Fred Edward Fiedler was born in Vienna, Austria on 13 July 1922. His parents, Victor and Helga Schallinger Fiedler, owned a textile and tailoring supply store prior to 1938. Fred was their only child. After completing secondary school, he served a brief apprenticeship in his father’s textile business before emigrating to the United States in 1938 and settling in South Bend, Indiana. After his high school graduation in 1940, Fiedler held a variety of low-level jobs in Indiana, Michigan and California, before returning to Indiana and a job at the Indiana and Michigan Electric Company. Following the German invasion of Austria, meanwhile, Fiedler’s parents moved first to Shanghai and then to the United States in 1946.