[4] A priority at the time was to keep concealed from the authorities people living "underground", by creating a succession of rapidly changing "safe houses" and providing food for which, in the context of the rationing, those who were not registered residents would have no coupons.
The women engaged in this activity also took care of information exchange between trusted individuals in the Salzkammergut mountain regions, and operated a messaging service linking Aussee, Goisern, Ischl and Ebensee.
There was no facility for a washing clothes in a laundry using chemical cleaning materials in the Aussee district, so she had a perfectly good reason to make weekly visits to the river channel in Altaussee, where she could contact Resi Pesendorfer and resistance supporters there without arousing suspicion.
[5] Pressure on the resistance groups increased from about 1943 as ever larger numbers of army deserters sought refuge in the mountains where they hoped to live "underground" - without a registered domicile, which would make it harder for the authorities to locate them and send them back to the Russian front.
During the summer months many of the men were able to live out in the open, under the trees, and to sleep in little used or abandoned mountain huts which had been constructed for keeping the hay crop dry until it was needed for the animals.
For winter accommodation the communist, Sepp Plieseis, was able to improvise a separate "partisan shelter" for pacifist comrades, using a large cave-like hut higher up in the mountains, carefully sited so that smoke from fires would not be visible from across the valley.
At some stage she became aware of the full route all the way to the "Hedgehog" hideaway, and on three occasions, when the need was urgent, she herself delivered heavy bundles of supplies right to the partisans' mountain shelter.
Karl Feldhammer jumped out of a window at the back of the house in order to escape through the garden, but a Gestapo man shot and killed him using a submachine gun.
[9] While the other policeman concentrated on threatening Marianne Feldhammer with his pistol, the couple's twelve year old daughter, Anna, quietly threw the illegal meat supplies that had been intended for delivery to the partisans out of the window where, thanks to the depth of the snow, they remained undiscovered.
It was only in the 1980s, notably through the meticulous work of Peter Kammerstätter (who died in 1993) in gathering documents and testimonies of contemporary witnesses, that it became possible for the contribution of activists such as the Feldhammers to be known to the wider public, and to find a way into the mainstream historical record.