Otto Brill, a chemist with a doctorate, was the second oldest of four children of the Jewish leather merchant Mori(t)z Brill and his wife Amalie, née Thein.

At the beginning of April 1941, the provisional rector of the Academy, Alexander Popp, informed Nazi Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) Baldur von Schirach of the founding of the association Freundeskreis der Akademie der bildenden Künste (Friends of the Academy of Fine Arts), w

Rudolf Hintermayer, who later became a lawyer and art collector, was born in Waidhofen an der Ybbs in 1917 as the youngest son of Rudolf Hintermayer, who worked in the Vienna municipal administration and later became Deputy Director of Städtische Gaswerke, and his wife Auguste,

Anton Kraus, son of a merchant, was employed as a trainee in an accounting department of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Finance between 1912 and 1914 after graduating from a secondary school in St. Pölten.

Helene Richter came from a liberal, (upper) middle-class family with a Jewish background. Her father, the physician Maximilian Richter, was head of the medical service of the imperial and royal privileged Southern Railway Company, and her mother Emilie was a housewife.