Rosa Jochmann
Rosa Jochmann was an Austrian resistance activist and Ravensbrück concentration camp survivor who became a politician.
Life
Provenance and early years
Rosa Jochmann was born in the 20th district of Vienna, the fourth of her parents' six children. Her father worked as an iron foundryman: her mother worked in domestic service and as a laundry worker. While she was still very young the family moved to the 11th district, in the southeast of the city, where they lived in a succession of rented rooms until 1912 when they moved into an apartment in one of the new so-called "Krankenkassenhäusern" which had been built at the instigation of the socialist politician Laurenz Widholz, alongside the "Braunhubergasse". She would still be living in southeast Vienna seventy years later.Her parents had both migrated to the capital from Moravia, where her father had been active in the Social democratic movement. Her mother grew up in a Roman Catholic family. The language spoken at home was for the most part Czech. Jochmann later recalled that her father had never really learned German. He was, according to at least one source, frequently unemployed because of his reputation as a political activist. His daughter later recalled in an interview that he "was a Social Democrat who never went to church, but had to say their prayers". The Jochmann children grew up bilingual.
When Rosa Jochmann was fourteen her mother died, aged just forty-one from multiple sclerosis Jochmann later told an interviewer that she had by this time been nursing her sick mother for six years. She now became the principal carer for her two surviving younger sisters, Josefine and Anna, while also looking after her father. World War I had broken out in 1914 and Rosa's brother, Karl, returned with Tuberculosis. Karl died in 1920. In his later years her father had a large red scar on his shoulder which had been inflicted with a sabre by a government official on a horse who had been policing a street protest. Rosa was with her father at the demonstration, conducted in order to press for voting rights, when her father received his injury. Like his wife, he never reached old age, dying in 1920 at around the same time as his only son.
Work
As a child it was Rosa Jochmann's ambition to become a nun and teacher, or a mother. When she was eleven, as a top student at her school, she was able to complete a typing and stenography course, which under other circumstances might have opened the way to a teaching career, but her domestic situation closed off that option. Nor would she ever become a mother. In 1915 she started work as an assistant with Victor Schmidt & Söhne, a long established Viennese manufacturer of sweets/candy. Because she was relatively young she earned only half as much as older workers, even though she was just as productive as they were. This gave rise to a sense of injustice which would become a theme of her later political activism. Then, because of the war, she was conscripted for work at a cable factory. Here, during a night shift, she dozed off and crushed a finger on the flywheel of a winding-drum She transferred to the Apollo candle factory, after which she ended up at the Auer gas mantle plant. Early on she became a works council member and active trades unionist. In 1920 colleagues at Auer elected her chair of the works council.Political career
Jochmann's union activism continued, and increasingly came to embrace a wider political activism. In 1926 the head of the Chemical Workers Union, Julius Weiß, arranged for her to be a member of the first group of students at the newly established Workers' Academy in Vienna 19. She was one of very few women attending the wide-ranging six-month course which she completed successfully. Topics included Applied Economics, Public and Civil Law and Rhetoric. Her teachers included future leaders of the Social Democratic movement in Austria, such as Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. Still aged only 25, she emerged to be appointed union secretary of the Chemical Workers Union.Rosa Jochmann also joined the Social Democratic Party in 1926. She attended that year's party conference, at which the important new party programme was adopted, as an observer, viewing from the visitors' gallery. Very quickly, however, she moved up the party hierarchy. In 1932 she became a member of the party Women's Secretariat. In 1933, at the last party conference before the SDAP was banned, Rosa Jochmann and Helene Postranecky were elected to the party national executive in succession to Adelheid Popp and Therese Schlesinger.
