Born to a big family of farmers in Vorarlberg (present-day Austria), Gmeiner was a talented child and won a scholarship to attend grammar school.

In the following decades his life was inseparably linked with his commitment to a family-centred child-care concept based on the four pillars of a mother, a house, brothers and sisters, and a village.

In 1960 SOS-Kinderdorf International was established in Strasbourg as the umbrella organization for SOS Children's Villages with Hermann Gmeiner as the first president.

In recognition of his services to orphaned and abandoned children he received numerous awards and was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

However, he was always at pains to stress that it was only thanks to the support of millions of people that it had been possible to achieve the goal of providing abandoned children with a permanent home, and that still applies today.