Maria BUMBERGER, née EBNER, was born in Elsbethen (just south of Salzburg) on December 21, 1901. She and her husband weren’t members of any illegal parties or resistance groups, but the two were arrested nonetheless by the Gestapo on June 11, 1942.
As was often the case with women arrested by the Gestapo and unlike her husband, she was never given the chance to defend herself in court.
The 40 year old Maria BUMBERGER was simply shipped off to Auschwitz ten days after her arrest and she was murdered there on November 17, 1942.1
On July 18, 1942 her husband Franz BUMBERGER was sent to the Dachau concentration camp for »failure to report a treasonable project«, and on July 9, 1943 he was sentenced to a year’s incarceration – on the following grounds:
On the occasion of a political conversation in the spring of 1940, the accused and his wife [Maria Bumberger] were invited to join the existing illegal Communist Party by Anton Schubert.2
He and his wife said they would consider it so Schubert told him to contact Lorenz Brucker3 to sign up. The defendant and his wife did not do so.
After the defendant returned from working in Cologne in October 1941 he met Schubert again and Schubert reminded him of their discussion the previous year and again invited him to join. Once again the defendant declined to do so, but he refrained from reporting the offers.
Franz BUMBERGER was incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp until July 9, 1943 and then he returned to Salzburg after his release. He died here in 1980.
1 Maria Bumberger’s daughter Maria Golser and her sister Anna Rinnerberger had tried unsuccessfully to get in contact with her in Auschwitz and were arrested for a short time. In the war year of 1942 five other Salzburg women were murdered in Auschwitz: Rosa Bermoser, Anna Frauneder, Marianne Innerberger, Anna Prähauser and Anna Reindl.
The Communist Josefine Lindorfer from Hallein was also deported from the police jail in Salzburg to Auschwitz where she was murdered.
2 Anton Schubert, an Austrian Communist Party functionary, was executed in the Munich-Stadelheim prison on July 22, 1943 (see Location 8 Stadlhofstraße).
3 Lorenz Brucker, an Austrian Communist Party functionary, died in Salzburg in 1983.
Source
- Widerstand und Verfolgung in Salzburg 1934 – 1945, vol. 1, p. 352ff.
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 23.03.2012 at Salzburg, Linzer Bundesstraße 26
Maria BumbergerPhoto: Archive of the Communist Party of Austria
