The Austrian Civil War

On the morning of 12 February 1934 the police arrived to search the Hotel Schiff, the Social Democrats’ headquarters in Linz, for weapons. Members of the Republican Defence League (Republikanischer Schutzbund), the armed wing of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, opened fire under their local commander, Richard Bernaschek. Within hours the fighting had spread to the working-class districts of Vienna and the industrial towns of Upper Austria and Styria. Against some ten to twenty thousand poorly led insurgents stood the police, the gendarmerie, the army and the armed units of the Heimwehr, which backed the government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. The Bundesheer, the Austrian army, shelled Vienna’s municipal housing estates. By 15 February it was all over. Historians debate whether these four days deserve to be called a civil war, or rather the February Uprising, as some Austrian literature has it. Their outcome, however, is not in doubt: the country’s largest party was outlawed, and Austria became an open dictatorship which four years later faced Hitler alone, without the support of its own workers.

A country of two armed camps

The republic was founded in 1918 from the German-speaking remnants of the Habsburg monarchy. Union with Germany, which the Constituent Assembly had demanded in 1919, was forbidden by the Treaty of Saint-Germain, so Austria remained a small state with a large capital, divided into two hostile camps. The Social Democrats, led by the theorist of Austro-Marxism Otto Bauer, governed “Red Vienna”. There Mayor Karl Seitz built tens of thousands of municipal flats, financed by taxes on the well-off. The largest of these buildings, the Karl-Marx-Hof in the Döbling district, was more than a kilometre long. The Catholic provinces were dominated by the Christian Socials, whose allies were the armed formations of the Heimwehr, which over time modelled themselves ever more openly on Italian Fascism. Both sides had their own forces. The Republican Defence League, founded in 1923, numbered several tens of thousands of men at its height and kept hidden arms depots.

The first great confrontation came in July 1927. After the acquittal of right-wing paramilitaries who had shot dead a war invalid and a child in Schattendorf, a crowd in Vienna set fire to the Palace of Justice. The police fired on the demonstrators and 89 people were killed. From then on the Heimwehr grew while the Social Democrats were on the defensive. The Great Depression, which reached Austria after the Wall Street Crash, did the rest: in 1933 roughly a third of those able to work were unemployed.

Dictatorship step by step

In May 1932 Engelbert Dollfuss, a Christian Social from agricultural Lower Austria, became Chancellor at the head of a coalition with a majority of one vote in parliament. On 4 March 1933, during a dispute over a single vote on a railway strike, all three presidents of the National Council resigned, among them the Social Democrat Karl Renner. Dollfuss declared that parliament had “eliminated itself” and began to govern by decree under the War Economy Enabling Act of 1917. On 15 March the police prevented deputies from entering the chamber. The example came from Berlin, where a few weeks earlier Hitler had become Chancellor, but Dollfuss was an enemy of the Nazis; his model and protector was Benito Mussolini.

On 31 March 1933 the government dissolved the Republican Defence League; in May it banned the Communists and on 19 June, after a series of bomb attacks, the Nazi NSDAP as well. In May the Fatherland Front was founded to replace the parties. In September Dollfuss announced the building of a “social, Christian, German State of Austria on a corporative basis and under strong authoritarian leadership”. In November summary courts and the death penalty were reintroduced. Mussolini, whom the Chancellor met many times, pressed ever more insistently for a showdown with the Socialists. As late as January 1934 his envoy, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Fulvio Suvich, was urging it.

The Social Democrats were helpless. Their Linz Programme of 1926 had threatened the bourgeoisie with a “dictatorship” of the working class should it try to overthrow democracy, but in practice the party retreated before every step the government took. The leadership declared that it would take up arms only if the government outlawed the party, dissolved the trade unions or took Vienna away from it. Negotiations in which Renner, as late as the autumn of 1933, proposed accepting a corporative order in return for the restoration of parliament came to nothing. From January 1934 the police searched party buildings and arrested Schutzbund leaders. On 11 February the Vice-Chancellor and leader of the Vienna Heimwehr, Emil Fey, told a meeting of his men: “Tomorrow we shall go to work, and we shall do a thorough job.”

