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Haidhausen communist who collected donations for families of imprisoned Nazi opponents
Maria Reichenwallner, undatiert | Privatbesitz Friedbert Mühldorfer
Maria Apfelkammer worked at a cigarette factory at the tender age of 14. She joined the Communist Youth League in 1923, taking part in political work in her Haidhausen neighborhood. In 1929 she married railway employee Anton Reichenwallner, with whom she had two children.
Since she had not attracted the attention of the police, Maria Reichenwallner escaped the mass arrest of communists immediately after the National Socialists came to power: it was subsequently up to members of communist organizations like her to continue to pursue political activity underground. She received and distributed leaflets for the Reichstag elections in March 1933 and also worked for the support organization ‘Red Assistance’, secretly collecting donations and passing them on to destitute families of prisoners. In addition, she made her apartment available to illegal couriers and comrades under the threat of arrest; this was possible because her husband was a railway employee and often absent due to his work.
In the summer of 1936 she helped the Lettenbauer brothers print pamphlets in her apartment and sort and pack them for distribution. This contact came about through the then head of ‘Red Assistance’, Max Troll, a key Gestapo informer who was instrumental in the arrest of numerous Nazi opponents from the summer of 1935 onwards. Maria Reichenwallner was arrested along with numerous other members of the illegal KPD groups in Giesing, Ramersdorf and Haidhausen on June 3, 1936. After lengthy police custody and pre-trial detention in Stadelheim, she was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison and five years ‘loss of civil honor’ by Munich Higher Regional Court on 8 July 1937 in a trial that involved 67 defendants, mostly communists and ‘Red Assistance’ members but also social democrats.
She was not released after serving her sentence, however, but was transported to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in June 1940, where she was not liberated until Soviet troops arrived at the end of April 1945.
Staatsarchiv München, Generalstaatsanwaltschaft 3490.
Detjen Marion: „Zum Staatsfeind ernannt“. Widerstand, Resistenz und Verweigerung gegen das NS-Regime in München, München 1998.
Mehringer, Hartmut: Die KPD in Bayern 1919-1945, in: Broszat, Martin/Mehringer, Helmut (Hg.): Bayern in der NS-Zeit, Bd. V. Die Parteien KPD, SPD, BVP in Verfolgung und Widerstand, S. 1-286.
