Dr. Franz Ritschl

Franz Ritschl attended grammar school in Kremsmünster and went to Vienna to study medicine after graduating from high school. In 1929, he was accepted into the Norica student association.

After obtaining his doctorate in medicine in 1935, he worked at Lainz Hospital until 1940. In February 1940, he was drafted into the German army and did his military service as a staff doctor and medical director in the medical replacement unit 17 stationed in the Radetzky barracks until the end of the war. There he helped to set up a resistance group whose aim was to save as many Austrian opponents of the Nazi system as possible from serving in the German Wehrmacht and to prevent those who had recovered from serving in the war again for as long as possible. This was done by committing them to a military hospital, giving them preferential treatment or issuing medical certificates to categorize them as unfit for the front. For example, pretended nervous disorders are a common diagnosis, as it is almost impossible to prove or disprove such a diagnosis. For example, Erwin Ringel (1921-1994), a medical student at the time (later a specialist in psychiatry and neurology), reports on how he fared at the time:

"... Our troop doctor in the Radetzky barracks was a certain [Franz] Ritschl. He was a member of the Austrian resistance movement. And of course he was on my side and visited me and said: 'What did you come up with? And I said: 'Mr. Staff Doctor, I've been so maltreated that I've lost my senses' - that was my only salvation - 'that I no longer had any senses left. Ritschl did two things: firstly, he asked my company whether I had always shown signs of mental abnormality, and my comrades, who of course understood what it was all about, said: 'Yes! He's always been highly abnormal! Then he said: 'Well, then you need to be psychiatrized. And he sent me to the reserve hospital 1a, I think it was, to the Hanusch Hospital."

Franz Ritschl thus became part of the military and medical resistance and was integrated into an anti-national socialist network, which also included Dr. Albert Rheinberger from Altenstadt near Feldkirch in Vorarlberg. These "resistance hospitals" also cooperated with Austrian officers in the military replacement services and leading members of the resistance group within the Artillery Replacement and Training Division 109, commanded by the South Tyrolean Captain Viktor Estermann (1910-1969).

In retrospect, Franz Ritschl described his resistance activities as follows: "...As a troop doctor in the Radetzky barracks from mid-1940 to the end of the war, I liberated thousands of anti-Nazi soldiers from military service, including members of all resistance groups; [I was] the leader of the 05in of the Radetzky barracks in the spring of [19]45."