Gedenkweg-Station: Maria-Stromberger-Weg Bregenz

Maria Stromberger (1898-1957) was born in St. Veit in Carinthia and trained as a nurse in Bregenz. In 1942, she decided, also based on information about the conditions in the camps, to volunteer for transfer to the Auschwitz concentration camp. There, she was assigned to the SS sickbay and established contact with the secret resistance group "Kampfgruppe Auschwitz," in which political prisoners from Austria and Poland had organized themselves. She obtained medicines, smuggled out information, and once even two pistols with ammunition into the camp. After the war, she returned to Bregenz and was arrested for several months by French authorities in 1946 due to her activities in Auschwitz. In 1947, she testified in Warsaw during the trial of the former camp commandant Höss. After her death in 1957, she remained largely unknown in Vorarlberg for a long time. The place is part of a memorial trail that has been commemorating resistance and persecution in Bregenz since 2002 with several memorial plaques.