Josef Schifferer

Josef Schifferer attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Salzburg and became a member of the Almgau Salzburg secondary school fraternity in 1924. After graduating from high school in 1925, he moved to Vienna in the winter semester of 1925/26 and began studying for a teaching degree in German and history at the university's Faculty of Philosophy, graduating in 1932 with a teaching degree. In 1925, he joined the student fraternity Austria Wien. After returning to Salzburg, the young secondary school professor became deputy regional leader of the Working Group of Austrian Youth Associations in 1935. In the fall of 1936, he became deputy federal leader of the "Österreichisches Jungvolk" and was appointed to Vienna. Josef Schifferer gives the keynote speech at the 1937 secondary school students' day of the Mittelschülerkartellverband in Salzburg. Together with Leopold Guggenberger and Friedrich Zacke, he organized demonstrations of the "Austrian Young People" against the planned Anschluss after the Berchtesgaden Agreement from 12 February 1938 to 10 March 1938.

After the Anschluss, he was immediately dismissed from the civil service and arrested and imprisoned until spring 1943, first in Dachau concentration camp and then in Mauthausen. After his release, he found work at the animal disease fund in Salzburg because he was "unacceptable" as a professor. In the summer of 1943, however, he was asked to enlist as a "war volunteer". He was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded by a shot through the eye in the head during the Red Army's "Operation Bagration" on June 26, 1944 during the fighting in the Vistula Bend - according to his comrades. He died the next day as a Russian prisoner of war in a military hospital in Bobruysk (Belarus).