Marie WURM was born in Salzburg on May 31, 1904 and was the only child of the Catholic couple Maria and Georg WURM. Georg was a butcher’s assistant who smoked and brined meat for a butcher before he died young in Salzburg in 1912.
Her mother remarried and lived with her husband in Gnigl (which was annexed to the city of Salzburg in 1935). Marie was still a young child and was taken in by her maternal grandparents.
Her grandfather was a railroader who had local citizenship rights in Salzburg and lived with his family at 8 Virgilgasse.
Marie, who remained unmarried, required nursing care and was incapable of learning a trade but she helped out in her grandparents’ home.
In July 1931, when she was 27 years old, she was admitted to the Salzburg State Asylum. She was one of the 68 patients deported from there to the Hartheim Castle killing center near Linz on April 16, 1941 – where they were all murdered.
As with all the other victims of the Nazis’ secret »T4«1 program, the death of 36 year old Marie WURM was not recorded in the Salzburg police registration files. But on what would have been her 37th birthday on May 31, 1941 her mother published a notice in Gnigl that:
at 8 am on Tuesday, June 3, a service will be held in the Gnigl parish hall for my beloved daughter Miss Mitzi Wurm.
This wasn’t the only service that Pastor Franz Dürnberger held for terror victims and their survivors in the Gnigl parish.
He performed memorial masses for Theresia TRENKE, who was also murdered in Hartheim, and for the resistance fighter Anton SCHUBERT who was executed in Munich.
The Gestapo was determined to prevent any memorials for the victims of the Nazi terror and when they heard about his actions they arrested Pastor Dürnberger as an »enemy of the state and the people« and sent him to the Dachau concentration camp.
He survived and after the liberation he was able to return to Gnigl and resume his pastorship there. But his resistance to the Nazis still hasn’t been honored publicly.
Marie WURM’s mother Maria survived the Nazi regime and died in Salzburg at age 84 in 1966.
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.
Sources
- Salzburg city archives
- Schloss Hartheim Learning and Remembrance Center
Translation: Stan Nadel
Stumbling Stone
Laid 13.07.2015 at Salzburg, Virgilgasse 8
Photo: Gert Kerschbaumer