The Sixtus Affair

Several political, social, and economic realities impacted the home fronts in the nations engaged in World War I. For Austria-Hungary, perhaps the most substantive political event was the death of Emperor Franz Josef on November 21, 1916, after a reign of almost 68 years. The Emperor was quite old by the time the world broke out. Michael Howard writes, "His successor, the young Emperor Karl, at once established 'back channels' with France to discuss peace terms,"[1] but his summary of Karl's efforts is a true understatement.

By the time Franz Josef died, the Austro-Hungarian military had proved itself essentially worthless, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers but gained nothing in the process. Moreover, the responsibility of the Reichswehr to the Austrians under their treaty obligations had the Germans commented that, in their alliance, they described themselves as an eine Leiche gekettet (shackled to a corpse). Given these conditions, it was only reasonable that Karl would pursue a peace settlement, although perhaps not a separate peace that would not involve Germany.

Early in 1917, Emperor Karl sent letters to the French government via Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, his brother-in-law, to determine whether the French would be agreeable to pursuing a separate peace. The negotiations failed but came to light the following year when French Prime Minister Clemenceau leaked the details to the press. Rather than admit the attempt was true and risk seeming to have betrayed his German allies, Karl instead denied the contacts and prevented any further negotiations with the Triple Entente from occurring.

The Austrian historian Martin Mutschlechner writes, "The Sixtus Affair was a diplomatic débacle of the first order for Austria and deprived the Habsburg Monarchy of the little freedom of movement in foreign affairs it still possessed. Emperor Karl now had no option but to fall in step with Germany’s intensified war effort."[2] The subsequent dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire upon its loss to the Entente demonstrates the extent to which Karl's shift in goals in war contributed to his own eventual downfall.

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     [1] Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford UP, 2007), 1206.

     [2] Martin Mutschlechner, "The Sixtus Affair: A Major Diplomatic Débacle," trans. by Peter John Nicholson, The World of the Habsburgs, Accessed September 4, 2016, http://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/sixtus-affair-major-diplomatic-debacle, para. 8.

Telegraphy and the Armenian Genocide

Of the many inhumane phenomena to arise from the inherent inhumane experience of war, the most inhumane is genocide. At least as understood since the 20th century, genocide is thankfully an infrequent occurrence. The first genocide of the 20th century was that of the Ottoman Armenian population of eastern Anatolia at the hands of the Ottoman Army and irregular forces during World War I. Among the forces that contributed to the emergence of genocide as a consequence of war was the increased technological advances of modern armies. In the case of the Armenian genocide, a pivotal technology that contributed to its unfolding was the wireless telegraph.

World War I was the first major conflict in which all major combatants had access to wireless telegraphy. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, historian Taner Akçam of Clark University (Mass.) has detailed the extent to which telegraphic communications played a role in internal communications regarding the Armenian genocide, as well as in the covering up of these crimes -- both during their commission and once they were over. In particular, Akçam details how a dual system of telegrams was established between Mehmet Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of the Interior during the genocide, and local and regional offices of the government in eastern Anatolia. Official telegraph channels sent communications that, while explicit on the matter of the expulsion from their homes and expropriation of the property of the Armenians, lacked any specific content on murderous actions against these civilians. In contrast, telegraphs sent from Talaat's home were explicit and often contradicted "official" communications.[1] Establishing this dual track of communications emanating from Talaat's offices and home is an inherently difficult undertaking, Akçam concedes, because of pervasive orders for telegrams to be destroyed after reading. In searching Ottoman archives, Akçam himself was only able to identify three such telegrams that escaped this fate.[2]

Nevertheless, primary sources that survived the war indicate that the "sanitized" language of many surviving telegrams had more insidious intent. For instance, the series of telegrams known as the "Andonian telegrams," which date from March 1915 to January 1916, are often explicit in exhorting action, but none of the documents is clear that the physical extermination of Armenian civilians regardless of sex and age is the actual policy. Examining the telegrams illustrates this issue. As an example, the telegram of March 25 states is quite explicit in calling for violence, calling for "wiping out of existence the well-known elements who for centuries have been the barrier to the empire's progress in civilization,"[3] using the terms "uproot and annihilate"[4] and "very bloody methods."[5] However, nowhere in the document are Armenians mentioned specifically, and the telegram can easily be interpreted as indicating that only guerrillas or terrorists are to be executed.

