Ludwig WIMMEDER was born in Innsbruck on September 8, 1908 and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.
He was the oldest of the three children of Anna Nissl Wimmeder, and Franz Josef Wimmeder. Franz Josef was a railroad worker, an engine driver for the Austrian Railroads.
The Wimmeder family had local citizenship rights in Salzburg where Franz Josef Wimmeder had been born, and they lived together in Salzburg after Anna Nissl married Franz Josef in 1909.
In the early 1920s they moved to Innsbruck. There, Ludwig trained to become a locksmith, but he never completed the training program and was registered by the police as a locksmith’s assistant or unskilled worker.
By the 1930s Ludwig WIMMEDER was living in Salzburg, where he changed his address several times. He was considered »unsettled« by the local authorities and came into conflict with the law.
At the end of the decade he was officially declared legally incompetent by the Nazi regime and he was committed to the Salzburg State Asylum.
On April 17, 1941 Ludwig WIMMEDER was one of the 82 patients who were deported to the Hartheim killing center near Linz in Upper Austria, where they were all murdered.
As with all the other victims of the Nazi’s secret »T4«1 program, the death of 32-year-old Ludwig WIMMEDER was not recorded in the police registration files of the city of Salzburg.
His parents and sisters survived the years of terror in Innsbruck.
1 The »T4« program was named after the location of its main office at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin.
Those primarily responsible for the killing of the handicapped in Salzburg were: the governor of Salzburg, Dr. Friedrich Rainer; Dr. Oskar Hausn, the head of the State Welfare Office; Dr. Leo Wolfer, the director of the Salzburg State Asylum (now called the Christian-Doppler-Clinic); and Dr. Heinrich Wolfer, the head of the genetic biology department of the Salzburg State Asylum.
Sources
- War Crimes Records of the U.S. Judge Advocate Division Headquarters (The National Archives Washington DC)
- Patient files (German National Archives, Berlin: Bestand R 179)
- Parish registers of the Salzburg Archdiocese
- Police registration and Local Citizenship registration files in the Salzburg City and Salzburg State archives.
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid at Salzburg, Wolf-Dietrich-Straße 14
