Franz Georg Anton Schönfeld

Franz Georg Anton Schönfeld was born in Währing, Vienna, the son of the Viennese municipal official Anton Schönfeld. He attended elementary school and grammar school there. After graduating from high school, he joined the Vienna City Council in October 1910, where he was promoted to city inspector in 1925. The entire family was practicing Catholics.

After the fall of the Danube Monarchy in 1918, he joined the SPÖ in 1919. After this party was banned in 1934, he became a member of the Vaterländische Front. In March 1938, he witnessed the fall of Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. He lives in his parents' former apartment together with his sister Marie Schönfeld. Both were single, opposed to National Socialism and had legitimist views.

From the spring of 1942, Franz Schönfeld began writing flyers against the regime. His sister, Maria Schönfeld, who was a shorthand typist in the Reich Governor's Property Transaction Office, duplicated them. Together, the siblings distributed the anonymized letters in mailboxes, sent them out or gave them to Maria Eckert, a tobacconist they knew who was also opposed to National Socialism. They gave the latter the poem "Parody of the Deutschlandlied", for example. A total of 65 different flyers were created.