Conventional wisdom has tended to see
the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 as
inevitable, given the strong historical, cultural, and political ties between
Germany and Austria. Indeed, the Anschluss was welcomed by many Austrians, who
had desired union with Germany since the end of World War I and who shared the
Nazis' pan-German, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic beliefs. However, less than
four years earlier, on July 25, 1934, an attempted National Socialist coup
against the government of Austria was an abysmal failure. Why the so-called
July Putsch failed can be understood as the result of Nazi Germany's inability
to appreciate the complexities of Austria's authoritarian right wing and its
resistance to key aspects of the Nazi Weltanschauung (world view).
Examining the coup in its three stages demonstrates some of these complexities.
Background
to the Coup
Almost from the moment that Hitler
became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, he indicated the desire to
annex Austria.[1]
However, several factors worked against this desire. Perhaps most importantly,
Austria and Germany had been forbidden to unite politically under the terms of
the Treaty of Versailles. In addition, loans extended to Austria from the
League of Nations, which had been instrumental in keeping the country economically
viable during the 1920s, had similarly stipulated that Anschluss would continue
to be forbidden. Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss had reiterated the agreement not
to unite with Germany under the terms of a second loan from the League, which
he managed to push through the Austrian legislature by two votes in the summer
of 1933.[2]
Nevertheless, not all of the forces were
against Anschluss. Most importantly, as noted, a significant proportion of the
Austrian population desired annexation by Germany and had since the end of
World War I. On October 1, 1921, the National Assembly had voted for Anschluss,
only to be rebuked by the League of Nations. Moreover, of the three major
political parties in Austria at the time, two of them -- the left-wing
Social-democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and the right-wing German-nationalist
Greater German People’s Party -- viewed union favorably, albeit the former with
certain stipulations. In addition, the small but growing National Socialist
German Workers Party (NSDAP) was pro-Anschluss. Only the right-wing Christian
Social Party of Chancellor Dollfuss opposed annexation by Germany.[3]
For the first three months of Hitler’s
term in office, however, the matter did not reach a crucial level. The NSDAP in
Austria had logged significant gains in regional elections in 1932, and the
belief grew among the party in both Germany and Austria that power could be
gained by the NSDAP in Austria through electoral means, in much the same manner
as it had in Germany. Dollfuss, for a variety of reasons, wanted desperately to
prevent such a turn of events. Therefore, when a constitutional opportunity to
dissolve the legislature arose in May 1933, Dollfuss exploited it and, on May
4, expressed his intention to rule by decree. Over the course of the following
year, Dollfuss would fashion an authoritarian state based largely on the model
supplied by Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy.[4]
Hitler’s reaction to Dollfuss’s decision
to suspend the legislature was to adopt a three-pronged attack on Austria,
combining economic sanctions (principally a thousand-mark fee imposed on travel
to Austria, which crippled Austria’s major tourism industry), broad use of
pro-Nazi, anti-Dollfuss propaganda by radio, and terrorism committed by members
of the NSDAP in Austria.[5]
The country had already been facing political violence for years: Helmut Konrad
of the University of Graz (Austria) has estimated that a political murder
occurred in interwar Austria every two weeks.[6]
With the Nazi terror campaign, the problem compounded significantly. Fearing
for his country, Dollfuss banned the NSDAP in Austria and undertook a
diplomatic campaign to support Austrian independence, finding that his most
vehement supporter was Mussolini, who feared Nazi irredentist claims on the
South Tyrol, the formerly Austrian territory that had been awarded to Italy at
the Paris Peace Conference.[7]
Mussolini, for his own part, assured
Dollfuss at a meeting in Riccione, Italy, on August 19, 1933, that Italy would
intervene on Austria’s behalf. In return, Mussolini asked that Dollfuss
eliminate the political left in Austria. This opportunity presented itself on
February 12 of the following year, when the SPÖ militia, the Republikaner
Schutzbund, launched an armed uprising against Dollfuss’s rule. The uprising
was brutally crushed, and the SPÖ was subsequently banned, leaving Dollfuss
free to combat the NSDAP and consolidate his own authoritarian rule. A formal
alliance with Italy and Hungary was entered in March. Hitler and Mussolini
discussed the situation in Austria at their first meeting on June 14 but came
to no agreements. Hitler admired Mussolini and wanted to avoid conflict with
him. Plus, the German military was still weak.[8]
Consequently, Hitler opted to allow for
an NSDAP coup in Austria. The coup leaders, seeing Dollfuss as weak and
unpopular and believing strongly in growing support for their movement in the
Austrian populace at large, elected to decapitate the government in Vienna and
replace Dollfuss with one of their own. Any resistance, they imagined, would be
easily crushed by armed Sturmabteilung (SA) units throughout the
country, which had been arming despite being forced underground. Mussolini
would accept the NSDAP coup once it was too late to roll it back, they
believed.
