Otto SCHNEIDER was born in the Upper Austrian town of Wels on December 12, 1882. He was an unmarried ballet master registered as a Roman Catholic.
He lived in Salzburg under the Nazi regime and his last residence was at 23 Lasserstraße, a property that had belonged to a Jewish woman who was expelled from Salzburg in 1938.1
In October 1939 Otto SCHNEIDER was arrested, presumably on the basis of a denunciation, and was prosecuted because of his sexual orientation according to the records of the Salzburg Provincial Court. The records of the verdict and sentence are gone2 but we know that he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp on January 20, 1941.
He was registered there as »PSV« (»protective custody«) prisoner number 23127 and fitted out with a green triangle to mark his status. But when Otto SCHNEIDER was registered in the Buchenwald concentration camp on July 12, 1941, it was as prisoner number 8193/homosexual.
He was murdered there on November 30, 1941 – the official cause of death was reported as »inflammation of the left lung.« His death is noted in the police register of the city of Salzburg.
1 In 1932 Gisela Jellinek (who was Jewish) bought the property at 23 Lasserstraße from David Rosenfeld who had lived there with his family. David Rosenfeld and his wife Stefanie had their last home in Trieste before they were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.
Gisela Jellinek and her husband Dr. Johann Jellinek were expelled from Salzburg in 1938 and were murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. The Roman Catholic pensioner Anna Steinwender also lived at 23 Lasserstraße. She was a patient at the Salzburg State Psychiatiric Hospital and was gassed at the Hartheim Castle »euthanasia« center in 1941.
The property at 23 Lasserstraße was »aryanized« in 1939 by Maria Scheuba, the wife of a medical doctor. The property at 23 Lasserstraße was not restored to Gisela Jellinek’s heirs after the liberation of Salzburg (Salzburg-Schallmoos Property Register EZ 262).
2 Under the Nazi regime the Salzburg Provincial Court condemned 338 people, including six women, for violating § 129 I b of the Austrian Penal Code – »unnatural sexual activity with a person of the same sex« – which was still enforced. The case files have since been destroyed.
Sources
- Salzburg City and Provincial archives
- Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camp Memorial Sites
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 23.03.2012 at Salzburg, Lasserstraße 23
