Survival in „geschützter Mischehe“ (protected intermarriages)

„We've been trembling all the time, there were rumors we're next.“ (Otto Wellisch)

Some people, who were "Volljuden" according to the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935, were able to survive the persecution on the spot. Jewish parents of a "Mischling" (half breed) as well as childless Jewish marriage women in an upright intermarriage ("Mischehe") were privileged and were not deported to a large extent. Even Jewish husbands of "Aryan" women enjoyed more protection. They survived because the National Socialists feared that the protests of the non-Jewish relatives would endanger the secrecy of the extermination process. Nevertheless, many of the victims were fleeing to safe foreign countries.

Seven St. Pöltner Jewish women survived in their hometown or in Vienna in a protected mix: Melanie Benedikt, Rudolf Bondy, Anna Mattes, née Gelb, Ernestine Yeschko, Alfred Kirchenberger, Else Maurer and Otto Wellisch.

Otto Wellisch 
„The priest who married us in the Votive-Churches, in the the year 1938, always kept talking to me: stay with your husband, he said, you protect your husband.“ (Maria Wellisch)

When Otto Wellisch married his non-Jewish wife Maria in 1937, the lawyer asked the bride: "Do you still marry a Jew at this time?" After the November pogrom, Otto Wellisch was arrested and imprisoned ten days in Vienna. His non-Jewish "spec" - although nationalsocialists - and his wife kept him from deportation. During the war Otto Wellisch was a forced laborer in Eisenerz. His wife had to put a "Judenstern" at her apartment door in Vienna, and "Husband Jew" stood in all of the ID cards, and the air guard did not let her into the air raid shelter. In the last few weeks the family - in the meantime a daughter was born - hid with Maria's mother in Osterburg near Melk.

Anna Mattes, née Gelb and her daughter Hilde
„Father always said, when they select you, then I will join you. He was a good person.“  (Hilde Fein, geb. Mattes)

Anna Mattes, the daughter of Wilhelm and Mathilde Gelb from Ratzersdorf, was protected by her marriage to the not Jew Johann Mattes. Her brothers Hermann and Rudolf were imprisoned in Dachau. Anna spoke thirteen times at the Gestapozentrale in Vienna, until she finally freed her brothers. Hermann and Rudolf Gelb escaped through France to Switzerland.

Anna Mattes first worked with farmers, then in a armaments company, the "Flugtechnischen Werkstätten". The leader, though a national socialist, protected them from overpowering. The deportation threatened when she was denounced by a former school friend because she did not wear the yellow star. But the gendarme warned Anna and did not continue the advertisement. Her daughter Hilde attended the Hauptschule and then also worked in the Flugtechnische Werkstätten:

„On the whole, I lived normally, but of course with many difficulties, I was not allowed to go to school, or vocational training; and then there was the story at a Thanksgiving: I was there and the HJ leader screamed that the Jewish girls must leave the place. Then his chief, the supreme HJ leader came to me and said, I'm going to dance with you now. And I told him that he's stupid because that's not possible. And he said: I can.“