Lothar Kitschelt, son of the factory manager August Eduard Kitschelt and Olga Anna Maria Kitschelt, née Freiin von Hartlich-Wallthor, started studying law but switched in the winter semester 1932/33 to art history, archaeology and philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. He joined the NSDAP in 1933 (membership number 6239371) and assumed various political functions, even after the party was banned in Austria. He was detained at Vienna city centre police station for forty-eight hours in February 1934 and for forty-two days in June/July 1935 for damaging Dollfuß-Schuschnigg and Heimwehr posters. After receiving a warning from the dean of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Vienna, he was banned in the winter semester 1935/36 from studying at Austrian universities. He continued studying in Munich, where he joined the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (National Socialist German Students' League) in 1935 and the SS in 1936. His doctoral thesis in art history in 1938 was entitled "The early Christian basilica as a symbol of the New Jerusalem". In March of that year he returned to Vienna. After a short period of unpaid employment as a research assistant in the Collection of Sculpture, Arts and Crafts in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) and in the archive of the Institute of Art History in the University of Vienna, the temporary director of the KHM Fritz Dworschak appointed him in July 1938 to manage the museum's Ecclesiastical and Secular Treasury. In late August/early September 1938 he was part of a nine-man delegation to accompany the transport of the Imperial Regalia from the Treasury in Vienna city centre to Nuremberg, where the Party rallies were held. In December 1939 he worked for several days as a senior official and registrar at the secret depot in Steinbach. On 23 December 1939 he married Helene Buchwieser, the former head of the KHM building department, whom he had met during alterations to the Treasury. In early 1940 he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In spite of Dworschak's claim that he was required in the Treasury, amongst other things to continue to look after objects from the dissolved Teutonic Order, the office of the Reichsstatthalter refused to support the application for exemption. His request to be granted leave in order to work was also turned down. He was posted to France, southeast of Nancy, and reported missing on 1 November 1944. On 6 June 1945 he was dismissed from the KHM on account of his illegal activities in the NSDAP under § 14 of the Prohibition Act. On 19 September 1947, the Vienna Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen (provincial court for civil law matters) declared him presumed dead with retroactive effect to 30 October 1944. Despite this, a search missing person announcement appeared in the Welt am Abend on 11 September 1948.