Leopoldine Kovarik

Leopoldine Kovarik (5 February 1919 – 2 November 1943) was a post office employee who lived and worked in a suburb on the south side of Vienna.

Aged 24, she was convicted under the usual charge of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat") and guillotined at Vienna's regional penitentiary, which had incorporated its own execution chamber since the aftermath of the short-lived uprising of 1934.

[2] Leopoldine Kovarik was also a supporter of the leading Austrian communist, Leo Gabler (1908-1944) who had returned from Moscow via Yugoslavia in 1941 in order the rebuild the destroyed party with a new leadership team.

(As a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, exiled Austrian communists leaders, including KPÖ founder member Franz Koritschoner, had previously been deported from the Soviet Union where they had taken refuge and handed over to the Nazis.)

[2] There was evidently no sense of urgency about bringing her to trial, but on 27 September 1943 she faced the special "People's Court" and found guilty of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").