Karoline Popp

Karoline Popp was born in Vienna as the legitimate daughter of the bookbinder Leopold Popp and Maria, born Prisch. She attended elementary and secondary school in Vienna and then took a shorthand and typing course. In 1916, she began working as a saleswoman at the Jewish-owned Viennese department store Gerngross.

On March 12, 1938, the devout Catholic and staunch Austrian witnessed the demise of free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. The owner of the Gerngross department store, Paul Gerngross, manages to flee to Montevideo with his family and the department store is 'aryanized'. Karoline Popp moved to the Heisst company in Vienna's 7th district as a saleswoman.

In January 1940, Karoline Popp was told by her friend Stefanie Wotraubek that the Catholic Church was under threat from the National Socialists and that there was a resistance group, the Austrian Freedom Movement, led by Karl Lederer. The opponent of National Socialism joins the resistance group, pays her membership fee, actively recruits six other members and also pays their membership fees to the resistance group.

From July 1940, a good 300 people from these resistance groups are betrayed by Gestapo informer and castle actor Otto Hartmann (Otto Hartmann is subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947 and pardoned in 1957). Karoline Popp is arrested by the Gestapo on September 5, 1940. She is released from custody on July 18, 1941 due to illness. In a trial on October 31, 1944, she is sentenced to one year in prison for 'offenses against the law against the formation of new parties'. The sentence was conditionally suspended at the end of January 1945.

In May 1945, Karoline Popp witnessed the liberation of Austria. On December 15, 1945, the Vienna Higher Regional Court overturns the sentence.