In 1892, a short man named Engelbert Dollfuss (later belittlingly nicknamed Millimetternich) was born in the town of Texing, Austria. His young adulthood was dominated by the ravages of WWI (1914-1918) and the fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the final days of the war. During all of that chaos and change, Dollfuss gained an education in economics and agriculture, which influenced his early career path in Austria’s Farmers’ Association and the Chamber of Agriculture. Politically, he joined the conservative Christian Social Party, which dominated Austria’s rural provinces in the post-war parliamentary system. For most of Engelbert Dollfuss’ formative years in politics, the Christian Social Party’s Ignaz Seipel was chancellor of Austria (r. 1922–24, 1926–29). The main rival political organization was the Social Democrat Party, which was entrenched in the capital of Vienna and other urban and industrial regions. Both sides were distrustful of the other and had extremists willing to resort to violence. Notably, each party had affiliated paramilitaries—namely the right-wing Heimwehren and the leftist Schutzbund, which began skirmishing against each other in the 1920s. A boiling point occurred in 1927, when a riot erupted in Vienna after Heimwehren gunmen were found not guilty by a jury for the killing of Schutzbund demonstrators. Chancellor Ignaz Seipel unleashed Johannes Schober, his president of police, against the unruly masses in Vienna. Schober’s officers used lethal live ammunition to suppress the riot, and nearly a hundred people died—of which four of were police. This same Johannes Schober briefly became the Chancellor of Austria in 1930, and his immediate successors as chancellor, Carl Vaugoin (r. 1930) and Otto Ender (r. 1930-1931), appointed Engelbert Dollfuss as the President of the Federal Railways and then the Minister of Agriculture, respectively, in 1930 and 1931.
Engelbert Dollfuss, as he advanced through the offices of the parliamentary government, cultivated an initial reputation as an amenable and agreeable figure who was potentially positioned to work across party lines. His small stature did not take away from his folksy charisma, and he ultimately became quite popular. He was also noticeably less intertwined with the right-wing Heimwehren paramilitary than other Christian Social Party leaders at the time. This was politically important for Dollfuss, as a branch of the Heimwehren militants had unsuccessfully tried to launch a coup against the Austrian parliament in 1931. This was the same year that Austria’s leading bank, Credit Anstalt, collapsed amid the economic devastation of the Great Depression era. It was in this socio-economic environment that Austria elected Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor in the year 1932. His coalition in parliament primarily consisted of his own party, the Christian Social Party, as well as his agricultural allies in the Agrarian League. Another block of supporters that would begin to have an increasing role in his government was the Heimatbloc, the political party of the Heimwehren paramilitary group. Despite the backing of the paramilitary, Dollfuss initially made some overtures to the rival Social Democrat party, floating the idea of cooperation in government. This overture was looked upon favorably by certain leading Social Democrat figures, such as Karl Renner, yet the party as a whole—largely due to the influence of the Austromarxist firebrand Otto Bauer—was convinced to reject Dollfuss’ olive branch. In the absence of cooperation, Dollfuss quickly began closely aligning with right-wing extremists and paramilitaries. Perhaps, under better circumstances, a collaborative government could have been revisited later. Yet, the rise of Adolf Hitler as the German chancellor and Führer in 1933 would forever change Engelbert Dollfuss’ politics.
It was no secret that Adolf Hitler dreamed of bringing Austria under German control—after all, he had written in his 1924 manifesto that Germany would only be safe if the parliamentary state of Austria was destroyed. Even before Hitler became chancellor, Nazis were already becoming a problem in Austria. Within the first year of Dollfuss government rule in 1932, Nazi terrorist attacks provoked the regime into banning political parades and demonstrations in Austria by both the right-wing Nazis and the leftist Schutzbund. Austria’s own nationalist Heimwehren paramilitary group, however, was allowed to continue operating openly. Upon Hitler’s subsequent rise to complete power in 1933, Engelbert Dollfuss immediately recognized the threat posed to Austria by the Nazis, and he scrambled for allies and advice to thwart the hostile Führer’s ambitions. Dollfuss’ foreign confidants included Hungary’s strongman leader, Miklós Horthy (r. 1920-1944), as well as Pope Pius XI (r. 1922-1939)—or at least the Vatican’s representative in Vienna—and, most importantly, the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini (r. 1922–1943). These men, as well as Dollfuss himself, became convinced that Austria could only prevent a Nazi invasion by appeasing Hitler through the implementation of an authoritarian state in Austria that would address Hitler’s qualms about the Austrian parliament and the Social Democrat Party. Mussolini, who was not yet an ally of Hitler, funded and armed the Austrian right-wing Heimwehren paramilitary and promised to support Dollfuss’ regime against Germany if the chancellor could overthrow the parliament and set up a totalitarian government in the Fascist model.
