Gregor Žerjav

In 1910, he became notorious for his involvement in the bankruptcy of the Agro Merkur credit bank, established a few years earlier as a financial institution supporting the National Progressive Party.

[1] In 1911, he was elected to the Austrian parliament, where he became the leader of the 'Yugoslav Club', a caucus of South Slav national liberal representatives from the Slovene Lands, Istria, and Dalmatia.

After the outbreak of World War I, Žerjav launched an underground network which was working against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in favour of the creation of a unified Yugoslav state.

In May 1915, when his colleague Bogumil Vošnjak fled to the west in order to join the Yugoslav Committee, Žerjav was again arrested and put into custody in the town of Gmund and later in Graz, where he spent most of the war.

The last years of his life he suffered tuberculosis; for an attempt of operative surgery he went to Berlin to the Charité as one of the first patients of Ferdinand Sauerbruch when using the iron lung there.