Dr. Franz Freimüller

Franz Freimüller initially trained as a tailor after completing elementary school. In 1917/18, he served as a rifleman in the Kaiserschützen Regiment No. 1.

After the war, he attended the Bundesgymnasium in Wels as an external student. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the medical faculty in Innsbruck. He was accepted into the Austria Innsbruck student fraternity in 1924. After gaining his doctorate, he trained as a specialist in internal medicine at the General Public Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross in Wels under Dr. Anton Hittmayr and worked as a senior physician until 13 March 1938.

He was then drafted into Medical Replacement Unit 17 in Vienna and took part in the Polish campaign as a junior doctor in 1939. Due to illness, he was deployed as an assistant doctor in military hospital 1a in Vienna. There he became involved in the "Gottfried Lerch secret group" (resistance movement "Austro-European Resistance (AER)") and the "resistance hospitals" resistance group. Here, like the other members of the group, he tried to save wounded soldiers in the Rainerspital in Vienna, which was now the reserve military hospital 1a, by means of reports certifying that they were "unfit" for further deployment on the front. In this military hospital alone, around 33,000 soldiers were sent through for assessment.