Karl Zehetner

Karl Zehetner initially attended the teacher training college in St. Pölten, where he joined the secondary school fraternity Carolina St. Pölten. In 1933, he joined the student company of the Heimatschutz at the teachers' college - they had to go to Vienna to suppress the National Socialist coup after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuß. After graduating in 1934, he returned to his home town of Hausmening near Amstetten and worked here as an unpaid probationary teacher. From 1934 to 1938, he served as chairman of the local youth movement 'Jung Vaterland'.

The early warnings of his then chaplain, Prelate Josef Huber, about National Socialism had a formative influence on him. After the Anschluss, he refused to join the NSLB or other Nazi organizations, which meant that his hopes of a permanent position as a teacher faded.

In order to avoid being called up for military service immediately, he worked at a "country work camp" in northern Germany from March-October 1938, then returned to his parents' company until he was called up for military service in May 1940. Requests for a deferment due to necessary presence at home are unsuccessful. He was sent to various units in Kaplitz [today: Kaplice in the Czech Republic]/South Bohemia, then Gau Oberdonau, Eisenstadt and Litzmannstadt [Łódź] in the Generalgouvernement. However, his interim plans to apply for the army school service as a teacher were dashed because he refused to be appointed as an officer candidate as a prerequisite.

On the Eastern Front, he witnessed how six scattered Soviet prisoners of war, who had been captured behind the front after a firefight with the German Wehrmacht, were hanged on the basis of Adolf Hitler's decree of March 13, 1941, which violated international law. He reports this truthfully to his family and writes in horror and concern: "If the Russians do this to us ...!" His letter was opened and his superiors were informed. He was subsequently court-martialed for "defeatist reporting" and sentenced to 14 days' imprisonment.

As a result of a guard offense in the spring of 1942, Karl Zehetner was ordered to report directly to the front to the IR 447 combat unit. In an unnoticed moment, he falls from a Wehrmacht truck and suffers a head injury and concussion from the impact. He disguises this incident as an accident and subsequently simulates this illness. According to § 5 KSSVO, self-mutilation is usually punishable by death as 'decomposition of military strength'.

After treatment at the dressing station in Roslawl, he is then transferred back to the reserve hospital XXa in Vienna, Rosenhügel. Here he came into contact with August Kargl and his brother-in-law Karl Eckling through his brother, Alois Zehetner. Both were already secretly involved in the military and medical resistance. August Kargl was a member of the Lower Austrian provincial government from 1936 to 1938 and was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp on the so-called 'Prominent Transport' after the Anschluss. Captain Karl Eckling ordered Karl Zehetner to the Wehrmacht commandant's office in Vienna, where he made contact with the Vorarlberg staff physician Dr. Albert Rheinberger from the IA reserve hospital (formerly Rainerspital), who worked with like-minded people in the 'Resistance hospitals' group. He saved Karl Zehetner from further deployment on the front by falsifying his medical certificates.

On July 20, 1942, he was released from the military hospital, assigned to a convalescent company and then served his 14-day military sentence (aggravated arrest) in Hollabrunn in August or September 1942. Karl Zehetner was injured in an Allied bombing raid on Vienna on September 10, 1944 and disarmed from the Wehrmacht on September 26, 1944. He returns to Amstetten.

In September 1944, he meets the non-commissioned officer Anton Orac, who is instrumental in setting up the resistance movement 'Austrian National Committee' (ÖNK). This group drew up a major liberation plan, which was to be the contribution to liberation in accordance with the so-called Moscow Declaration of 1943. The ÖNK, an organization that emerged from military circles in 1943 with various opponents of the Nazi system, became active after the failed assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 and was based in Mödling. It also maintained loose links with the resistance group of Major Carl Szokoll and the 'Operation Radetzky'.

In December 1944, Karl Zehetner is informed by telephone by Anton Orac of the arrest of a member of the ÖNK. He immediately leaves Amstetten and moves to his apartment in Vienna. The ÖNK was investigated by an undercover agent on February 6, 1945, which was followed by a wave of arrests in Mödling. Karl Zehetner goes into hiding in Vienna.

Karl Zehetner refuses to enlist in the Vienna Volkssturm and is therefore wanted by the Gestapo as a deserter since February 1945. Unnoticed, he returned to Amstetten and in spring 1945 joined the Austrian Freedom Movement (Erika-Enzian) in the Ybbstal valley, a military resistance movement led by South Tyrolean Captain Viktor Estermann and comprising civilian and military personnel. Viktor Estermann's unit, the Artillery Replacement Unit 109, was transferred from Brno [today: Brno in the Czech Republic] to Amstetten in December 1944. The aim of the group was to spare Amstetten the fate of a front-line town. Karl Zehetner was deployed there as a liaison between the military and civilian resistance in the town and district of Amstetten. He carried out his reconstruction work from a barrack located in a forest in the Greinöd district of the municipality of Neuhofen/Ybbs. Together with a source, he was able to prevent the Ybbs bridge near Allersdorf from being blown up, thereby undermining Adolf Hitler's so-called "Nero Order" of March 19, 1945.

This resistance movement was also spied on and betrayed. Karl Zehetner was arrested by the Gestapo on May 1, 1945 and taken to the prison of the Amstetten district court. Despite mistreatment and confrontation with members of the Amstetten garrison, he did not betray any of his comrades-in-arms who were still active in the Wehrmacht. The imprisoned resistance fighters were to be transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp. However, the military collapse of the Nazi regime led to the release of Karl Zehetner and his comrades.

After the end of the war, Karl Zehetner worked in the family business (building materials production, building materials wholesale and structural and civil engineering) and was also active in local politics. On May 18, 1945, he was appointed deputy mayor (ÖVP) of his home municipality of Ulmerfeld Hausmening (until March 23, 1946). He strongly opposed the forced appointment of communist municipal councillors by the Soviet occupying power, but his further local political ambitions failed due to their veto. Under pressure from the occupying power, he was forced to resign from the municipal council on May 16, 1946.

In 1950, Karl Zehetner came under suspicion of illegal possession of weapons following a denunciation. He was arrested and interned in the NKVD Soviet military intelligence detention center in St. Valentin. Following an intervention by the Federal Chancellor Leopold Figl