Tilly Spiegel

Ottilie "Tilly" Spiegel (10 December 1906 - 1988) was an Austrian political activist, first as a member of the Communist Party and then as part of the wartime resistance. After her actions had earned her a term of imprisonment during the Austrofascist period she fled the country, ending up as in Paris as a member of the French Resistance. Her parents were murdered by the Nazis but five siblings managed to emigrate to England or to the United States. In 1945 the merger combining Germany and Austria was reversed at the insistence of the occupying powers whose military victory had put an end to the Hitler regime. Tilly Spiegel returned to Vienna (where she had spent her student years) and was one of the first researchers to study the histories of victims of National Socialism. Books that she published were frequently consulted and quoted by subsequent researchers.

Biography Family provenance Ottilie Spiegel was born in Novoselica near Chernivtsi in Bukovina, which at that time was a multi-cultural frontier region of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Across the border to the east of Chernivtsi lay the Russian Empire. Ottilie was the eldest of her parents' six recorded children. Karl Spiegel (1880-1941), the children's father, was a businessman. The "circle" involved itself in support for refugees and women identified, after war was declared, as enemy aliens and interned in Paris. It was financed from Spiegel's earnings as a gymnastics teacher.

On 3 September 1939 France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany: on the streets of Paris and London eerily little changed, as the governments in those cities waited to see what Chancellor Hitler would do next. The answer arrived on 10 May 1940 when the German army invaded and quickly overran the northern half of France, taking over in Paris during the second week of June. From the end of 1940 or early 1941, Tilly Spiegel was actively engaged in resistance work for Travail Allemand (TA), an anti-fascist organisation of German expatriates that increasingly operated as a section of the French Resistance. Most were communists, many had fled Nazi Germany to escape life-threatening political and/or race-based persecution. A lot of TA members had fought in the Spanish Civil War, and ended up in France after the Falangist victory. One returnee from the Spanish Civil War who ended up as a TA resistance leader was Franz Marek, a leading Austrian communist intellectual originally from Galicia. It was probably through the TA that Tilly Spiegel met Franz Marek. At some stage they married: much later, in 1974, that marriage ended in divorce.

Resistance Between 1941 and 1943 Tilly was based in Nancy as a "regional TA instructor" for Meurthe-et-Moselle. Later she transferred to Lille to undertake similar duties in respect of the Nord department and Pas-de-Calais. Both these areas were in what then Germans had defined as Zone interdite, subjected to additional movement restrictions on local populations and higher levels of Gestapo and military supervision than most of occupied northern France. Sources are understandably vague about the details of Spiegel's resistance work, but there can be little doubt that as a communist resistance member easily identifiable as a non-local, her activities would placed her in extreme danger. In 1943 the focus of her activities evidently returned to Paris: it was probably in August 1944 that she was arrested by the Gestapo and detained, like her husband, in Fresnes Prison, a short distance to the south of the city. They were scheduled for execution. By the end of the month Paris had been liberated and both were released in the turmoil that accompanied the German military withdrawal. She rejoined the party's city leadership team (Bezirksleitung), remaining a member of it between 1945 and 1968. She worked closely with the DÖW's head of research, Herbert Steiner (1923-2001). Others involved included her former resistance comrade, Selma Steinmetz, along with Jonny Moser and Herbert Rosenkranz. During the 1960s these, Spiegel and the others were among the first researchers into Austria's National Socialist period to focus on the regime's victims. Moser investigated the persecution of Jews while Steinmetz concentrated on government treatment of the Sinti and Romani people. Spiegel worked on what had happened to women and girls engaged in antifascist resistance and Rosenkranz studied Austria's experience of the November 1938 pogrom ("Kristallnacht"). During the later 1960s, even before the crushing of the Prague Spring, Spiegel seems to have engaged in major "inner-party criticism" over the path taken by postwar communism. Little is known of her final years.

Celebration Tilly Spiegel was awarded the Golden Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria