Egon Friedrich Berliner (* 9 May 1923 in Vienna, 4 April 1945 in Graz) was an Austrian-British officer in the British secret service and resistance fighter in the German Reich. From 1943, Michael was named Michael O'Hara and had the cover names Friedrich Knoll, F. M. Chirgwin and Frederico Hofer.
Egon Berliner was the son of the Jewish banker Egon Berliner and Maria Humer, who was a convert from Warsaw and later converted into the Roman Catholic faith. Berliner visited the real school in Vienna and was excluded from the school visit after the connection. In 1939 he fled to Great Britain for political and "racial" reasons. In Cornwall, he worked as a mechanic, but was first interned as an enemy alien in 1940 and then shipped to Canada.
In 1941 he reported to the Pioneer Corps and was able to return to England. Prior to joining the Royal Engineers, he was a mechanic at the Royal Army Service Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.
In the spring of 1943 he was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). At the beginning of June 1944 he waited in southern Italy for his deployment behind the German lines. In the course of the operation Icecream he jumped at the end of July with two Italians at Mantua by parachute. This operation meant his promotion to the lieutenant. From Mantua, he was to cross Innsbruck via Bolzano to support Communist resistance fighters.
After the jump, however, he lost contact with his comrades and was regarded as missing for a long time. Only in October did he reappear at the base in Bari. In February 1945 he was to make contact with the Social Democratic resistance fighters in the framework of Operation Evansville alone. For this purpose he jumped near Graz. But that failed and he tried to get to the Slovenian partisans. In this attempt, however, he was captured by the Germans and heavily mistreated by the Gestapo.
In the SS-Kaserne Wetzelsdorf he was liquidated just before the end of the war on 4 April 1945 Edit source text Standard data (person): GND: 1070402257 (PICA, AKS) | VIAF: 315940295 | Wikipedia People Search
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