Balthasar Linsinger was ordained as a priest in 1925. As a pastor in Weißbach near Lofer, he was under Gestapo observation from 1940 due to disparaging remarks about National Socialism. In July 1940 the Gestapo arrested six Salzburg priests, including Linsinger. The priests were released a month later, but Linsinger was banned from providing religious education and pastoral care to young people.
In the summer of 1942 he made friends with the painter Eduard Bäumer, who painted a fresco in the Weißbach parish church. When Linsinger learned that Bäumer’s wife Valerie and their children were at risk of persecution, he offered the family his help in the event of danger.
In August 1943 Linsinger was transferred to Großarl. In the summer of 1944, Valerie Bäumer feared being deported and fled Salzburg with her children for the parish house in Großarl. The children Angelica, Michael, and Bettina Bäumer lived there from August 1944 to the end of the war, posing as a bombed-out family from Vienna.
Balthasar Linsinger was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem on November 10, 2010.