Assault
on the Chancellery
We know the intentions of the July
Putsch in part because of the so-called Kollerschlag Document, which was found
on an Austrian SA member attempting to cross the border back into Germany after
the coup attempt failed. Although it was coded, the SA member was carrying the
key as well, which was also found during the search. Although tactics on the
first stage of the putsch are lacking, the strategy is clear: Dollfuss was to
be deposed as Chancellor and the "period of inertia" that followed
his resignation would be used for the SA to seize power.[9]
Ultimately, the tactic chosen to force
Dollfuss's resignation was an armed attack on the Chancellery in Vienna. This
attack was carried out by a special unit of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the
SS-Standarte 89, which itself had been an Austrian SA unit until a couple of
months earlier.[10]
The coup leaders had believed that, in striking in the particular time and date
chosen, they would seize not only the chancellor but also his entire cabinet,
which was scheduled to meet at the time. In addition, it was known that the
vice chancellor, Ernst Starhemberg, who was also a prominent figure in the Heimwehr
independent right-wing militia, was in Italy on a state visit, so he would not
be able to take over the government in his absence.[11]
While we will never know whether the
coup against Dollfuss as planned would have been successful without the
chancellor being killed, events did not unfold as intended. A large proportion
of the responsibility for this failure in planning falls to Johann Dobler, a
Vienna police inspector and member of the Austrian NSDAP, who developed pangs
of conscience on the morning of July 25 and reached out to Emil Fey, the
previous vice chancellor under Dollfuss and a current minister without
portfolio, as well as a prominent Heimwehr leader. Although Dobler was not able
to reach Fey, he met with Karl Wrabel, an aide to Fey, at a Vienna café later
that morning and alerted him to the coup to take place that day. Wrabel subsequently
made contact with Fey, who warned Dollfuss, who in turn dismissed the cabinet
and tried to mobilize police to beat back the coming attack.[12]
When the assault team arrived at the
Chancellery between noon and one in the afternoon, Dollfuss was shot twice
almost immediately at close range and bled to death over the course of the next
two hours. Angry at having been foiled in seizing the whole cabinet and
specifically mad at Dollfuss, who refused to resign, the SS men with him
refused to call a priest to administer the late rites of the church. As these
events unfolded, elsewhere in the city, the President of the Republic, Wilhelm
Miklas, named as chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, then serving as Foreign Minister,
because Starhemberg was not in the country. At the same time, Fey mobilized the
Heimwehr and police against the coup leaders, who surrendered before seven that
evening.[13]
Dollfuss's assassination
notwithstanding, the first stage of the coup -- the attempt to decapitate the
government -- failed. Understanding why it failed offers some insight into how
the Nazis had misjudged the nature of Austria's authoritarian right wing. Julie
Thorpe of the University of Western Sydney (Australia) has offered a sort of
taxonomy of the authoritarian right in interwar Austria. Opposing the traditional
Lager (camp) theory of interwar Austrian politics, Thorpe instead
characterizes the Dollfuss movement as explicitly fascist and pan-German, with
the latter ideology distinguished among the Christian Socials as a Danubian
pan-German imperialism based in Vienna, rather than a strictly völkisch
(i.e., ethnic) pan-Germanism based in Berlin. Thorpe writes, "Austrian
proponents of a pan-German identity claimed that the Austrian state was the
fullest expression of German hegemony over non-German nationalities and of a German
historical mission in Central Europe."[14]
Consequently, while the Nazis might have seen the Christian Social electorate
as sympathetic on the basis of its fascist authoritarianism and pan-Germanism,
they misjudged the specifically Austrian-Viennese nature of this ideology.
