Dr. Max Frhr. Riccabona von Reichenfels

Max Riccabona was born in Feldkirch, the son of Dr. Gottfried Kuno von Riccabona (1879-1964), a lawyer from the Tyrolean noble family of Reichenfels. His mother Anna [Sara] Perlhefter (1885-1960) came from a Jewish family in Prague who converted to the Catholic faith. According to the so-called "Nuremberg Race Laws" [1st Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act of 14.11.1935 (RGBI I (1935)1333 f.) on the basis of § 3 of the Reich Citizenship Act of 15.9.1935 (RGBI I (1935)1146)], which also came into force in Austria after the Anschluss, Max is considered a "first-degree half-breed" (so-called "half-Jew"). This means that Max comes from a "mixed marriage".

His father intervenes with the highest Nazi authorities to save his family members from deportation, ultimately also to protect his son Max.

After elementary school, Max Riccabona attends the Bundesgymnasium in Feldkirch, where he graduates in 1934. In his youth, he fell seriously ill with pneumonia several times and had to spend some time in the Gaisbühel and Davos lung sanatoriums in Switzerland as a result.

He met Adolf Hitler at an election rally in 1932 and immediately rejected him. Max Riccabona initially embarked on a career in law and went to Graz to study political science, graduating with a degree in legal history. Here he joined the Traungau Graz student fraternity in 1934, "because it provided the fiercest brawls against the Nazis".

In the meantime, he completed summer courses in Paris, Cambridge, Perugia and Salamanca. He returned from Paris in 1936 and attended the Consular Academy in Vienna, from which he graduated as a consul in 1938. He then continued his studies in Vienna. A career in the diplomatic service was denied him as a "half-breed". Max Riccabona worked for the English and French secret services. Through his confederate brother Dr. Erwin Wasserbäck, the press attaché of the Austrian Embassy in Paris, he was also assigned to the political intelligence service. Here in Paris in 1939/40, he maintained contact with the circle of exiles around Joseph Roth and Otto von Habsburg in the Café Toumon. He was involved in organizing the resistance there and worked as a "courier for a secret Tyrolean monarchist resistance movement". He returned in 1940 and was drafted into the Wehrmacht. After various assignments such as substitute company of J.R. No. 462 in Hollabrunn and on the Western Front in France in anti-tank defense, he was transferred to the Stalag XVIIa prisoner of war camp in Kaisersteinbruch near Bruck/Leitha, the first of its kind in the "Ostmark", in July 1940 in the function of a "special leader". There are no records of his assignment there. Max Riccabona himself claims to have been deployed as an "interpreter". A resistance group is formed here, in which Max Riccabona is also involved. He later reports that he rescued Jews who had been denounced here and made their repatriation possible with the help of a CV doctor.

After a stay in a military hospital from 12 to 28 November 1940 at the Brothers of Mercy in Vienna-Leopoldstadt, he was discharged as "fit for garrison service at home". On December 3, 1940, he was declared "unfit for military service" as an "asthenic psychopath" and discharged from the Wehrmacht, although relationships may also have played a role.

He then went to Vienna, where he was arrested in Paris on May 28, 1941 after being denounced by a Gestapo informer for prohibited monarchist activities in 1939 and then transferred to the police prison in Salzburg "as a political prisoner on remand as a death candidate". After his liberation on May 4, 1945, Max Riccabona gave the following reason for his arrest: "suspect of espionage and illegal working in a movement of liberation" [on the basis of files found in Paris concerning the Austrian embassy employee Dr. Martin Fuchs]. On January 19, 1942, he was taken to the Dachau concentration camp without a court verdict. After various auxiliary jobs, such as assistant clerk in Block 3 and nurse in the prisoners' hospital, he himself fell ill with typhus in the last weeks of his stay, from the consequences of which he was later never able to recover. He could also have been a kind of functional prisoner; an identity document identifies him as "Reviercapo" in the prisoners' hospital. Another document, a "certificate" from the concentration camp doctor SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Sigmund Rascher (1909-1945) dated 12.1.1944, refers to Max Riccabona's activities in Dachau; it certifies that he "is an employee at the above institute. He is traveling to Vorarlberg in my company on official business. The person named can be expelled if I inspect him." This is the "Institute for Defense Research", where various types of human experiments are carried out. It is not clear from the records to what extent Max Riccabona was involved in these experiments. He had to witness a lot and was also aware of the threat to his life. His father Gottfried repeatedly tried to help him, as "half-Jews" were at great risk of death in the concentration camp. Max Riccabona reports on his stay in Dachau under the title "On the side track". He remained in Dachau until the camp was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945.

After a stay in the Valdurra reserve hospital and a cure in Bad Gastein, Max Riccabona resumed his law studies in Innsbruck in 1947, graduating with a doctorate in law in 1949. He is also active in the "Austrian Democratic Freedom Movement (ÖDW)" in Vorarlberg as provincial chairman and works with the French occupation authorities on denazification in Vorarlberg as well as in the care of victims of National Socialism. In 1949, he joined his father's law firm as a trainee lawyer, which he took over in 1960. He worked as a lawyer until 1965. After the death of his father, he gave up his professional life due to the late effects of his time in a concentration camp and spent the last decades of his life working as a freelance writer and visual artist at the Herz-Jesu-Heim in Lochau.