Barta Aloisia Maria Baroness von Hagenauer (geb. Ritter)

Berta Aloisia Maria Ritter was born in Graz as the legitimate daughter of the landlord Josef Ritter and his wife Aloisia, née Kalcher. She is the eldest of three sisters from a devout Catholic family. After finishing school, she married Simon (III.) Baron von Hagenauer in 1924 at the age of 21, who also came from a very religious Catholic family.

Simon (III.) Baron von Hagenauer, a lawyer, had already helped draw up the new Burgenland state constitution in 1922. From 1925 to 1938, Simon Baron von Hagenauer, who had in the meantime been appointed Privy Councillor, was Head of the Department of Culture and Trade at the Office of the Burgenland Provincial Government. In 1925, the first and only child of the Hagenauer barons was born in Vienna, Wolfgang Maria Simon Hugo Johannes, who was the last male descendant in the third generation.

In 1929, the papal barony of the Hagenauer family was recognized as Italian nobility by the Lateran Treaties concluded between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. In a later decree of the Kingdom of Italy (King Victor Emmanuel III), the hereditary baronage of the 'Nobile Francesco de Hagenauer di Salisburgo', with extension to all descendants of both sexes with the 'titolo di barone de Hagenauer', is retroactively confirmed by the royal Consulta Araldica. The baronage of the court and court lawyer Simon (III.) de Hagenauer and his wife Berta, as well as his siblings (Mathilde and Sabine), is thus an Italian one. In 1930, the family moved to Eisenstadt after the new provincial government building was completed there.

In 1934, Berta Baroness von Hagenauer joined the Vaterländische Front and became head of the Catholic Women's Department and the Maternity Protection Network of the Vaterländische Front in Burgenland. Berta Baroness von Hagenauer cultivated close friendships with other politically and socially active women, such as Franziska Princess von Starhemberg (Fanny Starhemberg) and Leopoldine Miklas (wife of the Austrian Federal President), as well as Burgenlanders of Jewish origin.