Mag. Walter Stecher

Walter Stecher moved to Feldkirch in 1917 and graduated from the Jesuit grammar school "Stella Matutina". He then studied at the University of Vienna to become a teacher of Greek and Latin. During his studies, he becomes a member of the student volunteer corps of the "Austrian Home Guard". At the beginning of the 1936/37 school year, he was appointed prefect and teacher at the Bundeskonvikt in Hom, Lower Austria. He led the Horn student group of the ÖJV until 1938. Several members belonged to the Waldmark Horn middle school fraternity, which also awarded him its ribbon in 1937.

A few days after the Anschluss, the members of the Heimatschutz "student free corps" - including many Waldmarkers - under the leadership of Walter Stecher had to wash the "Austria slogans" off the streets with K übel and scouring cloths on the orders of the NSDAP district leadership in Horn. These slogans, such as "Red-white-red to the death", "Heil Österreich" or "Mit Schuschnigg in ein Dollfuß-Österreich" had previously been written on streets and walls with brushes and lime by the ÖJV in protest against the Nazis in Horn and the surrounding area as far as Gars, Mold and Mödring.

At the beginning of April 1938, Walter Stecher was first transferred to Krems and then to Vienna in the autumn as "politically unacceptable". In April 1940, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht.

In the meantime, Walter Stecher had joined the "Austrian Freedom Movement" around the Klosterneuburg canon Roman Scholz. When the resistance group was busted by the Gestapo following a complaint filed on June 17, 1940 by castle actor and confidant Otto Hartmann, Walter Stecher was also arrested on October 22, 1940 and taken to prison. At his trial on 1-2 December 1943, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and seven years loss of honor by the People's Court "for preparation for high treason". On May 13, 1945, he was freed from prison in Werl/Westphalia by the advancing American troops.