Similarly, the telegram of September 3, even as it refers to the inclusion of women and children "in the orders which have been previously prescribed as to be applied to the males of the intended persons,”[6] is sanitized to the extent that the orders are not specified and could easily refer only to expulsion and not mass murder. The telegram of September 16, perhaps the most explicit of all in referring to a government order to "to destroy completely all the indicated persons [Armenians] living in Turkey," is nevertheless vague on the identity of the indicated persons and could easily refer, again, to guerrillas and terrorists.[7] Even those telegrams that refer to dead bodies seen on roads or by American observers could be depicted to be the unfortunate "collateral damage" inflicted in anti-insurgency actions against Armenian separatists.

However, another primary source unearthed in 1993 by the sociologist and historian Vahakn Dadrian, director of the Zoryan Institute (Mass.), makes clear the true intent of the murkier Andonian telegrams. This document, referred to as the "Ten Commandments" by the British officials who found it in 1919,[8] is explicit where the telegrams are not. For example, the third "commandment" directs local officials to "provoke organised [sic] massacres" in the Armenian areas, to be committed by the Muslim populations, with the fourth commandment advising the use of faked intervention by the gendarmerie in some areas but to collaborate actively with the massacres in others.[9] Most explicit of all are the fifth commandment -- "Apply measures to exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be Islamized" and the eighth commandment -- "Kill off in an appropriate manner all Armenians in the Army -- this to be left to the military to do."[10] Importantly, Dadrian is careful to consider the provenance and authenticity of the document,[11] before using it to support his theory of premeditation with regard to the genocide at large.

In conclusion, wireless telegraphy contributed enormously to the ability of the Ottomans to exterminate the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia. In addition, it allowed for the establishment of a dual system of communications: one sanitized for general consumption and one far more explicit in its exhortations to mass murder. Although the factors that contributed to the Armenian genocide existed independent of the modern technologies introduced in World War I, it is likely that the rapidity and ultimately the success of the genocide would have been less had wireless telegraphy not been available to Talaat Pasha and the Ottoman leadership.

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[1] Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2012), 383.

[2] Ibid, 292.

[3] Mehmet Talaat Pasha, "Talaat Pasha's Alleged Official Orders Regarding the Armenian Massacres, March 1915-January 1916," firstworldwar.com, accessed August 9, 2016, http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/armenia_talaatorders.htm, para. 1.

[4] Ibid, para. 2.

[5] Ibid, para. 3.

[6] Ibid, para. 1.

[7] Ibid, para. 1, the bracketed word has been interpolated by the translator.

[8] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 173.

[9] Ibid, 174.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid, 178-80.

Hasty Mobilization in World War I

For Germany, a hard-learned lesson of the first year of the war was that how it interpreted the act of military mobilization was not the same as other nations' interpretations. As a result of this assumption, Germany declared war on Russia although it is not clear that Russia undertook mobilization for reasons other than preparedness in the event that a negotiated settlement to the Austrian-Serbian conflict failed. Because of Germany's declaration against Russia, the conflict truly became continent wide, with Germany's first move the violation of Belgium's neutrality and the U.K.'s entry into the war -- an action it undertook because it believed that it had to eliminate the threat of France to successfully counter Russia.

Michael Howard writes in his book on the war, "On 30 July Czar Nicholas II, with extreme hesitation, ordered the mobilization of all Russian armed forces. It was generally assumed that mobilization led inevitably to Aufmarsch, the deployment of armies for the invasion of their neighbors, and that such deployment led with equal inevitability to war."[1] On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia when the latter refused to submit to all of the demands made on it in the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Immediately, Russia undertook steps to mobilized its armed forces, seeking to protect its own interests, as well as its Orthodox Christian ally.

Canadian historian Gordon Martel has written extensively on the topic of the initial mobilization, and he emphasizes the deliberations that occurred between July 28 and the declaration of war by Germany against Russia on August 1. For instance, Martel writes that, on July 29, "A message announcing a general mobilization in Russia had been drafted and ready to be sent out [sic] by 9 p.m. Then, just minutes before it was to be sent out, a personal messenger from the Tsar arrived, instructing that it the general mobilization be cancelled and a partial one re-instituted. The Tsar wanted to hear how the Kaiser would respond to his latest telegram before proceeding"[2]

Over the next two days, Tsar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm volleyed back and forth over whether mobilization would mean war. The day of the war declaration, Martel notes, "Nicholas said he understood that, under the circumstances, Germany was obliged to mobilize, but he asked Wilhelm to give him the same guarantee that he had given Wilhelm: ‘that these measures DO NOT mean war’ and that they would continue to negotiate ‘for the benefit of our countries and universal peace dear to our hearts'." [3] Despite this assurance from the Tsar, who truly did not want war against Germany, Germany declared war the same day.

