| Born: | 08-20-1916 |
| Faculty: | Medical School | Medical University Vienna |
| Category: | Expelled student |
Johannes Heinrich HARDECK, born on August 20th, 1916 in Gmünd/Lower Austria (entitled residency ("heimatberechtigt") for Bad Vöslau/Lower Austria, citizenship 1938: Austria), son of Dr. Heinrich Hardeck (physician, 1875–1945) and Marie Ernestine Hardeck (1886–?). The family lived in Bad Vöslau and he attended grammar school in Baden, where he also passed his school-leaving examination ("Matura") in 1935 and then moved to Vienna to live with his older brother Oswald Hardeck (1910–1996) in lived in Vienna's 17th district, Hernalser Hauptstrasse 25, who had just received his doctorate in July 1935 and began to study medicine himself. He was enrolled finally in the spring term 1938 at the Medical School in the 3rd year of his studies (spring term 1938 was validated on July 4th, 1938, Leaving Certificate ("Abgangszeugnis") was issued on November 14th, 1938).
In 1938, after the takeover of power of National-Socialism he was forced to abandon his medical studies and to leave the University of Vienna for racist reason.
He had to flee Vienna, because although he was baptized Catholic and a member of the Catholic "Cartell-Verband" student association "Amelungia Wien" (despite its "Aryan paragraph"), he was considered a Jew under National Socialism according to the "Nuremberg Race Laws" and was persecuted on "racial" grounds.
He was able to join his brother in Prague in Czechoslovakia in the summer and planned to continue his medical studies there, but this was no longer possible, nor was he able to continue the organ studies he had begun there, which he was forced to abandon after the German invasion of Prague in March 1939. He then worked as a typewriter mechanic and for a jeweler.
However, Johannes Heinrich (also known as Jan, Hans or Hanuš) Hardeck was soon interned and in 1942 was a forced laborer in the "retraining camp" in Linden/Lípa in south-eastern Bohemia, from where he was deported to the Theresienstadt [Terezín/Czech Republic] ghetto on September 14th, 1943 and from there to the Auschwitz [Oświęcim] concentration camp in German-occupied Poland on September 29th, 1944. From there, he was deported to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria on October 10th, 1944 and transferred from the main camp to a camp in the Kaufering satellite camp complex in Bavaria in January 1945, where he died on February 7th, 1945 (according to older information: March 3rd) and was buried in a mass grave.
His parents and brother survived the different concentration camps, but his father died immediately after liberation in 1945 and his mother a few years later, while his brother returned to Vienna and lived and worked here as a doctor.
Today, Johannes Heinrich Hardeck is still commemorated in Vienna an the memorial of the Catholic Couleur students in the ÖCV (Vienna's 8th district, Lerchenfelderstrasse 14), which was established in 1988, in the University of Vienna's Memorial Book since 2010 and, since 2021, on the Wall of Names Memorial to the Austrian Jews Murdered in the Shoah in Ostarrichi Park in Vienna's 9th district.
Lit.: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") MED 1937–1938; Arolsen Archives; Czech Republic Victims Database; DÖW 1998, 177; Gerhard HARTMANN, Für Gott und Vaterland. Geschichte und Wirken des CV in Österreich, Kevelaer 2006; Gerhart HARTMANN, Johannes Heinrich Hardeck, in: ÖCV-Biolex.
Herbert Posch
