Hermine Liska (née Obweger; 12 April 1930 – 1 July 2024) was an Austrian woman who was persecuted as a child for her religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness.
In 1938, after Austria's annexation to the German Reich, the situation for Jehovah's Witnesses became critical as they rejected the state's claim to absolute power and felt primarily obliged to obey God.
There were repeated house searches at the family home as the authorities suspected that there was banned literature from Jehovah's Witnesses at the farm and that religious meetings had been taking place there.
As his daughter continued to refuse to give the salute in elementary school, her father Johann Obweger was asked before the court in St. Veit an der Glan to confirm that he would raise Hermine in the spirit of the National Socialist movement.
[3] Because Hermine's persistent refusal to conform to the Nazi regime led to it being assumed that she was still secretly in contact with her parents, she was transferred to the Adelgundenheim in Munich in September 1942.
Hermine's brother Hans Obweger Jr. (born 1914), who had already refused military service, was forced to do mining from 1941, first in Eisenerz, and from March 1942 in Sittenberg [de].
Hermine's other brother Franz Obweger (born 1926) refused to join the Reich Labour Service and therefore served a year in the Vienna-Kaiserebersdorf youth prison.
He was released from prison at the beginning of April 1945; in the following weeks until the end of the war he hid at the Lassnighof together with the Judenburg Jehovah's Witness Hans König in order to avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht.
At the beginning of 1942, Richard Heide received a draft order for the Wehrmacht; he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for refusing to perform military service.
Gerhard was initially placed in the care of National Socialist-minded relatives, then in a children's home in Nikolsdorf near Lienz until the end of the war.
He declared that he could not perform military service due to his religious beliefs, whereupon he was sentenced to death in Berlin for undermining the Wehrmacht .
Because he did not comply with the draft order to join the Wehrmacht because of his religious beliefs, he was arrested at the Lassnighof in 1944 and transferred to the Dachau concentration camp on 11 October 1944, where he died on 21 February 1945.
[4] The Ministry of Education wrote to Hermine Liska in 2006: "Your personal work has contributed immensely to a climate of tolerance and acceptance and to an approach to the terrible history of National Socialism and the Holocaust that is accessible to young people.
In a radio interview, Hermine Liska answered the question whether she had a message for today's youth as follows: "For me, faith was a great help in standing together as a family.