As a young man, like many who had grown up with the Christian Youth movement in Sudetenland, he was drawn to Nazism, even attending a party rally at Nuremberg in the summer of 1936. The experience proved a turning point, however, unmasking for him the ugly underpinnings of Nazi ideology. In March 1938 Austria was invaded by the German army and quickly became incorporated into an enlarged Nazi German state. That year Roman Karl Scholz teamed up with his friend Dr. Viktor Reimann to create the "German Freedom Movement" ("Deutsche Freiheitsbewegung") a resistance group of an essentially Catholic and conservative character. After war broke out, in September 1939, the group was renamed, becoming the "Austrian Freedom Movement" ("Österreichische Freiheitsbewegung"). Their political objectives were to start by educating people about the true nature of National Socialism, and then to accomplish the downfall of the Nazi regime. This should be accompanied by the extraction of the Danube and Alpine provinces from the recently enlarged German state, and the re-establishment of an independent Austrian state which would also incorporate Bavaria, thereby extending in a northerly direction all the way to the River Main. Some of the recruits were drawn from among the older school students whom Scholz taught. In the end, there were around 300-400 members. The movement also incorporated a women's group, organized around Luise Kanitz. They collaborated with the resistance group centered on that led by . There were contacts with the western allies and with Czechoslovak resistance groups.