Sauer engl

Flugfeldgürtel 13/15 (laid 2011)

Heinrich Sauer

Building a resistance group

Heinrich Sauer, born 10 April 1892 in Werning, married.
Arrested in autumn 1941 and sentenced on 24 September 1942 to twelve years in prison for preparing high treason. Died on 2 January 1945 in the Stein prison on the Danube.

Heinrich Sauer was the son of a smallholder family and one of ten children. After leaving school, he worked as a laborer on road and building sites. At age 17, he was hired by the Southern Railway. In 1919 he married and had two children. The family lived in a small single‑family house at Feldgasse 26.

Sauer joined the Social Democratic Party shortly after World War I, and later the Republican Protection League and the Free Railway Workers’ Union. After the SPÖ was banned, he continued his political work in the “Revolutionary Socialists” until the group was crushed in 1934.

In 1939, Sauer began gathering committed comrades among his colleagues. He first organized several railway workers and like‑minded people outside his workplace, collecting contributions that he used, among other things, to support the family of Leopold Huber, a Wiener Neustadt railway worker who had been arrested with fourteen comrades and later sentenced to three years in prison for preparing high treason (see Stolperstein Leopold Huber, Hauptplatz 20). Sauer also established contact with other Communist resistance groups in the Leobersdorf, Vöslau, and Neunkirchen areas.

The activities of these resistance cells — whose goal was to overthrow the Nazi regime and restore an independent Austria — were considered particularly dangerous by the Nazis because the organization’s core was located within the railway system, a highly sensitive nerve center of the war machinery.

Some members of the organization, including Sauer, were arrested between August and November 1941. On 24 September 1942, Sauer was sentenced to twelve years in prison for preparing high treason.

But for Sauer, this was effectively a death sentence. A tall, strong man, he could not survive the starvation rations typical of German prisons and concentration camps. Emaciated and ill, he deteriorated rapidly and died — with liberation almost in sight — on 2 January 1945 in the Stein prison on the Danube.

On 25 September 1970, the city council decided to rename the former Feldgasse, where Sauer had lived, to “Heinrich‑Sauer‑Gasse” in his memory.

Anton Blaha, based on Resistance in the Wiener Neustadt Region 1938–1945 by Karl Flanner