page_title: Hilde Zimmermann
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Hilde Zimmermann / World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: Concentration Camp Ravensbrück Memorial Site - Prisoner labor station on the area of the former womens camp. Deutsch: Mahn- und Gedenkstätte KZ Ravensbrück - Baracken auf dem Gelände des ehemaligen Frauenlagers
context_page_description: Hilde Zimmermann, was a member of the Austrian Resistance. Arrested for her efforts to fight fascism, she was deported with her mother and childhood friend by Nazi officials to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany; she then went on to survive both her imprisonment there and a death march.
  According to the Österreichische Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück & FreundInnen, an organization which she co-founded, "She saw herself as a 'persecuted person', not as a 'victim' and considered it an obligation to report on the Nazis and the concentration camp prison in Ravensbrück especially [to] young people."
context_section_description: Sometime after the Anschluss, Hilde Zimmermann's brother joined the Wehrmacht. 
  Meanwhile, she became an even more active member of the Austrian Resistance. By 1944, she was involved with a cell which was partnering with Russian paratroopers who had been sent from Moscow to help expand local anti-Nazi efforts, including hiding and transporting other members of the resistance. That same year, while she and her friend Pauline ("Pauli") Hochmeister were helping to hide Sepp Zettler, a member of the communist resistance, she was betrayed by someone in the community, and arrested, along with her friend and their respective mothers, Anna Wundsam and Gisela Hochmeister. The four were then deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her brother, Othmar, who had been home on leave from the military, was separated from his family, and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
   According to historian Elissa Mailänder, when Zimmermann was interviewed later about her experiences, she recalled that "the female guards at Ravensbrück ... used violence as a means of impressing their male colleagues."
  She survived her imprisonment at the camp and a death march.
caption: The former women's concentration camp in Ravensbrück, in 2005.
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