Hans Maršálek

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Hans Maršálek (19 July 1914 – 9 December 2011) was an Austrian typesetter, political activist, detective, historian, and a spy for the Czechoslovak secret police. A committed socialist, he fought Nazi oppression and helped the resistance.

Early life and activism
He was born in Vienna to an ethnically Czech family. His father was a builder and his mother a maid. They lived in the working-class Hernals district. He trained as a typesetter for a Czech-language newspaper and joined the Socialist Youth. From 1936 to 1938 he resisted the Austrofascist regime and was jailed for his leftist activities.

World War II years
After Austria joined Nazi Germany in 1938, he fled to Prague but stayed politically active. In 1939 he joined the communist resistance and helped dissidents escape the Reich. In 1941 he was sent back to Vienna to recruit soldiers, but the mission failed. He was arrested by the Gestapo on 28 October 1941 and spent time in various jails before being sent to Mauthausen concentration camp on 28 September 1942, where his prisoner number was 13129. He first worked in the quarry and later in the camp office.

Resistance inside the camp
In 1943–1944 an underground resistance group formed in Mauthausen. Maršálek joined and used his position in the office to protect prisoners, rearrange work, and sabotage dangerous tasks. By 1944 he was the camp’s second-highest ranking clerk. He helped save many lives and assisted in planning actions against the camp’s brutal administration. When Mauthausen was liberated in May 1945, he helped care for and repatriate prisoners and even interrogated the former commandant, Franz Ziereis, after his capture.

After the war
He returned to Vienna on 28 May 1945 and joined the State Police. He married Anna Vavak in 1946; she died in 1959. He helped prosecute Nazi criminals and served as a key witness in the Mauthausen-Gusen trials (1946). He also helped found the Mauthausen survivors’ group and, in 1963, became director of the Mauthausen Memorial, a role he held until 1976. He gathered documents and wrote a definitive history of the camp, published in 1974. In 1952 he helped start the Comité International de Mauthausen.

Legacy
The Mauthausen Memorial museum opened in 1975, inaugurated by Chancellor Bruno Kreisky. In 2009 he received an honorary doctorate in social science from Johannes Kepler University Linz. The Hans Maršálek Prize for memorial and remembrance work is named in his honor. He died in Vienna in 2011 and was cremated at Feuerhalle Simmering. His grandson is Jan Marsalek, a former businessman and alleged spy for Russia.