Remembering Amalie Brust: Experience resistance against the Nazi regime up close!

Remembering Amalie Brust: Experience resistance against the Nazi regime up close!

A wreath-laying ceremony and rally will take place in Amalie-Brust-Gasse in Vienna on June 12, 2025, the 115th birthday of Amalie Brust. This event, which begins at 11 a.m. and takes place in the presence of district politicians, serves to remember the resistance fighters against the Nazi regime. Especially this year, 80 years after the end of the Second World War, the struggle and fate of women in the resistance is being brought into greater focus. My district reports that Amalie Brust was a native Czech who lived at Fenzlgasse 24 in the 15th district before moving to England.

Brust, who was a laborer and a member of the Communist Party, returned to Vienna in 1939 at the age of 29. She has been imprisoned several times in the past, including in 1935 for 41 days for possessing communist contribution stamps and later for distributing communist pamphlets. Her activities within a KJV (Communist Youth Association) group and the distribution of illegal materials led to her arrest by the Gestapo on September 15, 1939. DHM.de added, that women like Brust were often overlooked when it came to recognition for their acts of resistance, even though they played a central role in the opposition to the Nazi regime.

Amalie Brut's resistance and her fate

After her arrest, Amalie Brust spent months in Gestapo custody, followed by a sentence in January 1941 to two years in prison for “political resistance and preparation for high treason.” After serving her prison sentence, she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1941, where she died of typhus on November 17, 1944. A few days after her death, her mother received an urn with her remains, which was initially buried at Vienna's Central Cemetery and has been in the National Memorial of Resistance Fighters against the Nazi Regime since 1977.

Amalie Brust's courage and commitment are not isolated cases; many women were active in the resistance during the Nazi era. In recent years there has been an increased recognition of their actions, both through public memorial events and through the naming of schools and streets. MDR.de points this out, that historiography has often failed to adequately acknowledge these women and focuses on them only as “wife, fiancée, friend of,” which damages their actual contribution to a better understanding of our history.

With the upcoming event, Vienna not only remembers Amalie Brust, but also all the courageous women and men who stood up against one of the darkest eras in human history. The wreath-laying symbolizes the respect and recognition that these resistance fighters deserve and should receive even more attention.