After the 20 July plot in 1944 Schärf spent another five weeks in prison. Upon the outbreak of World War II, his only son Reinhold was conscripted in the Wehrmacht armed forces and was killed in action in 1941. There were contacts with the important resistance group (Maier-Mesner group, CASSIA) around the later executed priest Heinrich Maier, who was in contact with the American secret service OSS. On the other hand, Schärf avoided membership in the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals and was in contact with resistance circles.

Later on, he also helped in the aryanization process of buildings in Vienna. He took over Eisler's law firm and it was never restituted. However, three months later, he ' aryanized' the office of Arnold Eisler, a Jewish lawyer and party colleague who had to leave Austria. Upon the Austrian Anschluss to Nazi Germany in March 1938, Schärf was arrested and served time as a political prisoner of the Gestapo. Unemployed after the dissolution of the Social Democratic Party, he passed the Austrian bar exam in 1934 and worked as an associate with a law firm. Schärf became a deputy of the Federal Council in 1933, and though he kept aside from the Social Democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund paramilitaries, he was arrested after the 1934 February Uprising and lost his public offices in the course of the establishment of the Austrofascist dictatorship. Schärf, as well as Karl Seitz and the Austromarxist party official Otto Bauer, had urged Renner to step down from office, which proved to be fatal as it gave the government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss the opportunity to overthrow the parliamentary system. He held the post as a secretary throughout the years of the First Austrian Republic until the resignation of Parliament President Karl Renner in March 1933. Having witnessed the defeat and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, he entered politics and, through the mediation of the deputy Otto Glöckel, found employment as the secretary of the Social Democratic president of the National Council parliament Karl Seitz. He received a doctorate in summer 1914 and, upon the outbreak of World War I four weeks later, volunteered for service in the Austro-Hungarian Army.Īt the end of the Great War, Schärf was discharged as a Second Lieutenant.

The talented young man put himself through law school working part-time and with a scholarship granted for academic excellence. Living in the Austro-Hungarian capital Vienna from 1899, he attended the gymnasium in Hernals and went on to study at the University of Vienna. Schärf was born in Nikolsburg, Moravia (present-day Mikulov, Czech Republic), into a poor working-class family.

2 Suggestive abuse of biographical similarities.

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