Linz, 12 February

Bernaschek, party secretary and Schutzbund commander for Upper Austria, had warned the party leadership in a letter that he would respond with force to the next search. During the night Vienna sent him a coded telegram ordering him to await the decision of the party leadership, but it was intercepted by the police and never reached him. When officers entered the Hotel Schiff in the morning, shots were fired. Bernaschek was quickly arrested, but not before he had alerted units in Steyr, Wels and the coalfield. In Linz itself the fighting went on until the following day.

The news reached Vienna before noon. The party leadership, as surprised as the government, called a general strike and put the Schutzbund on alert. According to accounts, around midday the municipal power station cut off the electricity supply and the trams stopped. But there the strike ended. Railwaymen, postal workers and most factories carried on working, because after years of unemployment and lost disputes workers were afraid of losing their jobs. The army, police and gendarmerie remained loyal to the government, although the insurgents had hoped some soldiers would come over to their side. That same afternoon the government outlawed the Social Democratic Party and extended summary justice to the offence of rebellion. Mayor Seitz was arrested in his office in the city hall.

Fighting in Vienna and the provinces

The Schutzbund had a civil-war plan, prepared since 1931 by its chief of staff, Alexander Eifler. It envisaged the rapid seizure of barracks and police stations and, should that fail, defence of the working-class estates. But Eifler had been in custody since the beginning of February, and district commanders often did not know where the arms depots were or what their neighbours were doing. As a result there was neither an attack nor a single leadership, only many isolated pockets of resistance. People barricaded themselves in the large municipal blocks: the Karl-Marx-Hof in Döbling, the Goethehof in Kaisermühlen, the Sandleitenhof in Ottakring, the Reumannhof in Margareten and the workers’ hall in Ottakring. The fighting lasted longest in Floridsdorf across the Danube, where the defenders of several estates and the workers’ hall laid down their arms only on 14 February.

The police surrounded the estates and tried to take them. When they met resistance they called in the army, which had planned from the outset to use artillery in street fighting. From 12 February field guns shelled the Karl-Marx-Hof, the Goethehof and other buildings that were home to thousands of families. Years later a claim emerged that the army had fired practice rounds, but as early as 1974 the Austrian military historian Kurt Peball showed from the records that live combat ammunition had been used. The Karl-Marx-Hof surrendered after the shelling. Paradoxically, no one was killed in the building itself, and in the whole of Döbling there were 19 dead. Accounts from residents of the city centre at the time show how limited the fighting was. The writer Stefan Zweig recalled that he was in Vienna then and saw nothing: in the centre life went on as usual, while in the suburbs the guns were firing.

Outside Vienna there was fighting in Linz and Steyr, in the Upper Austrian coalfield and in St. Pölten, and in Styria in Graz and Eggenberg, Weiz, Kapfenberg, Judenburg and Bruck an der Mur. There political leadership was taken by the deputy Koloman Wallisch, a former activist of Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic, who had fled to Yugoslavia after its fall in 1919 and later settled in Styria. When the army arrived on 13 February, Wallisch withdrew into the mountains with several hundred men. Carinthia, the Tyrol, Salzburg, Vorarlberg, Burgenland and most of Lower Austria remained quiet, and some local Social Democrats immediately dissociated themselves from the rising. The forces were unequal: by various estimates between 10,000 and 20,000 Schutzbund members, only some of whom actually fought, faced almost 60,000 men of the army, police, gendarmerie and volunteer formations. On 15 February the last shots died away in Styria.

Casualties and executions

On 1 March 1934 the government announced that 104 members of the security forces and 193 civilians had been killed and more than 800 people wounded. The Social Democrats considered these figures too low. The British journalist G. E. R. Gedye wrote of 1,500–2,000 dead. Today the findings of the Austrian historian Kurt Bauer, who established the names of the victims, are most widely accepted: between about 350 and 370 people were killed, including some 110 on the government side, a similar number of insurgents and at least 110 bystanders who took no part in the fighting. Most of the deaths, more than 200, occurred in Vienna.

