 His mother descended from a long line of military officers.The young Alfred received his fundamentals in Ljubljana, and moved to Praha in Bohemia to complete his education, where thanks to his German-Austrian sounding last name, was able to join the local and prestigious Gymnasium.Life in Prague was very good at the time and being a German Austrian he could have lived well enough, even without speaking the local Czech language, but notwithstanding, he became very fluent in Czech, a fluency described next to be a bilingual, showing a great attitude, in learning languages, an ability he was to exploit with success, during the assignment, in the Balkans and in Russia, to the intelligence and counterintelligence unit.