Irene Harand

Who was Irene Harand?

Irene Harand was an Austrian human rights activist and campaigner against antisemitism.

Harand was born a Roman Catholic in Vienna and was an early organiser of protests against Nazi Germany's persecutions of Jews. She started the Harand Movement, an organisation Weltbewegung gegen Rassenhass und Menschennot in 1933 and actively campaigned throughout Europe before World War II.

Though not opposed to the Austrofascist rule of Engelbert Dollfuß and his Fatherland's Front, Harand fought against antisemitic sentiments and Nazism. To counter Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf, she wrote a book named Sein Kampf - Antwort an Hitler von Irene Harand.

When Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938, Harand was in London lecturing; it saved her life as the Nazis had set a price for her capture of 100,000 Reichmarks. She then emigrated to the United States, where she established the Austrian forum, which after the war was the basis for the Austrian Cultural Forum, of which she became the leader.

In 1969 she received the honorary title of a Righteous among the Nations from the state of Israel for her resistance against the Nazi anti-semitism. Harand died in New York in 1975 and is buried in Vienna-Simmering. In 2008 a square in the Vienna district of Wieden was named in her honour.