Rosalia Graf

Rosalia Graf (born Rosalia Moser: 1 June 1897 - 21 June 1944) was an Austrian domestic servant and factory worker who became a resistance activist some time after the incorporation of Austria into an enlarged version of Germany in March 1938. On 14 April 1944 both she and her husband faced trial and were convicted of "preparing to commit high treason". They were sentenced to death at the recently reconfigured Vienna district court. On 21 June 1944, within a few minutes of one another, they were executed (along with fourteen others convicted on similar charges), using the guillotine in the execution facility in another part of the extensive court complex.

Life Rosalia Moser was born in Breitenbrunn/Fertőszéleskút, the daughter of Mathias Moser, a small-scale farmer, and his wife, Elisabeth. Breitenbrunn, then as now, was a small village located by the marshy northern foreshore of the Neusiedlersee/Fertő (Lake) in the ethnically conflicted Burgenland/Gradišće/Felsőőrvidék region. At the time of her birth it was within the Austro-Hungarian empire, part of the Kingdom of Hungary (though it would in 1922 pass to the newly reconfigured Austrian Republic following a referendum). School attendance was compulsory: Rosalie Moser attended local school for the stipulated period and then took work as a domestic servant, working at different stages in Hungary and Austria. At some point she relocated to Vienna, becoming an unskilled factory worker.

In 1930 Rosalia Moser married Johann Graf, who had grown up in Vienna, and was working for the city authorities. Rosalia was almost ten years older than her husband. According to later court documents, the marriage was childless. They made their home in an apartment at Johnstraße 34/36 in Vienna's west-central Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus quarter. ).

On 21 June 1944 Johann and Rosalia Graf were led to the killing table in the execution department of the Vienna district court complex where they were executed on the guillotine within a few minutes of one another. They were included in a batch of 16 execution victims killed (some sources use the word "murdered") by the Hitler state on that occasion. Others included their co-accused, Therese Dworak and the brothers Johann and Josef Knize. Emilie Tolnay underwent the same fate a few days later, on 5 July 1944.