Emilie Tolnay (born Emilie Müller; 6 October 1901 – 5 July 1944) was an

Austrian Austrian may refer to: * Austrians, someone from Austria or of Austrian descent ** Someone who is considered an Austrian citizen * Austrian German dialect * Something associated with the country Austria, for example: ** Austria-Hungary ** Austria ...

hairdresser who by the time of the German annexation in 1938 had become a resistance activist. She died on the

guillotine A guillotine ( ) is an apparatus designed for effectively carrying out executions by Decapitation, beheading. The device consists of a tall, upright frame with a weighted and angled blade suspended at the top. The condemned person is secur ...

in the Vienna district court complex.

Biography

Emilie Müller was born at

Jihlava Jihlava (; ) is a city in the Czech Republic. It has about 55,000 inhabitants. Jihlava is the capital of the Vysočina Region, situated on the Jihlava (river), Jihlava River on the historical border between Moravia and Bohemia. Historically, Jihla ...

(). She completed her compulsory schooling and, in 1916, embarked on the first of a succession of unskilled jobs in industry. In 1922 she trained and qualified as a hairdresser, working in the profession till 1926. That was the year in which she married the bakery assistant Anton Tolnay (1893–?). Parliamentary democracy in the recently much diminished state of

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

was widely associated with military defeat and acute economic austerity. It was not universally popular. In March 1933 the so-called

Self-elimination of the Austrian Parliament The self-elimination of Parliament () was a constitutional crisis in the First Austrian Republic caused by the resignation on March 4, 1933, of all three presidents of the National Council, the more powerful house of the Austrian Parliament. Th ...

effectively marked a major step towards an Austrian adaptation of

Italian Fascism Italian fascism (), also called classical fascism and Fascism, is the original fascist ideology, which Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini developed in Italy. The ideology of Italian fascism is associated with a series of political parties le ...

. Among the politically engaged it was the socialists and communists who were most active in opposing the cancellation of democracy in Austria. During 1936 Anton and Emilie Tolnay were arrested by the government authorities on suspicion of having been politically active on behalf of the (by this time illegal) Communist Party. They were released after four months in detention. In March 1938, Austria became part of an enlarged

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

following an annexation which progressed without much effective opposition from the Austrian political establishment. On 14 July 1942 Anton and Emilie Tolnay were arrested again. Most of the surviving evidence on their political activism comes from the indictment presented on 22 December 1943 by the Chief Prosecutor, when the Tolnays faced trial at the Vienna branch of the special People's Court. They had "participated in the reorganisation of the illegal nti-governmentresistance struggle during 1941 and 1942". They had provided support for the wanted

Communist Communism () is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, di ...

official, Adolf Neustadtl, "and enabled Neustadtl to regain physical strength" (by supplying him with food). The prosecutor made clear the assessment that Anton Tolnay was strongly influenced by his "mentally far superior" wife. The case was also made that Emilie Tolnay had successfully recruited Rosalia and Johann Graf to work with the illegal "Communist Opposition". On 14 April 1944, the People's Court sentenced Emilie Tolnay to death. Comrade activists who received the same sentence included Therese Dworak,

Rosalia Graf Rosalia Graf (born Rosalia Moser: 1 June 1897 - 21 June 1944) was an Austrian domestic servant and factory worker who became a resistance activist some time after the incorporation of Austria into an enlarged version of Germany in March 1938. On ...

and Johann Graf. The charge on which they were convicted was the usual one of "preparing to commit high treason and favouring the enemy" (''"Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat und Feindbegünstigung"''). Anton Tolnay received a ten-year jail term (but was released a year later when the régime collapsed). On 5 July 1944 Emilie Tolnay was executed on the guillotine which had been moved into the Vienna district court complex in 1938, shortly after the German take-over.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tolnay, Emilie 1901 births 1944 deaths People from Jihlava Austrian resistance members People executed by Nazi courts People executed by Nazi Germany by guillotine Austrian people executed by Nazi Germany Austrian hairdressers