August GRUBER, born 1894 in Aurolzmuenster, Catholic, married, was a signaller of the Salzburg Railway and Tramway Company (SEuTG, today, local railway), a member of the Social Democratic Party, the Republican Defense Corps, the Free Trade Union (shop steward for railway workers) and, after the ban on Social Democracy in February 1934, a member of the illegal Revolutionary Socialists of Austria (RSO).
Under the Nazi regime, the railway workers with their small cells along the minor branch lines represented the most organized resistance (RSO and Austrian Communist Party).
Key figure in the RSO, employed in the Third Reich railroad workshop, was the metal turner Engelbert WEISS (beheaded on April 7, 1944 in Berlin-Ploetzensee). August GRUBER had organized an RSO group in the SEuTG (local railway), recruited members and collected money for comrades in need. On 5 February 1942, 76 railway workers, including August GRUBER, were arrested after the Gestapo had managed to infiltrate a spy into the railroad network and expose it.
August GRUBER was sentenced to death on 8 August January 1943 for conspiracy to commit high treason and executed on 23 March 1943 in Berlin-Ploetzensee as shown in the official record:
At 18.36 the sentenced was brought by two prison officers, his hands tied behind his back. The executioner Roettger from Berlin was ready with his three assistants. The offender, who was calm and collected, was positioned without resistance on the guillotine, whereupon the executioner beheaded him with the guillotine and then reported that the sentence was executed.
The execution of the sentence from presentation until announcement of completion lasted 18 seconds.
Resistance and persecution in Salzburg from 1934 to 1945, Volume 1, p. 278 (in German)
The GRUBER family (wife Maria, nee Neuhauser, and daughter Grete) lived at 2/IV Sigmundplatz, Salzburg, since 1922.
The widow, who lived until 1971 at that address, died in Nonntal nursing home in 1977. Daughter Grete, born 1922, and her son Gerhard, born in 1945, moved away in 1966.
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 21.07.2010 at Salzburg, Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz 2
Photo: Gert Kerschbaumer