Although Martel's depiction of the negotiations is intricate, it is important to bear in mind that they occurred over only three days and not in person. A 12-hour ultimatum issued by Germany to Russia was an overly hasty act, motivated by worry among the Germans about the French-Russian alliance and concern that a two-front war would be impossible to fight. Thus, in the mistaken belief that France could be easily knocked out of the war, particularly if the U.K. hesitated to intervene, Germany forced the hand of Russia and mobilized against Belgium, forcing the U.K.'s hand as well. The length of Germany's campaign in the west was far longer than expected, and Germany ended up getting the two-front war it sought to avoid.

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     [1] Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford UP, 2007), 626.
     [2] Gordon Martel, "The month that changed the world: Wednesday, 29 July 1914," OUPblog, accessed September 1, 2016, http://blog.oup.com/2014/07/29-july-1914-russian-mobilization-first-world-war/#sthash.JHq57BWe.dpuf
     [3] Gordon Martel, "The month that changed the world: Saturday, 1 August 1914," OUPblog, accessed September 1, 2016, http://blog.oup.com/2014/08/1-august-1914-germany-declares-war-on-russia/#sthash.pZxmFsiY.dpuf

Ottoman Entry Into WWI

I've begun my next course, this one on World War I. Only five discussion posts in this class, but a longer research agenda is coming soon.

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Of the countries participating in World War I, perhaps no country was undergoing quite as extensive a shift in national identity at the time as the Ottoman Empire. For hundreds of years a multi-national, multi-religious (although Muslim majority) empire run by a Turkish elite, a series of wars beginning in the early 18th century had taken their toll on the empire's territorial integrity. These losses were most precipitous in North Africa and the Balkans, so that by 1912, the empire's European holdings consisted only of parts of Albania, Bulgaria, and Serbia and the Greek areas of Thrace, Macedonia, and Epirus -- and these territories were all lost by 1913. As a result of this contraction in territory, the Young Turks, in theory a modernizing party with ecumenical interests that had seized power in a 1908 revolution, turned to Turkish nationalism as a way of galvanizing the population around the national idea as a way of preventing further losses.[1] From the standpoint of Clausewitz's "trinity" of government -- government, military, and popular "passions"[2] -- the Young Turks'  nationalist campaign can be understood as a linchpin in the Ottomans' decision to enter World War I and the side it chose.

Regarding government, the Young Turks as the ruling party saw its primary goal as the prevention of further territorial loss from the empire. However, it was not only wars that threatened the empire. The population of Anatolia -- now viewed by the Young Turks as the launching ground for a larger pan-Turanian movement -- was ethnically and religiously divided, particularly in the eastern provinces. There, in addition to Arabs and Kurds, who were Muslims, there were large populations of Christians, mostly Armenian, who were a focus of resentment exploited by the Young Turks to unify ethnic Turks.  Subjected to periodic massacres by previous governments, most recently in 1909, the Armenians sought international protection, which came in the form of a quasi-protectorate created in the six provinces in which Armenians constituted a majority, the security of which was guaranteed by Russia and France, the latter of whom held a large proportion of the empire's debt.[3] While theoretically intolerable to nationalists like the Young Turks, the leadership had no option but to accept the "solution" imposed in February 1914 but knew a war would free its hand to alter the demographic situation through radical social engineering. This desire dictated, to no small extent, the Ottomans'  decision to side with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the war.[4]

However, military concerns were also important. Here, in addition to the aforementioned unwelcome influence of Russia in the eastern provinces, there was already Russian expansion into the Caucasus, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, and eastern Armenia, that threatened the eastern border directly. In addition, given the Orthodox  and Slavic causes that led Russia to enter the war on Serbia's side, Russian intervention in the Balkans could directly threaten the imperial capital of Constantinople, which was still the most important city in Orthodox Christianity despite annexation by the Ottomans in the 15th century. This interest on Russia's part was not merely religious; control of Constantinople meant control of the Dardanelles and, by extension, control over the entire Black Sea. Thus, Russia and the Ottomans both had economic motives underlying the military incentives that they saw as essential to their war goals. Thus, by allying with Russia's enemies, the Ottomans hoped to maintain control of its remaining territory and perhaps extend its influence in the Caucasus.[5]

