Adolf Schärf

Who was Adolf Schärf?

Adolf Schärf was, from 1957 to his death, the sixth President of Austria. Born into a poor working-class family, he put himself through law school working part-time and with a scholarship granted for academic excellence. He received a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna in 1914 and volunteered for service in the Austro-Hungarian Armed Forces in the same year. At the end of the Great War, he was discharged as a Second Lieutenant. He entered politics and found employment as the secretary of the social democratic president of the Nationalrat during the years of the first republic and served on the Bundesrat 1933-1934. After the fall of the Republic in 1934 and twice during the Nazi occupation, he served time as a political prisoner. Unemployed after the dissolution of the Socialist Party, he passed the Austrian Bar exam in 1934 and worked as an associate with a law firm. However, in 1938, he aryanized the office of Arnold Eisler, a Jewish lawyer who had to leave Austria. He took over the law firm and it was never restituted. Later on, he also helped in the aryanization process of buildings in Vienna.