Viktoria “Dora” Hösl (2.6.1902 Munich – 9.5.1953 Munich)

Viktoria “Dora“ Hösl was raised by foster parents in the Upper Palatinate. In 1923, her son Herbert was born, and she returned to Munich with him in 1924. She found work rolling cigarettes at the Milbertshofen Austria Tobacco Factory, became politically active and was elected as an employee representative. In the elections in April 1932, she stood as a candidate for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and became a member of the Bavarian State Parliament.
As a well-known communist, she was arrested after the National Socialists seized power on March 10, 1933, and - like many communist women from Munich - was imprisoned in Stadelheim Prison without ever having been given a trial. In March 1936, she was transported to the Moringen Concentration Camp and held in ‘protective custody‘ there and in the Berlin police prison until September 15, 1937. Only then was she able to look after her son again, who initially lived with her stepbrother Jakob Schweller after she was taken into custody. After Schweller’s imprisonment in Dachau Concentration Camp in the fall of 1934, her then eleven-year-old son Herbert was also interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo and then placed in a children’s home.

After her release, Dora Hösl worked as a seamstress, but also established connections with members of the resistance group led by Wilhelm Olschewski. On March 14, 1942, she was arrested once more, charged, and detained in pre-trial custody until the hearing. The trial before the Munich Higher Regional Court against a total of 18 defendants accused of high treason ended on June 20, 1944 with a penal servitude of three years for Dora Hösl as well as three years of being stripped of her civil rights because she had “proved disloyal to her people and thus dishonorable“. The only evidence they found was that they listened to foreign broadcasters together.

While incarcerated, she met the communist Josef Angerer, whom she married after the liberation. Exhausted by her seven and a half years of imprisonment and the deprivations - she was denied a pension due to her health problems - Dora Hösl died in Munich just before her 51st birthday.