The most complicated piece of Clausewitz's formulation is the "passion"  component. By 1914, the Ottoman population was extraordinarily war-weary. To this extent, therefore, the Ottoman people were certainly not clamoring for war when it broke out.  As a result, it was necessary for the Ottoman leadership to deploy two strategies to motivate the population. First, it was necessary, with German prodding, for the caliphate to declare that the war against the Entente was a jihad, and thus a religious obligation for all Muslims. Although this call motivated some, the response to this call was generally anemic; it also decidedly lacked an effect on non-Muslim populations in the empire, who were still fairly numerous.[6] Therefore, the second strategy of identifying internal enemies -- particularly in the form of the Armenians to also extended to non-Turks generally at certain points -- as fifth columns participating in the empire's collapse. This was an effective strategy in so far as these populations also existed on the other side of the empire's borders with Russia and Persia. Of course, it also resulted in murderous violence against the Armenian population, who, in keeping with the political motivations for war, were expelled en masse from their homes toward the Syrian desert and subjected to massacres along the way.

In conclusion, while political and military considerations are easy to identify for the Ottoman Empire in its choices at the beginning of World War I, the issue of popular enthusiasm was decidedly lacking. Unlike other participants in the war, rather than a primary goal of expanding its territory, the empire sought to prevent even further losses and to reverse what it considered to be foreign encroachment on its sovereignty. However, like the other participants, nationalism was a key component in the attempts to prevent such losses. The extent to which this nationalism was embraced by the population varied over time, although it eventually became the national ideology of the modern Turkish republic. Nevertheless, it did not save the empire from complete disintegration.

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     [1] Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 4.
     [2] Michael Howard, The First World War: A Very Short Introduction (New York, Oxford UP, 2007), 1.
     [3] Notably, entering the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary afforded the Ottoman Empire the opportunity to renege on repaying this debt.
     [4] Eugene L. Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), chapter 3, page 5, EPUB.
     [5] Ibid, chapter 2, page 5.
     [6] Ibid, chapter 5, page 42.

Austrian Coup of 1934

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.

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[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.

The Dissolution of Yugoslavia

In 1989, Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. Today, the process of Yugoslavia's breakup is still not complete. Although all six former constituent republics are now independent sovereign states, it was not without serious conflict that Yugoslavia was broken up. In addition, a seventh republic, Kosovo, has been carved out of Serbia, but its future remains uncertain. Despite the tragic process of Yugoslavia's disintegration, however, some positive aspects of this process have emerged.

Like World War I, at the core of Yugoslavia's breakup was Serbian nationalism, which had been on the rise throughout the 1980s following the death of Yugoslavia's longtime communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, who had been effective at maintaining Yugoslavia's cohesion and stifling nationalist tendencies. Following Tito's death, some Serbs increasingly began to feel that their supremacy within the federation, which had been a fact throughout Yugoslavia's existence, was being lost. Other ethnicities embraced nationalism in response. Complicating the problem was the fact that no single republic of Yugoslavia was ethnically homogeneous; rather, each republic had a mix of ethnicities, with one in sometimes only a slim majority. Serbs, in particular, existed in communities in all six republics, particularly Croatia and Bosnia. Frequent political crises and sporadic outbreaks of ethnic violence became commonplace.

The dismantling of the Soviet system and communism in Eastern Europe in general expedited Yugoslavia's dissolution. Free elections in most republics brought independence-minded parties to the fore. The first republic to break away was Slovenia, in early 1991, followed swiftly by Croatia. With Croatia's declaration of independence, Yugoslavia's army attacked. However, it was in Bosnia that the bloodiest battles were fought -- indeed, some of the bloodiest incidents in Europe since the end of World War II. When the dust settled in 1995, Bosnia was independent but itself had become a federation of a Bosnian state and a Serbian state within Bosnia, the Republika Srpska.

More complicated and extended has been the attempts of the Albanian province of Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia and later the independent state of Serbia. First with an uprising in the 1990s that occasioned NATO intervention and UN administration and since 2008 with a declaration of independence, Kosovo has sought to separate itself from Serbia. However, unlike the constituent Yugoslav republics, Kosovo has not received universal recognition and has not been admitted to the UN, although some progress has been made toward normalizing relations with Serbia.

