Marie Karoline Schönfeld

Marie Karoline Schönfeld was born in Währing, Vienna, the daughter of Viennese municipal official Anton Schönfeld. After elementary school, she attended secondary school and two classes at commercial college. After being employed by the City of Vienna for 15 months, she joined the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Public Labor [today: Federal Ministry of Labor] in 1917, where she worked as a shorthand typist. The entire family is practicing Catholics.

Since her youth, Marie Schönfeld has been a member of the Marian Congregation. After the fall of the Danube Monarchy in 1918, she joined the Christian Civil Servants' Union in 1919 and the Patriotic Front in 1934. In March 1938, she witnessed the fall of Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. She lives in her parents' former apartment together with her brother Franz Schönfeld. Both were single, opposed to National Socialism and had legitimist views.

From the spring of 1942, Franz Schönfeld began writing flyers against the regime. Maria Schönfeld duplicates them and distributes them together with her brother as anonymous letters in post boxes, sends them or passes them on to Maria Eckert, a tobacconist they know who is also opposed to National Socialism. They gave the latter the poem "Parody of the Deutschlandlied", for example. A total of 65 different flyers were created.