According to the Austrian census of 1910 the town had 6,859 inhabitants, 6,619 of whom had permanent residence there. Census asked people for their native language, 6,588 (99.5%) were German-speaking, 16 (0.2%) were Czech-speaking and 13 (0.2%) were Polish-speaking. Jews were not allowed to declare Yiddish, most of them thus declared the German language as their native. Most populous religious groups were Roman Catholics with 6,552 (95.5%), followed by Protestants with 208 (3%) and the Jews with 83 (1.2%).
The Freiwaldau massacre
On November 25, 1931, the local Communist party organised a hunger march of around 1,000 unemployed stone workers ('Steinklopfer') to Freiwaldau. The police chief at Setzdorf instructed his men to prevent the demonstration from reaching the town. The police forced the marchers to take an alternative route through the forest. The police soon caught up with them at Nieder-Lindewiese, and a clash ensued during which the marchers threw sticks, stones and other objects at the gendarmes. After two stones hit the commander of the unit, First Lieutenant Oldřich Jirkovský, on the forehead, gave his men the order to fire on the crowd. As a result, ten people, including six women - among them a 60-year-old woman and a 14-year-old girl - were killed and fifteen men and women seriously injured and taken to the hospital in Freiwaldau. The Vienna Neue Zeitung attributed the march to the growing indebtedness of local stone- and chalk workers, who could no longer earn enough for subsistence