Sadly, ethnic tensions remain fairly high in these now six or seven independent states. However, one positive development is that the world community sought to punish war criminals who committed acts of genocide during the breakup of Yugoslavia, convening the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1993. The ICTY continues to prosecute war criminals and has successfully prosecuted several, including the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the ICTY, the world community kept its promise in the UN Convention on Genocide to punish these crimes, which is one of the only positive results of a sad period of chaos in the Balkans.

Immigration to Europe

Immigration has played and continues to play an enormous role in European history since the end of World War II. In response to several factors, including decolonization of Africa and Africa, decimated populations as a result of the war and subsequent zero (or even negative) population growth, and later the Schengen Agreement all contributed to the changing demographic nature of native- and foreign-born Europeans. Examining the situations of immigration in several European countries can elucidate our understanding of the impacts of immigration on post-war Europe.

In the United Kingdom, decolonization of Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia resulted in an influx of immigrants from these countries, with a large uptick in the rates of immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, the policy toward immigrants in the U.K. of social integration has been successful. Second and third generations of British citizens of African and South Asian descent have arisen in the U.K., with such varied outcomes as the first Muslim mayor of London elected earlier this year, a proliferation of curry restaurants in the major metropolitan centers, people of Asian and African descent holding peerages, and so on. At the same time, politically there has been some reaction. The rise of the National Front and later the National Party in the U.K. was largely a reaction to non-white immigration. In addition, the U.K. population's electoral decision to leave the European Union was significantly motivated by a desire to stem immigration, including from elsewhere in Europe under the Schengen Agreement. Clearly, the U.K. continues to navigate the experience of immigration, but its overall experience seems to have been a net positive.

In France, immigrants came during the same period from North and West Africa and Southeast Asia. Here, the predominant policy practiced by French governments vis-à-vis immigrants has been one of multiculturalism, i.e., to encourage immigrants to maintain their customs to as great an extent as possible, while simultaneously becoming French citizens. As in the U.K., the rise of mass politics on the far right in the form of the Front National is one result of this increased immigration. However, it is clear that the overall experience of France with immigrants -- and equally important, of immigrants with France -- has been more problematic than that of the U.K. Multiple generations of people of African and Asian descent live in the banlieux of Paris, where they are subject to occupation-style policing and discrimination when they attempt to venture outside. At the same time, in opposition to France's centuries-long tradition of laïcité, both the discrimination and the government's encouragement of multiculturalism have contributed to increasing demands by communities of African and Asian descent to have their religious beliefs accommodated, which in turn has fueled ethnic and racial tensions even more. The spate of recent terrorist attacks in France, while not directly correlated to France's troubled experience with immigration, are nevertheless related.

Germany experienced a much larger population decline as a result of the war, not to mention partition, and its fast-growing economy during the 1960s and 1970s necessitated the influx of immigrants. In this particular case, the majority of the workers came from Turkey and were originally as guest workers, rather than as immigrants. When the economic need for these workers persisted, guest workers ultimately brought their families and became immigrants. A third generation of Germans of Turkish descent has now been born. Germany has largely chosen the strategy of the U.K. in seeking to integrate these immigrants, rather than encouraging multiculturalism. A newer, greater challenge is now being faced in Germany as the result of accepting more than a million refugees over the course of the past year, with the ultimate settlement status of these refugees undetermined. There have been the expected political reactions from the right, although laws in Germany generally keep the public discourse more civil than elsewhere. That said, much remains to be decided in Germany, and just in the past week, terrorist attacks have occurred there as well, although it is still unclear at this point the extent to which immigration and/or religion has played a role.

Ultimately, Europe to some extent is experiencing a struggle between, on the one hand, a commitment to human rights and acknowledging that there is a certain strength in diversity and, on the other hand, the long-term effects on the continent's demography of the immigration of non-Europeans with different cultures and beliefs. I do not personally see this as a crisis like some commenters do so much as a challenge. It took Europe hundreds of years to develop a political culture that was not only adopted in the United States but that has also become the model for much of the world. The ideologies of some immigrants might stand in diametrical opposition to this European ideal. The solution will be to encourage absorption policies that successfully integrate the immigrants into their new homes, rather than subject them to further alienation.