In May 1945, Austria experienced liberation from the Nazi regime of terror. Women and men made a significant contribution to this with their respective resistance activities. They were active underground as lone fighters and/or in resistance groups. The bicycle appears in many narratives as an indispensable mobility vehicle: from a helpful means of transport for secretly carrying news, medicine and food, to necessary rescue journeys, and finally to bicycle journeys to freedom after a successful escape.
This project describes bicycle routes in the resistance against National Socialism in the Salzkammergut, most of which were ridden in connection with the partisan group Willy-Fred. The stories, individual fates and bicycle routes leading across the Salzkammergut researched for this purpose are merged into a total of five packages in the form of text, images and geodata on the digital platform Salzkammergut Culture Guide and thus made available to a broad public. These packages/data collections extend geographically over almost the entire Salzkammergut 2024 region. Using the associated Salzkammergut Culture Guide-APP, routes can be recreated or cycled in order to understand the hardships that individual cyclists – and very often women – had to endure when they had to cover more than 100 kilometres a day on their bikes, sometimes with great hardship.
The newly created cultural tourism offer is aimed at school classes, historians, cyclists and the population in general and will be presented to an interested public in the context of a discussion event. Accompanied tours make it possible to get to know the region from a new perspective and at the same time teach how to use new digital tools and access history by bicycle.
