Ministerialrat Mag. Kurt Schleifer

Kurt Schleifer first attended the Stiftsgymnasium in Melk, then transferred to the Bundesgymnasium in Horn. In 1937, he joined the Waldmark Horn secondary school fraternity and the student volunteer corps of the Austrian Young People. As a pupil at the Bundeskonvikt in Horn, he experienced the first days of the National Socialists' seizure of power in March 1938.

After the Anschluss, he was ordered by the Horn district leadership of the NSDAP to wash away the slogans such as "Yes to Austria" and "Red-white-red to the death", which had previously been painted on walls and on the street in Horn, with a bucket and broom together with the Student Free Corps under the leadership of Prof. Walter Stecher. With this action, the Austrian Young People of Horn are disbanded.

On a hike over the heights to Rosenburg, the Waldmarkers sing the Andreas Hofer song when they reach the Dollfuß memorial: "Now raise your hands to the oath high and mighty, we will carry it to the end and never rest ...". Then they stop at an inn. Schleffer reports:

"It wasn't long before a gendarme and two SA men came in with their white shirts and swastika armbands; they greeted us with "Heil Hitler!" and we thanked them spontaneously by shouting "Three liters!" to the innkeeper. Then the gendarme took our personal details. When he noted Stecher as a secondary school teacher, he probably remembered that his son was Stecher's pupil and said goodbye. Only the two warriors stayed behind and began their discourse again with "Heil Hitler!", we replied with "He's speaking right now!" (so it must have been March 12, 1938 when Hitler spoke in Linz). He then presented his curriculum vitae '... I was born ...', we joked: '... as a Nazi!'; we readily believed that he went to elementary school, even more so when we certified that he had completed it as a Nazi, as well as his subsequent apprenticeship. Our planting got on the nerves of one of his henchmen, so he shouted 'Heil Hitler! We reminded him that he was still talking and that we didn't have our three liters yet either. Then they both left, shouting the Hitler salute again and saying that they couldn't talk to us."

At the start of the 1938/39 school year, Kurt Schleifer moved to Klosterneuburg to avoid any more trouble from ardent members of the Hitler Youth or Nazi members of the teaching staff and became a traffic activist at Arminia Klosterneuburg. Here, together with other Arminians, he founded the "Freikorpsfähnlein St. Leopold". Soon afterwards, he joins the "Austrian Freedom Movement" resistance group around the Klosterneuburg canons Roman Karl Scholz. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940 and was arrested on August 5, 1940 after the group was exposed by the denunciation of the castle actor Otto Hartmann. He initially remained in the Elisabethpromenade police prison, was then transferred to Provincial Court II on the Hernalser Gürtel in Vienna and finally to the [Willich-]Anrath prison near Krefeld. After his release on August 30, 1943, he returned to the Wehrmacht. When he learned of another arrest, he deserted to the Americans on the Western Front in 1944 and was sentenced to death in absentia by the People's Court, but was taken prisoner by the Americans in time.

After his release from captivity, Kurt Schleifer studied law in Vienna. He and other witnesses testified at the Hartmann trial in November 1947 that Hartmann had encouraged them to commit acts of sabotage. "He instructed them to shoot immediately if they resisted, so that 'no witness would be left'."