Brunner Straße 30 (laid 2010)
Ignaz Seckl and his son Heinrich
Kaisersteingasse 7 (laid 2011)
Franz Seckl and his wife Hanni Delfine
Deported to the concentration camp for “provocative behavior towards the Aryan population”
Ignaz Seckl was born on September 24, 1860, in Bad Fischau and was widowed.
His son Heinrich Seckl was born on December 8, 1891, in Wiener Neustadt, worked as a dental technician, and was unmarried.
Franz Seckl (Ignaz’s son) was born on March 1, 1884, in Ramplach, married, father of two children. His wife, Hanni Delfine Seckl (née Grünfeld), was born on August 10, 1886, in Velka, Moravia.
Ignaz Seckl, his two sons, and his daughter-in-law were sent to a collection camp in Vienna for deportation. On February 6, 1942, they were deported to Riga, where they were killed. Leopoldine Seckl (Ignaz’s daughter) survived the Holocaust in what is now the Czech Republic. The two children of Franz and Hanni, Martha and Josef, then both school-aged, survived in exile in London.
The Seckl family was known in Wiener Neustadt as the “Bockerl-Seckl” family. Ignaz Seckl had taken over the cone-processing factory, founded by his father Josef in 1866, and expanded it at Weikersdorfer Straße 24 (now Brunner Straße). This factory processed pine cones to obtain seeds, which were then traded.
Ignaz and his wife Maria (who had died several years before Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany) had three children: Franz (the eldest), daughter Leopoldine, and Heinrich (the youngest). Heinrich never married and had worked in Leipzig as a dental technician. Before the war began, he returned and lived with his father. Franz married Hanni Delfine Grünfeld and lived at Kaisersteingasse 7. Of these three siblings, only Leopoldine survived the Holocaust. She later became Catholic and, as Leopoldine Peikert, moved to Odrau, now part of the Czech Republic.
In 1938, the family had to move together into the apartment on Weikersdorfer Straße (now Brunner Straße) after their house on Kaisersteingasse was confiscated.
Two Gestapo reports give insight into the tragic fate of the Seckl family:
Gestapo report no. 7 from February 1941 coldly notified Berlin that on February 15, 1941, the first transport of 1,000 Jews left Vienna’s Aspang railway station for the General Government (Nazi-occupied Poland). The report stated that weekly transports of the same size would follow—a total of approximately 70,000. “General Government” was the official term used for areas in occupied Poland that included extermination camps or ghettos serving as transit sites.
Daily report no. 12 from January 28–29, 1942, from the Gestapo in Wiener Neustadt described how, “for provocative behavior towards the Aryan population, the Jews Ignaz Seckl, Heinrich Seckl, Franz Seckl, and Hanni Delfine Seckl, all living at Weikersdorferstraße 24, were arrested and sent to the Jewish Community’s collection camp in Vienna for deportation to the General Government.”
This “provocative behavior” evidently referred to the simple fact that they were still alive after having been deprived of all means of subsistence.
Ignaz, Heinrich, Franz, and Hanni Delfine were deported from Vienna to Riga on February 6, 1942, where they were murdered.
The children of Franz and Hanni, Martha and Josef, managed to emigrate to England as teenagers. Both later married and lived in London. In June 2010, Josef (Joe) Seckl and his wife traveled from London to Wiener Neustadt to visit the sites of the planned commemorative stones.
Anton Blaha after „Widerstand im Gebiet Wiener Neustadt 1938 bis 1945“ by Karl Flanner und „Das jüdische Wiener Neustadt“ by Werner Sulzgruber.