Breaking Away from the Battlefront

In the heart of the Austrian Alps, a group of deserters from the Mountain Hunter Regiment 136 found refuge during World War II. Among them was Alois Huber, a man who made a bold choice to desert before his regiment was sent to war against Poland in August 1939.

Alois Huber was drafted into the regiment in December 1938 in Innsbruck. He was trained as a pack animal handler and stretcher bearer, but his conscience could not allow him to participate in the impending conflict. On a fateful day at Jenbach station, Alois climbed out of a window of the toilet while his company was being loaded onto transport for the attack on Poland.

The deserters, including Alois, found their hiding place in the Haselbachgraben, a secluded area at about 1,300 meters above sea level. They remained passive until the end and had no connections to the resistance group in Fügen and Schlitters. Their families and another nearby farm supplied them with food and other essentials, leaving supplies at agreed places.

Anna Huber, Alois' sister, suffered from anxiety dreams for a long time due to the search operations. She maintained a connection with August Jakomet, a gendarme responsible for the area, who showed little enthusiasm for his own search at the farm in Fügen. In fact, August warned the Huber family about searches, a rare act of compassion in those turbulent times.

The search for Alois remained fruitless until the end of the war. However, when the US Army took control of the Zillertal on May 5th, 1945, the deserters came out of their hiding place in their tattered clothes and had themselves photographed.

After the end of NS rule, some deserters faced negative comments in the village about their desertion from the Wehrmacht. However, the family that regularly supported deserters in hidden caves during World War II with food and other supplies was the Barnay family in the Großes Walsertal region.

Alois Huber provided his nephew Hansjörg Huber with the reason for his decision to desert from military service: moral opposition to the German war of aggression, rejection of the persecution of Jews, and discomfort with military drills. His decision was imitated in 1943 by Peter Hotter, a nearby mountain farmer's son, who jumped out of a train on his way back from leave to avoid the fate of his older brother who fell in the attack of the German Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union.

In 2005, the Video Club Hart in the Zillertal made a documentary film about the deserters, interviewing still living deserters, relatives, and other initiates, and filming the hiding place in the Haselbachgraben. The documentary, titled "The Hiding Place," was awarded the silver medal at the Austrian State Championships of Amateur Filmmakers. Performances in Stumm and Hart also received positive feedback.

The story of Alois Huber and the other deserters serves as a poignant reminder of the choices individuals made during a time of war and the lengths they went to resist the oppressive regime.