Dr. Karl Mutschlechner

Karl Mutschlechner attended grammar school in Brixen and moved to Innsbruck to study medicine after completing his A-levels. There he was accepted as one of the founding members of the Raeto-Bavaria student fraternity in 1908. He later had to go into the field as a doctor. After the First World War, he worked as a town and railroad doctor in Grein a. d. Donau from mid-December 1918.

The events after the Anschluss are described as follows in the fraternity chronicle he wrote:

"At 6 o'clock in the morning, the police took me and my wife out of bed, I was first taken to the Grein police cotter and then with the Berlin "Green Heinrich" with 17 other Greiners to Linz, to the new police prison in Linz. I was only a few doors away from Dr. Gleissner, but I never saw him, although other prisoners did.

In the meantime, my wife was not idle, she managed to get me and all the Grein prisoners released, right up to the highest Gestapo chief. The imprisonment lasted less than 3 weeks .... My wife had informed the brothers of my release and when the prison door opened, a crowd of Raeto-Bavarians met me in the street [...] and it was a very warm welcome from my brothers in Linz."

After his release, Karl Mutschlechner was dismissed from his job as a municipal and railroad cashier without pension entitlement or compensation and was even dismissed from the volunteer fire department and declared unworthy of military service. At the end of August 1938, he was arrested again because a colleague from Grein reported him to the police, claiming that he had refused medical assistance to an imprisoned SA man in 1934; the man had therefore died of TB in 1936. Karl Mutschlechner was probably saved from being sent to a concentration camp shortly beforehand by his medical intervention with the wife of the Grein local group leader during a complicated birth, so that he was released after 14 days.

At the end of 1940, he met Dr. Heinrich Gleissner, who had been released from the concentration camp, in Berlin. Due to the danger of being tracked down, the meeting took place in a church.