Grete Jost

Grete Jost (26 May 1916 – 15 January 1943) was a Viennese communist resistance activist against Austrofascism and, after 1938, against National Socialism. Margarete "Gretl" Jost was born at the height of the First World War into a working-class family. She grew up in the Erdberg quarter of the Rabenhof district in the south-eastern part of the central Vienna. The family was resolute in its support of the (not yet quite mainstream) Social Democratic Workers' Party ("Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei"). In that respect Grete and her two sisters enjoyed what some would have regarded as an "Austro-Marxist upbringing". She attended state junior and middle schools locally. Aged only seven she was enrolled into the "Workers' Gymnastics Association" ("Arbeiterturnverein"). She was also a member of the (socialist) "Kindefreunde" organisation between 1926 and 1930. In 1931 she got a job selling shoes. She lost it fairly soon, after which she had no regular employment till 1937, when she managed to get another job as a sales assistant, this time in a knitwear shop. While working as a shoe saleswoman she joined the Free Trades Unions organisation. Jost withdrew from her trades union activism and, following the brief but brutally suppressed insurrection of February 1934, joined the Communist Party. Joining the Communists reflected a widespread belief on the political left in Vienna that the Social Democratic Workers' Party had shown itself to be insufficiently robust in resisting the political developments of the time. Austria was in the process of becoming a one-party state and Communist Party membership had been illegal since May 1933. She nevertheless participated in party training and recruitment activities. She worked as a treasurer for local party cells and, till Autumn/Fall 1937, undertook distribution of party literature. She intensified her illegal political activism after March 1938 which was when Fascist Austria was formally incorporated into an enlarged Nazi Germany following a largely unresisted military invasion from the north-west.