Christian WALLINGER was born in Aigen (now part of the city of Salzburg) on January 7, 1910.
He was Catholic and the youngest child of a young widow who worked as a housekeeper on an estate.
Christian and his older sister Rosa (who was married to a railroader) lived in the household of the prominent attorney and politician Dr. Julius Sylvester in Parsch (which belonged to the Aigen municipality until they were both incorporated into the city of Salzburg in 1939).
Christian was unable to learn a trade because of an illness and became a patient in the State Asylum in April 1932.
On April 17, 1941 he was one of the 82 patients transferred from the Salzburg Asylum to the killing center at Schloss Hartheim where they were all murdered.
The death of 31 year old Christian Wallinger was not recorded in the Salzburg police registration files, as was the practice for all the murdered victims of the secret »T4«1 campaign to eliminate the handicapped from the Third Reich.
After the liberation of Salzburg Christian’s sister took the fate of her brother very much to heart:
My brother was under care until 1941, when he was deported without my knowledge from the hospital [the State Asylum in Salzburg].
During a visit to the hospital a few days before his deportation my brother Christian informed me that soon mentally ill patients were going to be deported from there, but only the most seriously ill. He had no idea at the time of the horrendous project underway.
When I learned about the deportation I immediately went to the then hospital director Dr. Leo Wolfer and made a serious allegation about the unauthorized transfers. Dr. Wolfer sought to justify himself, that the deportation was because of instructions from Berlins so there was no point in raising objections, and finally he threatened me that if I didn’t calm down I would have to be committed to the asylum …
Report of the Salzburg Federal-Police dated September 6, 1946
The hospital director Dr. Leo Wolfer had died in 1942 and couldn’t be made answerable.
Christian Wallinger’s sister Rosa lived in Salzburg until her death in 1989.
1 It was called the »T4« program because its Berlin headquarters were located at Tiergartenstraße 4.
Primarily responsible for the murderous program in Salzburg were: Dr. Friedrich Rainer as Governor, Dr. Oskar Hausner as leader of the regional health office, Dr. Leo Wolfer as director of the State Asylum (now called the Christian-Doppler-Clinic), and Dr. Heinrich Wolfer as head of the hereditary disease section of the State Asylum.
Quellen
- Salzburg city archives
- Schloss Hartheim Study and Memorial Site
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 03.07.2014 at Salzburg, Gaisbergstraße 33
Photo: Gert Kerschbaumer