Moreover, the loyalty of the Heimwehr,
to whom Dobler as informant reached out, was emblematic of this erroneous
assessment of the Nazis. Bruce Pauley of the University of Central Florida, in
elucidating the history of Austrian National Socialism, has also treated the
history of the Heimwehr at some length. In May 1930, the Heimwehr had publicly
sworn the so-called Korneuburg Oath, which included explicitly fascist and
pan-German expressions of ideology.[15]
The following year, the Austrian Nazis and the Heimwehr organization in the
federal state of Styria formed a Kampfgemeinschaft (fighting alliance).[16] Here, the
Nazis seem to have misjudged the Heimwehr as a whole on the basis of the
actions of its Styrian wing. Nazi ideology in Austria was always more popular
in regions of Austria bordering non-German nations, including Styria,
Burgenland, Carinthia, and parts of Tyrol. Believing that the sympathies of the
Styrian Heimwehr existed in the Heimwehr in, e.g., Vienna or Salzburg was a fatal
miscalculation.
Finally, there was a miscalculation on
the Nazis' part with regard to their own organizations. As noted above, while
the SA was the primary armed organization executing the coup nationwide, it was
a former SA unit now subordinated to the SS that began the assault in Vienna.
Importantly, less than one month before the July Putsch, the SA had been
violently purged in Germany on the famous "Night of the Long Knives"
of June 30, 1934. Anger about the purge spread to the SA in Austria, and as noted
by prominent German historian Peter Longerich, "Although the Austrian SA
had promised the plotters its support in principle, the Viennese SA failed to
come to the assistance of their unpopular SS comrades."[17]
The
Uprising in the Provinces
We know that the coup leaders in Vienna
attempted and failed to seize a radio station in Vienna on July 25, from which
they would have broadcast Dollfuss's removal from office as a signal for SA
units throughout Austria to seize power on a local basis. On this point, the Kollerschlag
document states, "On news of Dollfuss' resignation, the entire SA will
immediately and without further instructions undertake 'unarmed propaganda
marches' … for the purpose immediately occupying public offices and buildings
in the provincial capitals and local administrative centres [sic] and of
seizing power."[18]
Elsewhere, it is stipulated, "Armed confrontation with the police or
gendarmerie is preferably to be avoided for as long as possible. Where it
proves necessary, however, it is to be carried out with the utmost vigour [sic]
and maximum forces. Clashes with the Federal Army are to be avoided if at all
possible."[19]
This stage of the coup failed as well.
Part of this failure can be attributed to Nazi misjudgment of the sympathies of
the Heimwehr, which was mobilized with the Austrian army nationwide against the
Nazis. However, the reasons for the failure of the coup in the provinces ran
deeper. Writing to the German foreign ministry on July 31, just one day after
the coup was put down finally, Hans Steinacher, head of Volksbund für das
Deutschtum im Ausland, a Berlin-based government organization dedicated to
engendering German unity outside of Germany's borders, laid out the reasons for
the coup's failure. After indicating the mistakes of staging the coup while the
vice chancellor was out of the country and of not preparing an option to abort
the plan, Steinacher remarks, "The 'masses' are lacking. We are unable to
prove that they exist and, at the moment when the matter was becoming really
dangerous Italy intervened."[20]
Clearly, there was no popular support for the Nazi coup beyond the Nazi party
itself.
Here, the assassination of the
chancellor itself seems have been a key mobilizing factor. As noted above,
Dollfuss had been refused a priest for last rites by the SS. According to
Philip Scheriau, in his Master's thesis written at the University of Vienna,
this information was transmitted to the deeply Catholic Austrian population via
newspapers both domestically and internationally before the coup attempt was
even completed. The core of Scheriau's thesis states that "Dollfuss is
represented in the [newspaper] coverage as a martyr in two primary ways. On the
one hand, he is a hero who fell in the fight for his country, and on the other
hand, he is represented as a hero and martyr in the Christian tradition."[21]
Beyond this, Dollfuss had enjoyed the
support of the Austrian Catholic Church for his authoritarian policies. Not
only was one of Dollfuss's most popular predecessors as chancellor, Ignaz
Seipel, a Catholic priest, but Seipel had actually contributed to the creation
of the Heimwehr that defended the Austrian state against the Nazis. Moreover,
Dollfuss's funeral mass, held on July 28, before the coup was over, was said by
the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, and was attended by half a
million faithful. Those Austrians not already put off by the Nazis'
anti-clericalism were surely disgusted by the reports of how Dollfuss had died,
and if their sense of being Austrian was not offended, their Catholicism was.
