Grete Jost

Grete Jost (26 May 1916 – 15 January 1943) was a Viennese communist resistance activist against Austrofascism and, after 1938, against National Socialism.

Biography Provenance and early years Margarete "Gretl" Jost was born at the height of the First World War into a working-class family. She grew up in the Erdberg quarter of the Rabenhof district in the south-eastern part of the central Vienna. The family was resolute in its support of the (not yet quite mainstream) Social Democratic Workers' Party ("Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei"). In that respect Grete and her two sisters enjoyed what some would have regarded as an "Austro-Marxist upbringing". Joining the Communists reflected a widespread belief on the political left in Vienna that the Social Democratic Workers' Party had shown itself to be insufficiently robust in resisting the political developments of the time. Austria was in the process of becoming a one-party state and Communist Party membership had been illegal since May 1933. She nevertheless participated in party training and recruitment activities. She worked as a treasurer for local party cells and, till Autumn/Fall 1937, undertook distribution of party literature. From 1938 she was working as a contact between locals party activists and senior party officials. She became the party contact for the "Südbahnstrecke" - the part of Vienna surrounding the Südbahnhof railway terminus. On the one side this involved communicating instructions from the party regional leadership to activists living "underground" (their place of residence not registered with the city authorities): on the other hand she was responsible for passing to the leadership reports of the "illegal work" undertaken by activists in this part of Vienna. In July 1940 the authorities arrested forty members of the organisation, but even after this sources indicate that there were still around fifty communist activists in the district defined, for the purposes of party organisation, by the suburb of Baden and the surrounding district ("Bezirk Baden und Umgebung"). Jost administered cash contributions and the application of the funds to support comrades who had been arrested and the families left destitute by those arrests. Margarete Jost was executed on it on 15 January 1943. Her final words, reportedly, were "Es lebe die Freiheit!" (loosely, "Long live freedom").