Austrofascism
During the four-day February Uprising in 1934, Rosa Jochmann was installed inside the Republican Protection League headquarters at George Washington Court. From there she stenographed radio messages, updating the outside world about the progress of the fighting, and then delivering texts to Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch in the next-door room. The insurgency collapsed after the government called in the army. On the night of 12 February 1934, Jochmann was one of those who persuaded the leader of the party, Otto Bauer, that for him to remain in Austria would be personally fatal. Bauer escaped across the border to the north, and would spend the next four years as a political exile in Brno. He instantly resigned the party leadership, but during the difficult years that followed was able to remain in frequent contact with former party comrades as an advisor and inspiration. All the individuals who had been members of the party national executive faced charges of high treason: most were arrested in the days following the armed altercation.Directly after the February events the SDAP was expressly outlawed, in the context of a more far reaching programme of destruction by the Dollfuss government, aimed at Austria's democratic political structure. Jochmann managed to evade immediate capture and continued with – now illegal – party work while using a forged identity card as "Josefine Drechsler". She was able to remain at liberty for more than half a year, and was at the centre of attempts to create an illegal successor organisation to the SDAP. On 26 February 1934 five political comrades who had not been arrested met in a private apartment in Vienna 9: Manfred Ackermann, Roman Felleis, Karl Holoubek, Rosa Jochmann und Ludwig Kostroun initially described themselves as the "national group of five", but were very soon identifying themselves as the "Central Committee of the Revolutionary Socialists". The Revolutionary Socialist movement concentrated on building opposition to the Austrofascist régime. Jochmann addressed illegal rallies, participated in "conferences and actions" and engaged in the distribution of printed material. Armed with her sister's identity card, she made repeated visits to the Czechoslovak frontier near Brno, from where she smuggled leaflets and bundles of the illegal "Arbeiterzeitung" into Austria.
There was a widespread perception that the Austrofascist régime would not last, and Revolutionary Socialist political activity, though illegal, was still relatively brazen during the middle part of 1934. Leaflets were distributed and stickers applied to walls and street furniture. There were even public meetings. A commemorative rally was scheduled for 15 July 1934 at the Predigtstuhl Meadows in the Wienerwald, just outside the city. Jochmann was due to speak. As she began to address several hundred people, the local police, backed up by the gendarmerie, stormed the event. Two people were shot. "More gendarmes turned up and our people tried to defend themselves. Shots were fired and many people fled. You heard screaming and moaning."
Arrest
On 30 August 1934, Rosa Jochmann arrived at the railway station in Wiener Neustadt carrying two briefcases. She was observed by a police informer as she approached a newspaper kiosk. She was intending to hand over Revolutionary Socialist political leaflets for onward distribution. Police appeared as she reached the kiosk. They arrested Jochmann, confiscated the leaflets and searched the kiosk." Jochmann was detained at Wiener Neustadt for three months before the prosecutor's office ordered that she be transferred back to Vienna, where she was held in investigative detention at the Rossauer Lände jail on behalf of the Vienna district court. By 22 November 1935, Rosa Jochmann would have spent fifteen months in jail, most of which comprised pre-trial detention.Records survive of her interrogation sessions, which, when she was first incarcerated, often took place several times per day over a succession of days. The investigators were trying to reconstruct the events of the February Uprising, the identities of those involved and their connections with the Republican Protection League. It was not till April 1935 that she was convicted and sentenced. She was guilty of carrying illegal goods – the politically printed matter – which was a violation of Press Law. More serious convictions resulted from the police search of the newspaper kiosk at the railway station. The prosecution asserted that evidence had been found for the training of the so-called "tens of thousands", a quasi-military structure created to engage in illegal activities, and that Jochmann had been serving as a messenger on behalf of the illegal organisation. Further evidence adduced against her involved records of financial transfers as well as a travel card issued by the Lower-Austria rail service, which included a photograph of Rosa Jochmann but was issued in the name of her sister, Josefine Drechsler.
Her release, which came in November 1935, did little to reduce the pressure on her. She devoted the next few months to looking after friends awaiting their own trials. Comrades who faced trial in Vienna in March 1936 included Bruno Kreisky and Franz Jonas, along with Maria Emhart and Jochmann's own partner, the future secretary of state Franz Rauscher.