Viktor Riemann (25 January 1915 - 7 October 1996) was an Austrian author, commentator, journalist and politician (VdU). He sat as a member of the "Nationalrat" ("National Parliament") between 1949 and 1956. Despite his involvement in liberation activism and subsequent imprisonment following the country's incorporation into Hitler's Germany, Riemann found himself identified as a controversialist, or on occasion more simply as an embarrassment, by representatives of the consensual centrist Austrian political mainstream during the postwar decades. A succession of political biographies and his newspaper contributions may have contributed to this. Biography Early years Viktor Reimann was born and died in Vienna. Successful completion of his schooling led him to the University of Vienna where he studied History and Germanistics. Heinrich von Srbik and Hans Hirsch were two of his history tutors. In 1936 he was actively involved with the (still, in Austria, illegal) National Socialist Party. After 1938 he switched to a position of opposition, driven primarily by simple hostility to Austria having recently been integrated into an enlarged German state. In the Autumn of 1938 Reimann teamed up with the Augustinian canon regular Roman Karl Scholz to set up a "catholic-conservative" resistance group. After war broke out, in September 1939, the group was renamed, becoming the "Austrian Freedom Movement" ("Österreichische Freiheitsbewegung"). Their political objectives were to start by educating people about the true nature of National Socialism, and then to accomplish the downfall of the Nazi regime. This should be accompanied by the extraction of the Danube and Alpine provinces from the recently enlarged German state, and the re-establishment of an independent Austria, which should also incorporate Bavaria, thereby extending in a northerly direction all the way to the River Main. In the end, there were around 300-400 members, many of whom had been taught by Scholz at the monastery school an hour's walk downriver from Vienna. The group was also networked with other resistance groups, notably in former Czechoslovakia, and maintained contacts with agents of the allied powers. Such contacts were not without their own risks, however. The "Austrian Freedom Movement" was smashed thanks to betrayal by one of its members, the government spy and Burgtheater stage actor Otto Hartmann. The authorities arrested Riemann towards the end of 1940. He was held in investigatory detention for two years and then, early in 1943, sentenced by the special People's Court to ten years imprisonment. Till 1945 Viktor Reimann survived