Hans Marsalek

Hans Maršálek (July 19, 1914 – December 9, 2011) was an Austrian typesetter, political activist, detective, and historian. A devout socialist and active in the resistance, he was arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war, he joined the Austrian political police and was instrumental in tracking down and convicting numerous Nazi criminals. He also became the main chronicler of the camp's history, helped establish the Mauthausen Memorial Museum, and published several books.

Maršálek was born on July 19, 1914 in Vienna to a family of first-generation Czech immigrants. His father was a builder, his mother worked as a maid. The family lived in Hernals, a working-class district, in humble circumstances. Both parents were members of the Social Democratic Party; Maršálek's father eventually was elected to the Hernals district council on a Social Democratic ticket.

Maršálek was educated in Vienna's Czech School. In his teens, he apprenticed as a typesetter for one of the city's Czech-language newspapers. Following in the footsteps of his parents, Maršálek was politically active from an early age. He was active in the Socialist Workers' Youth and, from 1936 to 1938, in the resistance against the Austrofascist Ständestaat regime. He was arrested and subjected to brutal interrogations for being a member of the Austrian wing of the International Red Aid, an organisation supporting persecuted left-wing dissidents. He also had ties to revolutionary socialists, in particular Johann Otto Haas, and to the Czech communist movement.

Following the 1938 integration of Austria into Nazi Germany, Maršálek fled to Prague to dodge the draft but remained politically active. in the Social Democratic expat community. After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he joined the communist resistance. For the next two years, his main activity was helping German and Austrian dissidents flee the Reich.

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