The summary courts, made up of four professional judges, passed verdicts within three days. They sentenced 24 people to death. Fifteen were pardoned and nine men were hanged. The first, on 14 February, was the gravely wounded Karl Münichreiter, who was carried to the gallows on a stretcher. On 15 February the engineer Georg Weissel, commander of the professional fire brigade in Floridsdorf, was executed. Wallisch was captured on 18 February in Ardning; the next day the summary court in Leoben sentenced him to death, and the sentence was carried out that same night. So that he could be tried under summary procedure, the summary courts had been extended. Pleas for clemency from the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer, and from the Holy See went unanswered. The executions were contentious even within the government: the Heimwehr leader Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg regarded them as pointless revenge, while Fey demanded them. The Justice Minister, Kurt Schuschnigg, did not forward the pleas for clemency to the President. For decades afterwards the Social Democrats called Dollfuss the “workers’ murderer”.

Otto Bauer and the former Defence Minister Julius Deutsch fled to Czechoslovakia on 13 February, which government propaganda held against them at every opportunity. In Brno they set up the party’s bureau abroad. Those who remained in the country worked underground as the Revolutionary Socialists. Thousands were arrested, and the internment camp at Wöllersdorf, set up in the autumn of 1933 for Communists and Nazis, now filled with Social Democrats as well. The party, the trade unions and all workers’ organisations were dissolved. Vienna lost its self-government. Among those arrested were Seitz, Renner and the former Schutzbund commander, General Theodor Körner, later President of Austria. Several hundred Schutzbund members left for the Soviet Union, where they were received as heroes. Many of them later perished in the Great Purge, while others fought in the International Brigades in Spain.

The corporative state

The February victory opened the way to a new political order. On 17 March 1934 Dollfuss, Mussolini and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Gyula Gömbös, signed the Rome Protocols, which bound Austria still more closely to Italy and Hungary. At the end of April a rump parliament, convened for a single sitting and now without the Social Democratic deputies, approved hundreds of government decrees, and on 1 May a new constitution, proclaimed “in the name of God the Almighty”, came into force. The republic became the Federal State of Austria, with the Fatherland Front as the sole political organisation. Its opponents called this system, based on Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo anno and on Italian models, Austrofascism (PL). Some historians prefer the terms “corporative state” or “the Dollfuss–Schuschnigg dictatorship”, because, unlike Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, the regime had neither a mass movement nor a racial ideology.

Significance

February 1934 became a symbol in Europe of the first armed resistance by workers against fascism. Otto Bauer’s pamphlet on the rising was translated into many languages, and the European left, which in those same weeks had witnessed the right-wing riots of 6 February in Paris, spoke ever more loudly of the need for a common front against fascism. For Austria itself the consequences proved disastrous. Dollfuss was fighting on two fronts, against the left and against the Nazis, and in February he destroyed the force that could most effectively have defended an independent country against Hitler. The Social Democratic workers, roughly a third of society, turned their backs on a state that had shelled their homes and hanged their comrades. According to later estimates, the regime could count on the support of roughly a third of citizens.

Five months later the Nazis attempted to overthrow the government themselves and murdered Dollfuss. His successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, governed a country whose only external support was Italy. When Mussolini drew closer to Hitler after the war in Abyssinia, Austria was left without a protector. In March 1938 Schuschnigg tried at the last moment to reach an understanding with the underground Social Democrats, but by then it was too late. In the prisons and camps of the corporative state Social Democrats and Nazis sat side by side, and for both the enemy was Austrofascism. After 1945 both major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, drew from the years 1927–1938 the lesson that civil war must never be allowed to happen again. Hence the long tradition of grand coalitions in the Second Republic. The dispute over February 1934 and over Dollfuss continues in Austria to this day.