Diploma Engineer Rudolf Erich MÜLLER was born in Pozega (in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now Croatia) on July 10, 1873. He converted from Judaism to Catholicism and he was married to a Catholic woman with no known Jewish ancestors.
From 1912 on he was the owner of a commercial agency in Salzburg, and he had local citizenship rights in Salzburg along with his wife. They lived on the 2nd floor of 6 Mirabellplatz, and also owned the building at 17 Schwarzstraße/16 Elisabethkai which they had to sell for an annuity in the violent year 1938.
In November 1938 they were forced to move out of their large apartment on the Mirabellplatz so that it could be occupied by a German SS officer and department head for the SS intelligence service, the SD. Rudolf Erich MÜLLER was arrested as »racially Jewish« on November 11, 1938 (right after the »Reichskristallnacht« pogrom) and deported to Vienna.
There he lived in the Carmelite cloister (old age home) at 15 Töllergasse in the 21st district – which was used as a »collection residence« for Catholics of Jewish origin who were targeted for further deportation.
On July 10, 1942 the 69 year old Rudolf Erich MÜLLER was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he was murdered on March 3, 1943.
In May 1944 his widow was living in a small apartment in Salzburg when the Gestapo informed her that her husband was dead.
In 1948 Mrs. MÜLLER received the annuity for the house they had been forced to sell back in 1938 for the first time. She died in Salzburg in 1964.
On the ground floor of 6 Mirabellplatz there were two Jewish shops:
Until 1938, there were two Jewish businesses on the ground floor of the building at Mirabellplatz 6:
Oswald LÖWY’s haberdashery, knitwear, and toy shop (for the life stories of the LÖWY family, see the Stolperstein at Franz-Josef-Straße 12) and a branch of the Viennese clothing store Zum Matrosen, owned by Leon and Julius Abrahamer.
Adolf Aron WEISS, a Jew who served as the Salzburg branch manager for over three decades and lived with his Catholic wife in Salzburg even under the Nazi regime, Vierthalerstraße 5, died here on November 6, 1944, of malnutrition; he was buried in the »Crypt of the Forgotten«.
Sources
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- Matricula online (birth, marriage, and death records)
- City and Provincial Archives of Vienna and Salzburg (resident registration records, victim welfare files)
- Documentation Center of the Austrian Resistance and Yad Vashem (Holocaust victims)
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 22.06.2009 at Salzburg, Mirabellplatz 6 (Ecke Schrannengasse)
Registration form of Rudolf Erich Müller
Death notice by the Gestapo, 1944-05-31
Photo: Gert Kerschbaumer