Italian
Intervention
As indicated in Steinacher's letter to
the German foreign ministry, the final reason the July Putsch failed was the
threat of Italian intervention. Misjudgment of how Mussolini would react to
the coup attempt was the final miscalculation of the Nazis in June 1934. Not
only was Vice Chancellor Starhemberg in Italy at the time of the putsch, but likely
unbeknownst to the coup leaders at the time, so were Dollfuss's wife and
children. Mussolini's reaction to the putsch was deeply personal, and he
mobilized Italian army troops to the Brenner Pass and Italy's border with
Carinthia, in a clear threat of intervention if the Nazis did not stand down.[22] It was
largely on the basis of this threat that Hitler withdrew support for the coup,
and it collapsed.
However, it also seems that there was a
miscalculation by the Nazis of the Austrian position on Italy as well. There
was a not insignificant number of right-wing Austrians who resented Italy's
annexation of South Tyrol at the end of World War I. Hitler, for his own part,
had recognized Italy's claims to the territory as a way of appeasing Mussolini,
for whom he had great respect. In June 1934, Hitler and Mussolini had met for
the first time in person in Venice, and at this meeting, Mussolini had made
clear his support for Dollfuss and for Austria's independence from Germany.
That the coup went forward six weeks later would seem to be a grave error on
Hitler's part.
The irredentist positions of the
Austrian far right undoubtedly played a role in this error. Given the
resentment about South Tyrol both in the Nazi Party and in the Heimwehr, it
could have been believed that a Nazi seizure of power in Austria would create
sufficient momentum for the reclamation of South Tyrol, or at least provide
enough of a show of force at the Italian border that Mussolini would think
twice before intervening. Here, the Nazis seem to have misjudged Dollfuss,
himself initially an irredentist on South Tyrol, and his own willingness to
compromise on the matter in exchange for Mussolini's support. As Gottfried-Karl
Kindermann of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
notes, this guarantee of independence was stipulated in a secret attachment to
the Rome Protocol of 1934, signed among Italy, Austria, and Hungary as a hedge
against German aspirations of continental hegemony.[23] In
essence, Dollfuss had conceded South Tyrol in exchange for Italian military
protection. While this concession did not save his life, it did save Austria --
at least for the time being.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the complexity of the authoritarian
right wing in Austria and the extent to which its ideals were different from
those of Nazi Germany explains why the Nazis failed to seize control in Austria
in July 1934. At the core of Dollfuss’s authoritarian lay Austrian nationalism
that was deeply Catholic, and the loyalty of the people and state institutions
to this ideology was fatally misjudged. It would require another four years and
a vastly changed international landscape before Anschluss could be carried out
successfully. The reasons why the Anschluss of 1938 succeeded, however, are
beyond the scope of this paper.
[1] Ian Kershaw, Hitler,
1889-1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 2000), 522-23.
[2] Gottfried-Karl
Kindermann, Hitler’s Defeat in Austria, 1933-1934, trans. Sonia Brough
and David Taylor (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 32-33.
[3] Steve Beller, A
Concise History of Austria (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007), 209-10.
[4] Kindermann, ibid,
78-79.
[5] Ibid, 33-35.
[6] Helmut Konrad, “The
Significance of February 1934 in Austria, in Both National and International
Context,” in Routes Into the Abyss: Coping With Crises in the 1930s, ed.
Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 22.
[7] Kindermann,
ibid, 39.
[8] Ibid, 95,
[9] “The
‘Kollerschlag Document,’” in Hitler’s Defeat in Austria, 1933-34, ed.
Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, trans. Sonia Brough and David Taylor (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 196.
[10] Peter
Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (New
York: Oxford UP, 2012), 177.
[11] “The
‘Kollerschlag Document,’” ibid, 196-98.
[12] Kindermann,
ibid, 101-02.
[13] Ibid, 102-03.
[14] Julie Thorpe,
"Revisiting the 'Authoritarian State' 40 Years on," Journal of
Contemporary History 45, no. 2 (April 2010): 319.
[15] Bruce F.
Pauley, Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis: A History of Austrian National
Socialism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1981),
74.
[16] Ibid, 76.
[17] Longerich,
ibid, 178.
[18] “The
‘Kollerschlag Document,’” ibid, 196.
[19] Ibid, 197.
[20] Hans
Steinacher, Head of the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland to the Foreign
Ministry, 31 July 1934, in Hitler's Defeat in Austria, 1933-1934, ed.
Gottfried-Karl Kindermann, trans. by Sonia Brough and David Taylor (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), 205-06.
[21] Philip
Scheriau, "Mediale Reaktionen auf den Juliputsch 1934 in In- und
Ausland" (Masterarbeit, University of Vienna, 2014), 71, translation mine.
[22] Kindermann,
ibid, 116.
[23] Ibid, 43.
