O5 (Austria) O5 (Österreich)

The largest and best-known resistance group was the O5, which was initiated and supported by bourgeois-conservative forces, but later also established contacts with social democrats and communists. The initiator was Dachau concentration camp, Hans Sidonius von Becker, a former propaganda leader of the Fatherland Front, who began gathering various resistance groups in 1941/42.

From 1944, the name "O5" (an abbreviation for "Austria") appeared, which became the group's trademark. [...] In November 1944, Hans Sidonius von Becker and his comrades-in-arms created a committee of seven as a management body; after Becker's arrest on February 28, 1945, Raoul Bumballa took over the leadership. The O5 became a political factor not least because it was able to establish a firm connection with the Western Allies through the young, courageous and intelligent soldier Fritz Molden. Molden, who had been active in the Catholic-conservative youth resistance since 1938 and was arrested for the first time in 1940, had deserted as a member of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1944 to join Italian partisans and then fled to Switzerland. He was able to gain the trust of Allen W. Dulles, the head of the OSS in Bern, with whom he now worked closely, supported by the exiled Austrians Kurt Grimm and Hans Thalberg. Milden commuted between Vienna, Tyrol and Switzerland with forged papers and at great risk in order to hold talks and exchange messages, and made a significant contribution to activating the resistance work of the O5 in Austria.

On December 12, 1944, a Provisional Austrian National Committee (POEN) was formed from the aforementioned group of people from O5/Siebener-Ausschuss, which saw itself as the core of a future provisional Austrian government. However, the involvement of Adolf Schärf and Viktor Matejka as representatives of the Social Democrats and Communists, as claimed by Fritz Molden and reproduced by Radomir Luza, was firmly denied by these two politicians. Arrests by the Gestapo in January, February and March 1945, including Hans von Becker, Ernst Spitz and Major Alfons Stillfried, wiped out the POEN. While the Western Allies had a positive attitude towards the POEN and the O5 due to Fritz Molden's reporting, which understandably exaggerated the size and strength of the Austrian resistance, and provided assistance, e.g. in the form of paratrooper detachments, the Soviet side was highly skeptical of the O5 precisely because of its pro-American ties. The O5 worked closely with the military resistance group in Wehrkreiskommando XVII, which was led by Major Carl Szokoll, and was involved in the planning of the uprising in April 1945, but not in the sense of a political leadership body. The failure of the 'Operation Radetzky' caused by betrayal was also a decisive setback for the O5.

For the KPÖ leaders Johann Koplenig and Ernst Fischer, who returned from exile in Moscow in mid-April, the resistance fighters of the O5 were "chatterboxes" and "a gang of crooks, swindlers and naive people"; but the newly founded ÖVP and the re-established SPÖ had no interest in political competition either. On 21 April 1945, the Soviet occupying power issued an order prohibiting the activities of unregistered political organizations and several representatives of the O5 as well as Major Carl Szokoll were temporarily arrested.

This put an end to the O5's hopes of playing a political role in post-war Austria. Members of the O5 included: