Dr. Karl Schröckenfuchs

As an orphan, Karl Franz Chlouba initially attended the grammar school in Mariaschein [Bohosudov (part of Krupka) in the Czech Republic], before transferring to the boarding school of the Benedictine monastery in Altenburg in 1918. From here he went to the grammar school in Horn, Lower Austria. In 1920, he was one of the co-founders of the Tursia secondary school fraternity at Altenburg Abbey, which merged with the Waldmark Horn secondary school fraternity in 1922. He graduated in November 1922 and went to Vienna to study history and geography at grammar school. Here he joined the Nordgau Vienna student fraternity in 1923. He financed his studies as a proofreader at the daily newspaper "Reichspost"

Karl's paternal tutor, Fridolin OSB from St. Lambrecht Abbey in Styria, established contact with the Schröckenfuchs family in Teufenbach near St. Lambrecht; in 1924, at the age of 21, Karl Chlouba was adopted by the childless widow Juliane Schröckenfuchs née Lercher (1860-1946), wife of the mayor Josef Schröckenfuchs (1858-1918), and from then on he bore the surname Schröckenfuchs.

Karl Schröckenfuchs completed his university education with a doctorate in 1927 and a teaching degree in 1928 in both subjects as well as Latin and German as subsidiary subjects. In 1929, he initially found a position as a probationary teacher at the Realschule in Vienna-Hietzing, and in 1930 he moved to the Realgymnasium in Waidhofen a. d. Ybbs/NÖ as a history teacher and became an educator at the local Konvikt.

In addition to his school commitments, Karl Schröckenfuchs was also politically active: in 1933, he became a member of the VF and was involved in organizations close to it. In 1934, he took part in the defensive battles against illegal National Socialist units from Carinthia in the Murau/Styria region. In 1936, the military units were reorganized and Karl Schröckenfuchs was transferred to the front-line militia as a reserve militia leader. Until 1936, he also served as a local councillor in Waidhofen/Ybbs. In 1936, he moved to Leoben in Styria and taught there as a secondary school professor at the Realgymnasium; he gave up his previous positions in Lower Austria and became a district leader of the Austrian Young People (ÖJV).

On the day of the Anschluss, Karl Schröckenfuchs was immediately arrested at 4.00 am by an SA commando as a representative of the "corporative state"; he was also dismissed from his teaching post without notice and his family was evicted. On August 25, 1939, he is sentenced to 20 months in prison by the Leoben District Court for alleged grievous bodily harm (referring to the Nazi attacks on July 26, 1934 in Teufenbach) and extortion. His lawyer Otto Tiefenbrunner is not admitted as defense counsel; he is banned from practicing his profession in Styria and Vienna and is himself imprisoned in 1943. Due to an appeal for annulment, the verdict does not become final, but he remains in custody and is transferred to the St. Pölten court prison from Whitsun to December 27, 1939. Here, in front of fellow prisoners, he is said to have regretted the failure of Georg Elsner's Munich bomb attack on Adolf Hitler on November 8, 1939 in the Bürgerbräukeller and expressed criticism of the regime, as the prosecution reproaches him:

"It's a pity that the explosion didn't happen 10 minutes earlier, it would have torn the Führer and the whole government apart and we would have been saved. Only the pig, Göring, would have been lucky, because he was in Berlin. If the assassination attempt had succeeded, the whole government would have collapsed and Austria would have become independent again."

After a denunciation by his cellmates on August 15, 1940, a special court at the St. Pölten district court sentenced him to an additional 8 years in hard labor, taking into account his pre-trial detention from January 15, 1940 to August 15, 1940:

"According to § 21 ST. § 21 STG the punishment has been increased by ordering a hard camp quarterly and according to § 23 STG. the solitary confinement in a dark cell on 8.11. of each year during the part of the sentence."

On 28.6.1941, the "Deutsche Reichsanzeiger und Preußische Staatsanzeiger" announced that Karl Schröckenfuchs had been stripped of his academic degree as Dr. phil. by the University of Vienna for political reasons as a result of his conviction on 8.5.1941. He was transferred from St. Pölten to the Garsten prison in Upper Austria at the end of June 1942. From here, he was transferred to the infamous "Strafdivision 999" of the German Wehrmacht at the Heuberg military training area (Sigmaringen district/Baden-Württemberg) in mid-July 1943 and shortly before Christmas 1943, he was deployed to the "demining service" and "partisan combat" in Greece, where he was taken prisoner of war by the British on the island of Leros (Aegean) in April 1945, which he spent on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

After eight years and nine months, Karl Schröckenfuchs was able to return home to his family in December 1946 and return to work as a grammar school professor at the Bundes-Realgymnasium in Leoben. He was appointed principal here in 1948.

In 1955, 181 people were rehabilitated by the University of Vienna. Karl Schröckenfuchs and Eduard Michl were among the 32 names on a previously unknown list from June 28, 1941, which was discovered by chance in the Vienna University Archives in 2002. On 10 April 2003, the Senate of the University of Vienna decided to "generally declare all disqualifications from academic degrees by the University of Vienna for political reasons at the time of National Socialism null and void and to make a corresponding note in the doctoral records of the University of Vienna."

This is intended to "restore the academic honor of all those academics - also on behalf of persons who have not yet been rehabilitated" for those named in the 1941 revocation decision.