Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Although the Nazis in Austria were growing stronger and more violent every day, the Christian-Socialist-Heimwehr coalition passed its time destroying the Social Democrats. The Heimwehr militia would attack the Socialists in the industrial parts of the cities, coming in by train from the rural areas for the purpose, and the Christian Socialist government would then suppress the Social Democrats for these “disorders.” After one such affair, in October 1932, Dollfuss appointed the Heimwehr leader, Ernst Fey, as state secretary (later minister) for public security with command of all the police in Austria. This gave the Heimwehr, with 8 seats in Parliament, 3 seats in the Cabinet. Fey at once prohibited all meetings except by the Heimwehr. From that point on, the police systematically raided and destroyed Social Democrat and labor-union property—”searching for arms,” they said. On March 4, 1933, the Dollfuss government was beaten in Parliament by one vote, 81-80. It threw out one vote on a technicality and used the resulting uproar as an excuse to prevent by force any more meetings of parliament.

Dollfuss ruled by decree, using a law of the Habsburg Empire of 1917. This law allowed the government to issue emergency economic decrees during the war if they were approved by parliament within a stated period subsequently. The Habsburg Empire and the war were both finished, and the decrees of Dollfuss were not concerned with economic matters nor were they accepted by Parliament within the stated period, but the government used this method to rule for years. The first decrees ended all meetings, censored the press, suspended local elections, created concentration camps, wrecked the finances of the city of Vienna by arbitrary interference with tax collections and expenditures, wrecked the supreme constitutional court to prevent it from reviewing the government’s acts, and reestablished the death penalty. These decrees were generally enforced only against the Social Democrats and not against either the Nazis or the Heimwehr, who were reducing the country to chaos. When the Socialist mayor of Vienna disbanded the Heimwehr unit of that city, he was at once overruled by Dollfuss.

In May the Christian Socialist Party conference failed to elect Dollfuss as head of the party. He at once announced that parliament would never be restored and that all political parties would be absorbed gradually into a single new party, the “Fatherland Front.” From this time on, Dollfuss and his successor Schuschnigg worked little by little to build up a personal dictatorship. This was not easy, as the effort was opposed by the Social Democrats (who insisted on a restoration of the constitution), by the Pan-Germans and their Nazi successors (who wanted union with Hitler’s Germany), and by the Heimwehr (who were supported by Italy and wanted a Fascist state to dominate the Danube area).

While Dollfuss continued his attacks on the workers, the Nazis began to attack him and the Heimwehr. The Nazi movement in Austria was under direct orders from Germany and was financed from there. It engaged in wholesale attacks, parades, bombings, and murderous assaults on the government’s supporters. In May 1933, Hitler crippled Austria financially by putting a 1,000-mark tax on all German tourists going to Austria. On June 19 Dollfuss outlawed the Nazis, arrested their leaders, and deported Hitler’s “Inspector General for Austria.” The Nazi Party went underground but continued its outrages, especially hundreds of bombings and thousands of acts of vandalism. In June 1933 they tried to murder Steidle and Rintelen, and in October they succeeded in wounding Dollfuss.

In the face of these Nazi atrocities, Dollfuss continued his methodical destruction of the Socialists. Since 1930, and probably since 1927, Mussolini had been arming Hungary and the Heimwehr in Austria. The Social Democrats, supported by Czechoslovakia and France, opposed this. In January 1933, the Socialist railway union revealed that a trainload of 50,000 rifles and 200 machine guns was en route from Mussolini to the Heimwehr and to Hungary. In the resulting controversy a joint Anglo-French note protesting this violation of the peace treaties and ordering the arms to be either returned to Italy or destroyed was rejected by Dollfuss. Instead, Dollfuss made an agreement with Mussolini for support against the Nazis through the Heimwehr and for destroying the Socialists in Austria. In March 1933, Dollfuss outlawed the Republican Defense Corps, the militia of the Socialist party, took the Heimwehr into his Cabinet, and ended Parliament.

Because the continued agitations of the Nazis in 1933 made necessary more support for Dollfuss from Mussolini and the Heimwehr, the government began to take steps to abolish the Socialist movement completely. At the end of January 1934, orders were issued to the Heimwehr, and they began to occupy union headquarters, Socialist buildings, and the city halls of various provincial cities. On February 10th Fey arrested most of the leaders of the Socialist militia, and the following day made a speech to the Heimwehr in which he said, “Chancellor Dollfuss is our man; tomorrow we shall go to work, and we shall make a thorough job of it.”

Bloodshed had already occurred in the provinces, and, when on February 12th Fey attacked the workers in Vienna in their union centers, their Socialist headquarters, and their apartment houses, full-scale fighting broke out. The government had an overwhelming advantage, using the regular army, as well as the Heimwehr and police, and bringing up field artillery to smash the great apartment houses. By February 15th the fighting was finished, the Socialist party and their labor unions were outlawed, their newspapers declared illegal, hundreds were dead, thousands were in concentration camps and prisons, thousands more were reduced to economic want, the elective government of Vienna was replaced by a “federal commissar,” all the workers’ welfare, sports, and educational movements were wrecked, and the valuable properties of these organizations had been turned over to more favored organizations such as the Heimwehr and the Catholic groups. Soon afterward, rents were raised in the Socialist apartment houses, tenants were forced to pay for facilities which had previously been free (including garbage collection), workers were forced, in one way or another, to join the Fatherland Front, and even the Socialist workers were forced to seek jobs through the employment exchanges of the Catholic unions.

A new constitution was declared, under the emergency economic decree power of 1917, on April 24, 1934. It changed Austria from a “democratic republic” to a “Christian, German, corporative, federal state.” This constitution was both fraudulent and illegal, and Dollfuss’s efforts to make it more legal, if not less fraudulent, had the opposite result. Dollfuss had signed a concordant with the Vatican in June 1933. Since the Holy See wanted this agreement to be approved by Parliament, Dollfuss decided to kill several birds with one stone by convoking a rump of the old Parliament to accept this document, to terminate the disrupted session of March 4, 1933, and to accept the 471 decrees he had issued since that date. Among these decrees was the new constitution of 1934. Since the government insisted that the old constitution had never been suspended or even violated, the new one had to be accepted either by a plebiscite or by a two-thirds vote of the old Parliament with at least half its members present. This was done on April 30, 1934, the various acts being accepted by a fraction of the old Parliament. Because the Socialists were prevented from attending, and the Pan-Germans refused to attend, only 76 out of 165 were present, and some of these voted against the acts proposed.

The new constitution was of no importance because the government continued to rule by decree, and violated it as it pleased. For example, a decree of June 19, 1934, deprived the courts of their constitutional power to rule on the constitutionality of all the government’s acts before July 1, 1934.