While Dollfuss pondered the situation, the Austrian Nazis’ spree of terrorism continued, prompting Dollfuss to ban the Nazi Party in Austria. This, in turn, provoked an economic retaliation by Hitler, who imposed travel visa fees on Germans who wished to visit Austria. Tragically, while Dollfuss was undergoing his existential crisis in geopolitical politics, a tempting opportunity was unfortunately placed right on his platter by the Austrian parliament. In 1933, a minor procedural voting dispute in the parliament, caused by a man accidentally voting twice, ultimately spiraled into a scandal that resulted in the resignations of the president and vice presidents of the parliament, as well as the temporary suspension of the parliament, itself. Engelbert Dollfuss leapt at the opportunity presented to him; he used police to forcibly keep the parliament closed and insisted that from then on he would rule Austria by authoritarian decrees empowered by a vague and untested Emergency Powers Act meant for wartimes. The army, meanwhile, would not save the parliament, as it had become dominated by the Christian Social Party, to which Dollfuss belonged.
Austria’s Social Democrat Party, caught off guard by the totalitarian takeover of government, hoped for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis. Leftist leaders told their aligned paramilitary organizations to stand down while the leadership attempted to negotiate a reopening of the parliament. Even the aforementioned firebrand Otto Bauer joined the diplomatic overtures that urged a new coalition government that included both the Social Democrats and Dollfuss’ own Christian Social Party. Even though notable members of the Christian Social Party, such as Leopold Kunschak, approved and supported the compromise, Engelbert Dollfuss refused to take this provided off-ramp and instead continued to march down the path of authoritarianism, starting by outlawing the leftist Schutzbund paramilitary organization that the Social Democrat Party leaders had chosen not to mobilize.
Benito Mussolini and Engelbert Dollfuss met three times in 1933, and after the latter’s authoritarian takeover of the Austrian government, Mussolini officially guaranteed Austria’s independence in a meeting at Riccione. Yet, for Mussolini, Dollfuss’ authoritarian government was not totalitarian enough. Vestiges of the Austrian parliament remained, and opposition Social Democrat Party members remained in office in positions such as mayor. Therefore, prodded on by Mussolini’s insistence and encouraged by the bloodlust of the Austrian army and the Heimwehren paramilitary, Dollfuss planned to destroy what remained of the Social Democrat Party through the use of a nationwide military campaign.
On February 12, 1934, Engelbert Dollfuss unleashed the army, the Heimwehren, and the police on Social Democrat strongholds in the regions of Linz, Steyr, Styria, and Vienna. In all of those regions, Dollfuss’ forces encountered resistance from Schutzbund paramilitary fighters who had been laying low since the 1933 ban on their organization. The surprised Schutzbund members had pistols, rifles, and heavy machine guns, which they used effectively from entrenched positions in their urban and industrial environments. Nevertheless, Dollfuss’ forces had an overwhelming advantage in grenades and artillery. Over the next few days, most of the battles in the brief civil war were decided by artillery shelling of Schutzbund positions, which were reduced to rubble. Most of the Social Democrat Party leaders and Schutzbund commanders had been captured or fled by February 15. Hundreds died in the conflict, itself, and more would follow due to the trials and executions of opposition figures that occurred in the days after the civil war. Active Schutzbund militants were not the only ones tried and executed—a notable execution was that of the Social Democrat Mayor, Kolomon Wallisch, of Bruck an der Mur, who was cruelly left to strangle for twelve minutes in his disastrous hanging. Opposition party members who survived the war and tribunals found their party outlawed, their funds frozen, and their political and labor organizations disbanded. The regime’s executions and repressiveness after the civil war destroyed any remaining relationship that the Dollfuss regime had with the Western Democracies, ensuring that the regime would continue to interact with other fascist states. In May of 1934, Dollfuss’ regime drew up a replacement constitution for the new totalitarian Austria. Dollfuss also introduced the curious Fatherland Front, a nationalistic and Catholic inspired organization that was meant to transcend the old parliamentary party system while still promoting Austrian independence.
Ironically, the scheme by Dollfuss and Mussolini to thwart Hitler by creating a Fascist regime in Austria was ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. For Hitler, his ambition in Austria was more territorial than political, so an authoritarian leader in Austria was irrelevant—Hitler wanted to annex it into Germany regardless. Even with the left-wing Social Democrats and the Schutzbund defeated, the right-wing Nazis in Austria continued their terrorist activity and sedition. In a bizarre, sudden, and anticlimactic end to Engelbert Dollfuss’ ironic saga, he was ultimately assassinated by Austrian Nazis on July 25, 1934. Dollfuss’ successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, attempted to continue the repressive regime in Austria. Ineffective and disliked, his weak authoritarian regime suffered sabotage both from Communists and Nazis until the exasperated strongman weakly signed away Austria’s sovereignty to Hitler’s Germany in 1938. Mussolini, who had by that time become Hitler’s ally, then pretended he had never guaranteed Austria’s independence.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Engelbert Dollfuss photographed at the Turkish liberation ceremony of the Heimatschutzes in Schönbrunn, dated 14.05.1933, [Public Domain/no known copyright] via the Österreichische Lichtbildstelle Archive and the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. https://viewer.onb.ac.at/10BDB4FF).
Sources:
- Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s, by David Clay Large. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990, 1991.
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Engelbert-Dollfuss
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benito-Mussolini
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Miklos-Nagybanyai-Horthy
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Hitler
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Renner
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Otto-Bauer
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Schober
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ignaz-Seipel
