Univ.-Prof. Dr. Willibald Plöchl

The color student gymnastics shaped the family that Willibald Plöchl came from. His father Josef and his older brother Alois, founder of Austria Vienna, were already color students. Willibald Plöchl first attended grammar school in St. Pölten, then transferred to the Stiftsgymnasium in Seitenstetten, before graduating from the commercial academy in Vienna, where he became a member of the Catholic-Austrian Habsburg-Lorraine Association. With a view to transforming this fraternity into a university fraternity, he founded the Catholic-Austrian secondary school fraternity Tegetthoff together with his future brother-in-law Hans Pittioni in 1925. The KÖL Habsburg-Lothringen or Hasso-Lothringen, as it was officially called on the advice of the registering magistrate Dr. Adolf Schärf (the later Federal President), merged in 1927 with the student fraternity Maximiliana, which Willibald Plöchl supported throughout his life.

After graduating from high school in 1927, Willibald Plöchl first studied at the Consular Academy until 1929 and then transferred to the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate (Dr. iuris) in 1931. He also worked as a journalist for the "Reichspost". As a lawyer, he joined the administrative service of the Lower Austrian provincial government, where he was particularly responsible for combating illegal National Socialists. In 1935, he also habilitated in ecclesiastical law.

As a legitimist and thus as an exponent of the group that was most resolutely in favor of Austria's independence, Willibald Plöchl was on the Nazis' wanted lists. Immediately after the Anschluss, he was expelled from the civil service and the university. A brief arrest by the Gestapo showed Willibald Plöchl the seriousness of the situation. In September 1938, he and his wife left the German Reich for the Netherlands, where he taught at the University of Nijmegen [Nijmegen] in 1939/40, and France, where he went into exile in America, where he contacted the State Department and taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.. The result of his contacts with the State Department is Resolution No. 328 of the American Congress of July 31, 1941 on the independence of Austria:

"... The Austrian Nation - spiritually unconquered - although silenced by its suppressors, still continues to exist and will be free again."

In the USA, Willibald Plöchl, together with other Austrian legitimists, tried to found a government in exile around the former Secretary of State in the Ministry of Social Affairs, Dr. Hans Rott, in the Schuschnigg government (1936-1938), as he had previously done in Paris in the Ligue Autrichienne. To this end, he founded the Free Austrian National Council in Washington DC on December 19, 1941. However, this plan failed due to the disunity of the Austrian emigrants and the Council was dissolved in March 1943.