Dr. Arthur von Schuschnigg

Artur von Schuschnigg was born in Vienna as the son of the later Field Marshal Lieutenant Artur von Schuschnigg. His brother Kurt von Schuschnigg later becomes Federal Chancellor of Austria. After a few years in Vienna, the family moved to Marburg, where he attended elementary school and grammar school. Due to the loss of the First World War, the family had to move to Innsbruck, where he finally graduated from high school. Arthur von Schuschnigg then enrolled in art history at the University of Innsbruck and graduated in 1928.

From 1933, he worked at the Austrian radio station RAVAG in Vienna. There, as program manager of the record department, he witnessed his brother Kurt's farewell words on the evening of 11 March 1938. He is then immediately dismissed. In the spring of 1939, he was offered a position as curator at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin and moved there with his family. Due to his close contacts with Austrian artists, his apartment in Berlin soon became a meeting place for Austrian emigrants.

"In Berlin, Arthur von Schuschnigg quickly found access to a circle of artists around the expressionist painter Ewald Vetter and his family, whom he had met through the widow of the writer Robert Seitz, Erna Seitz. Reinhold Schneider and Käthe Kollowitz also socialized there. Schuschnigg's apartment at Burggrafenstraße 14 was soon frequented by many "Austrian emigrants"; one of his first friends from Austria was the poet Hans von Hammerstein-Equord (a member of the Schuschnigg government for a time before 1938), who had been released from Gestapo custody and was later imprisoned again, Hans Nüchtern, the former head of RAVAG's current service, who came from Vienna, and Annie von Einem, the mother of composer Gottfried von Einem, who was studying with Boris Blacher in Berlin at the time."

When Arthur's brother Kurt von Schuschnigg was transferred to the Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen in 1941, Kurt von Schuschnigg's wife Vera and their son Kurt Jr. regularly visited their Berlin apartment to exchange information between resistance groups - including the AFÖ. In addition, the apartment serves as an information exchange point with the former Federal Chancellor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and persons and groups close to him. Arthur von Schuschnigg made his apartment available as an information meeting point for the Nazi opposition.