Karl Polly

Karl Polly attended the teacher training college in Wiener Neustadt, where he graduated in 1923. After leaving school, he had to work as an unskilled laborer for a few years as he was unable to find a job as a teacher in socialist-ruled Vienna. He was later employed as a primary school teacher and in 1934 was accepted as an honorary member of the secondary school association Ostgau.

After the occupation of Austria by the Third Reich, Karl Polly joined forces with around 20 to 25 other primary school teachers to form the legitimist resistance group 'Austrian Workers' Movement' at a physical education meeting in 1940. The group maintained contact with foreign legitimist circles, including Otto von Habsburg-Lothringen. She distributes leaflets smuggled in from abroad and her own. In 1940, he is drafted into the Wehrmacht, is sent to Memmingen and is transferred to Vanes in France shortly afterwards. In the meantime, the group is betrayed in Vienna and Karl Polly is also revealed to the Gestapo. He was arrested in Vanes on September 8, 1941 and interrogated by the Gestapo in various prisons. On November 20, 1943, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison by the Fifth Senate of the Berlin People's Court (flying commission) for preparation for high treason' committed by "attempting to tear the Ostmark away from the Reich". He remained in prison until April 25, 1945. At the end of the war, he is marched from Straubing prison with 4,000 fellow prisoners towards Dachau concentration camp but is liberated by advancing US troops.

He is transferred to Salzburg by the Americans, where he soon becomes foreign policy editor of the Salzburger Volksblatt - the ÖVP-affiliated daily newspaper. He was promoted to editor-in-chief in 1948, but was forced to liquidate the newspaper in 1949. From 1950, he was editor-in-chief of the ORF until his retirement. He is also involved in the ÖVP Kameradschaft der politisch Verfolgten und Bekenner für Österreich.