Memorial Plaque for Maria Stromberger at the Sanatorium Mehrerau

Maria Stromberger (1898-1957) was born in St. Veit in Carinthia and trained as a nurse in Bregenz. In 1942, she decided to volunteer for transfer to the Auschwitz concentration camp, based on information about the conditions in the camps. 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. In Vorarlberg, she remained largely unknown for a long time after her death in 1957. Since 1995, a memorial plaque at the Sanatorium Mehrerau remembers Maria Stromberger, who had worked there for several years as a nurse.