Gisela Tschofenig

Gisela Tschofenig (born Gisela Taurer:21 May 1917 - 27 April 1945) was an (illegal) Austrian Communist political activist who after 1938 became an anti-government resistance activist. In 1945 fellow detainees at the Schörgenhub labour camp, who had heard overnight shots on 27/28 April, after seeing Tschofenig called outside with two other women, had their fears confirmed the following morning when one of the camp guards was seen to be wearing their friend's "mountain boots".

Life and death Gisela Taurer was born into a railway family in Carinthia. She had two elder brothers and, after 1919, one younger sister. Gisela grew up with her family, initially, at Landskron, a little town just outside Villach. In 1925 the family relocated to Villach. In 1935 they had to relocate again, this time in connection with her father's work. Locomotive Driver Karl Taurer was transferred to the locomotive depot at Linz, having been assessed as "politically unreliable" in Villach. His daughter was also politically aware, even as a young child, participating actively in Social Democratic youth organisations such as Österreichische Kinderfreunde and die Rote Falken. In 1933 she was just 16, still living with her parents in Villach, when she had her first significant unfriendly encounter with the police, when she was found handing out political leaflets in behalf of the Young Communists. )

Gisela Taurer received a solid school level and higher education, intending to participate on the government side in the Spanish Civil War. As matters turned out the girls never got beyond the south of France, however. They stopped off in Lyon where Taurer and her friend both took jobs as governesses, "au pairs" or nanny. (All three terms are used in sources.) however, whose record of political activism stretched at least as far back as 1933, when he experienced the first of several terms of imprisonment in connection with his political activism. Soon after the "Anschluss" (identified by some as the German invasion) in March 1938 he escaped to Czechoslovakia where during the Autumn/Fall of 1938 he was again imprisoned. According to one source Tschofenig received his military conscription notification in the Autumn/Fall of 1939, but he evidently ignored it. Her "political activities" are thought to have included, as they had before her ten months in Belgium, acting as a point of contact between relatively isolated activist cells, arranging courier services for them, and authoring political leaflets. She was also able to use the language skills acquired during her time as an au pair in France to establish and sustain contact with the French forced labourers at the "Reichswerke AG für Erzbergbau und Eisenhütten „Hermann Göring“" (iron works) in Linz, which during the erarly 1940s became a beacon for the National Socialist military-industrial complex. Intense secrecy was vital. Although Giesla Taurer and her friend Theresia Reindl were in close contact during this period, neither was made aware of the other's "underground activities".

On 3 June 1944 Gisela Taurer finally married Josef Tschofenig at the Standesamt (loosely, "registry office") which had been set up at the Dachau concentration camp. Three days later, on 6 June 1944, the district court in Linz retrospectively conferred "legal legitimacy" on the infant Hermann Tschofenig. She took a room in the home of the Tatschl family near Villach. The survivors were recaptured, however, and in the evening driven across town to the labour camp at Schörgenhub. Despite its designated purpose, it seems that by this time Schörgenhub was being used primarily as a place of detention for political detainees. The accommodation block in which the Kaplanhof were accommodated is described as "half-finished".