Karl Emanuel Aurelius Polly

Karl Emanuel Aurelius Polly was born in Vienna as the legitimate son of railroad inspector Karl Polly and Karoline, née Remann. After elementary school, he attended the lower level of a grammar school before transferring to the teacher training college in Wiener Neustadt, where he graduated in 1923.

After school, he had to work as an unskilled laborer for a few years as he was unable to get a job as a teacher in socialist-ruled Vienna. He worked for the Donau-Save-Adria Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft, a church building association, in the archbishop's ordinariate and as the manager of a children's day care center. In 1932, he married Agnes Kolar and became the father of a son in 1938. In 1934 he became an elementary school teacher at the Münnichplatz elementary school in Vienna's 11th district. In the same year, he was accepted as an honorary member of the Ostgau secondary school association.

Karl Polly was involved in a front-line fighters' organization between 1923 and 1924 before becoming a district cultural officer in a patriotic organization between 1924 and 1935. In 1934, he became the main group advertising manager of the Vaterländische Front. As an official of the Patriotic Front, Karl Polly was vehemently opposed to Hitler's ambitions to expand his influence over Austria.

On March 12, 1938, Karl and Agnes Polly witnessed the demise of free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. Together with around 20 to 25 other primary school teachers, Karl Polly joined the legitimist resistance group Austrian Workers' Party (ÖAP) at a physical education meeting in 1940. The group maintains 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. At the same time, he returned to work as a primary school teacher, where he was rehabilitated on February 13, 1946, but retired at the end of November 1948. 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 ORF until his retirement. He is also involved in the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and in the ÖVP Kameradschaft der politisch Verfolgten und Bekenner für Österreich.