The hairdresser Walter Wellek was enlisted in the Reich Labour Service from February to June 1940 before beginning training in September that year at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie in Vienna, which he completed in June 1943. From January 1942 he worked at the Institut für Denkmalpflege (Institute for Monument Protection) as a student first and then as a photographer. In May 1944, because his father was Jewish, he was sent to France in the "Arbeitsbatl. der 29. Hundertschaft für politisch Unverlässliche, Wehrunwürdige und Schwerverbrecher" of the Organisation Todt, a building organization on military lines consisting of forced labourers and prisoners-of-war. He was enlisted in spite of the objection by the Office of the Reichsstatthalter in Lower Danube, because Wellek was the only photographer at the Institut für Denkmalpflege and was needed there for "important war work". On his return in September 1944 he worked again as a photographer for the monuments authority and remained there until 1961. In this function in 1955 he photographed the artworks in Schloss Kleßheim that had been transferred to Austria from the Central Collecting Point in Munich. From February 1962 to May 1966 he was an attendant at the Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts). Nothing further is known at present about his life.