Käthe Sasso, child member of the anti-Nazi resistance in Austria who survived Ravensbrück

In August 1942 an informer betrayed her resistance group. Fifty were executed but Käthe’s life was spared because she was a minor

Käthe Sasso, who has died aged 98, was a teenage operative in the anti-Nazi resistance in her native Austria; she was imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp, but in 1945 she managed to escape while on a death march to Bergen-Belsen.
She was born Käthe Smudits to staunchly communist parents in Vienna on March 18 1926, and spent her early years with her Croatian grandmother in a village in eastern Austria. When she returned to Vienna, she found her parents’ apartment filled with resistance fighters, and young Käthe was soon involved in printing leaflets and leaving them on park benches.
She was 12 at the time of the Anschluss on March 12 1938. Her school stayed closed for three days. When it reopened, three Jewish girls were missing. “Even as a child, I knew what was wrong,” she recalled. Käthe asked her teacher, whom she idolised, where they were, and was told: “Jewish rascals have no place in our school!”
Resistance work was dangerous. Under Nazi occupation, 2,700 Austrians were sentenced to death and executed for political activities, 1,200 of them in Vienna. Käthe’s parents belonged to the Gustav Adolf Neustadl group, which brought money, clothes and food to women whose husbands had been imprisoned or executed for resisting.
Their primary business, however, was propaganda: “We wanted to show that there were still people who were against what was happening in Austria… especially to the poor Jewish population,” recalled Käthe.
In 1940, her father was drafted into the Wehrmacht, and a year later her mother died. Left all alone, Käthe picked up their web of contacts to continue their resistance work.
In August 1942, however, an informer betrayed the group. Fifty were executed, but Käthe’s life was spared, at first because she was a minor, and then, when she came of age, because she blamed her dead mother for all her resistance activities up until 1941, and then (for the year she couldn’t account for) invented a lover in the resistance called Herbert with whom she claimed to be obsessed.
The Gestapo bought her story and deposited her at the notorious police prison nicknamed the “Liesl”. “Now you’re bringing us children,” said the prison guard. Later, in the Vienna court, she had to watch the executions of her fellow resisters, including Maria Restituta Kafka, a Franciscan nun.
She was transferred to the Oberlanzendorf labour education camp, and in 1944 deported to Ravensbrück. By the following year, older or infirm women were being selected for extermination at the Uckermark death camp, so the resistance fighters made cosmetics out of smuggled bark and margarine, to dye snow-white hair. One woman saved in this manner was Leopoldine Sasso, then 50, the mother of Käthe’s future husband.
When hundreds of Hungarian Jewish children in Ravensbrück were gassed, Käthe lost the will to live, and came up with a plan to electrocute herself on the barbed wire, until an older woman talked her out of it.
As the Soviets approached Berlin, the Ravensbrück prisoners were herded towards Bergen-Belsen on a death march, but Käthe and her friend Mizzi escaped. They travelled over 500 miles back to Vienna, where they were thrown off a tram, exhausted, because they did not have money for the fare.
Mizzi died a year later, her body ravaged by the camp, but Käthe survived to become a prominent educator about the Nazi period in Austria, for which she was awarded the Golden Medal of Merit of the Republic of Austria and the Simon Wiesenthal Prize for civic engagement to combat anti-Semitism. She successfully campaigned for a national memorial to executed resistance fighters to be erected in Vienna’s Central Cemetery.
In 1946 she married Josef Sasso, a Wehrmacht soldier who had spied for the Allies and been sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp. In 1963, he was a key witness in the trial of Stefan Rojko, a guard nicknamed “the butcher of Theresienstadt”.
Käthe Sasso, born March 18 1926, died April 14 2024