Dr. Alfred Missong

Alfred Missong was born in [Frankfurt-]Höchst/Hesse to a German father and an Austrian mother. He attended the Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt/Main. He only moved to Austria at the age of fifteen, where he first went to the Jesuit College Kollegium Kalksburg and then to the grammar school in Ottakring. After the First World War, he became involved with the CDSB, where he served on the board as secretary until 1921. Here he also met Felix Hurdes, among others. After graduating from high school in 1921, he began studying political science at the University of Vienna, which he completed in 1924 with a doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.).

From 1925 to 1938, he worked as the editor of "Schönere Zukunft", a Catholic weekly published in Vienna by Josef Eberle. The conviction of Austria's independence is a fundamental idea that runs through all of his political writing, in particular his numerous essays in the "Österreichische Akademische Monatsblätter" published by the Katholische Österreichische Landsmannschaft (KÖL). As early as 1932, Alfred Missong wrote "Der Nazispiegel" (The Nazi Mirror) under the pseudonym Thomas Murner, in which he denounced the Nazi system and the National Socialist evil spirit as barbarism.

So, of course, the Anschluss brought misfortune to the Alfred Missong family. On the night of March 11-12, 1938, Alfred Missong wanted to cross the Czech border together with Eugen Kogon (1903-1987). The attempt fails, Alfred Missong is arrested in Gänserndorf, Lower Austria, and held in Gestapo custody until May 30, 1938. Because the Gestapo were unable to decipher the pseudonyms under which he published his anti-Nazi views, he was released. He emigrated to Switzerland with his whole family in June 1938 and later, when the Swiss authorities threatened to extradite him to the Germans, to the Balkans in Yugoslavia, where he waited in vain for a visa to the USA. After the invasion of German troops, Alfred Missong moved with his family to Hungarian-occupied Vojvodina and then to Budapest. Here he was arrested again on August 13, 1941, handed over to the Gestapo and transferred "by deportation" to Vienna on September 26, 1941 and held in custody until October 15, 1941. From December 1941, he was employed in a law firm, but always had to fear being drafted into the German Wehrmacht.

In retrospect, he wrote: "I received summonses to the Wehrmacht at least three times a year, and time and again, with the help of the CV doctors [resistance hospitals], who worked as military doctors, I managed to appear ill enough to finally obtain an av qualification. So I was spared the 'Führer's gray skirt'. I even escaped the 'Volkssturm' because the local group leader had registered me as an 'enemy of the state'."