Karl Glaser

Karl Glaser is a pupil at the Bundesrealgymnasium in Salzburg from 1931-1939. On March 30, 1938, he was accepted together with Alfred Mateja at the last illegal pub of the Almgau Salzburg secondary school fraternity at Josef Ebner's stall. Together with Karl Steiner, Robert Weidinger and others, he forms a cell of the "Grey Free Corps" in the ÖJV, recruited by Karl Beran, a university student who had come to Salzburg in the summer of 1938. This underground activity is investigated and Karl Glaser is arrested by the Gestapo together with his two brothers on September 21, 1938, but is released on September 27 and arrested again on October 25, 1938. He remains in prison at the provincial court until 28.11.1938. On September 9, 1939, the three young Almgauers are put on trial. The following passage can be found in the indictment:

"A proclamation was also found ... allegedly written on August 12, 1938, with the following wording: 'Austrians! Since the day of the Anschluss, the violence and terror of a government that is alien to you in its way of fighting and its aims have endeavored to rob you of everything that is in any way connected with the concepts of homeland consciousness, love of the homeland and Austria. Under the guise of national unification, your fatherland became a colony of Prussia at the same time as the latter finally betrayed the separated South Tyrol. Now that you have to act, as it were, as trustees of all the cultured people of your homeland, it is time to renounce the bad habit of false modesty and all too unquestioning self-aggrandizement and to cultivate a different consciousness, namely the historical consciousness and the pride of the Austrian. The bravery with which each and every one of you has demonstrated your love for your homeland over the past four years reaches its peak today in acquiescence. Austrians, the lust for power and the sabre-rattling of a few are about to thrust you and your children into a disaster that threatens to lay the world low and destroy the work of centuries of human diligence with a sacrilegious hand. Therefore, when the storm bells ring, the fatherland calls you to unite under the slogan: stick together - keep up - endure.'"

The indictment accuses the young people of having violated the ban on "maintaining or forming new parties" (RGB 1. 1 1933, p. 479) by advertising for this organization and collecting contributions [contributions of 30 pfennigs were actually collected]. On the basis of their youth, the court comes to the following conclusion:

"...If one considers that the blameless Karl Glaser, Robert Weidinger and Karl Steiner have essentially confessed, that their deed was committed a relatively short time after the NSDAP came to power in Austria and the reunification of the Ostmark with the great German fatherland, i.e. at a time when they, still surrounded by learned prejudices, were unable to appreciate and understand the greatness and beauty of the idea of the union of the members of the German people into a great national community, which had become a reality, that their actions arose from adherence to an erroneous view, but not for reasons of expediency and an ability to adapt to the new times, that Glaser is now in the labor service and the other defendants will probably be trained in the near future, then one will come to the necessary conclusion that neither Karl Glaser nor the other two ... a prison sentence of more than three months is to be expected. ... The court is therefore convinced that the application of the Führer's decree of clemency is appropriate in the present case ..." (decision of 4 November 1939)

Karl Glaser studied at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences for three semesters between 1939 and 1940 after graduating from high school. After completing his labor service, he was sent to the front in 1941 until the end of the war.