The July Putsch in Austria

At 12.53 p.m. on 25 July 1934, lorries carrying 154 men in Austrian army and police uniforms drove into the courtyard of the Federal Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz in Vienna. They were members of the Vienna-based 89th SS Regiment (SS-Standarte 89), many of them former soldiers of the Bundesheer, the Austrian army, a good number of whom had been dismissed for Nazi sympathies. Within minutes they had taken the building. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who tried to escape through a side door, was hit by two bullets and bled to death on a sofa in his office, because his attackers refused to let anyone fetch either a doctor or a priest. At the same time another group seized the RAVAG radio station and broadcast a false announcement that Dollfuss had resigned and that Anton Rintelen had taken power. This was meant to be the signal for a rising across the whole country. Yet the putsch collapsed in Vienna that same evening, and in the provinces after five days of fighting. The army and police did not go over to the Nazis, and Benito Mussolini sent his divisions to the Brenner Pass, making it plain that he would not allow Germany to march into Austria. For Hitler it was his first serious foreign-policy defeat.

Some chronologies combine two events under this date: Dollfuss’s ban on the Nazis and his murder. In fact the NSDAP had been outlawed in Austria more than a year earlier, on 19 June 1933. The events of 25 July 1934 were the underground party’s response to that ban.

A year of Nazi terror

Once Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, the Austrian National Socialists, until then a small party, began to grow rapidly. In the local elections of April 1932 they had won well over 10 per cent of the vote in Vienna, Lower Austria and Salzburg, and in fresh parliamentary elections they could have expected far more. Dollfuss, who had governed without parliament since March 1933, had no intention of allowing such elections. The conflict with Berlin came to a head in May 1933, when the government expelled the Bavarian justice minister Hans Frank, who had come to Vienna to agitate against it. From 1 June Hitler retaliated with the so-called Thousand Mark Ban: every German wishing to travel to Austria had to pay a fee of 1,000 marks. Austrian tourism collapsed. In Austria itself the Nazis launched a wave of bomb attacks. On 19 June 1933, after a grenade attack on a group of Catholic gymnasts in Krems, the government banned all activity by the NSDAP and by its ally, the Styrian Heimatschutz.

The ban did not break the party. Its leadership, headed by Theo Habicht, Hitler’s envoy for Austrian affairs, moved to Munich. In Bavaria thousands of refugees were formed into the Austrian Legion, an armed unit that trained near the border. Inside Austria, Nazi terror and government repression fed on each other. Between 31 December 1933 and 8 January 1934 the Nazis carried out 140 bomb attacks, and in October 1933 Rudolf Dertil, a former soldier and a Nazi, slightly wounded the Chancellor with two shots. The government responded with arrests, an internment camp at Wöllersdorf and the reintroduction of the death penalty. When in February 1934 Dollfuss crushed the Social Democrats in a brief civil war, only the Nazis were left as his opponents, and no agreement with them was within reach. Attempts at negotiation with Habicht, in the spring of 1933 and in January 1934, came to nothing.

The conspiracy

The putsch was prepared by a small group. In the spring of 1934 Fridolin Glass, commander of SS-Standarte 89, placed his unit directly under the SS leadership and fell out with the command of the Austrian SA as a result. Together with the lawyer Otto Wächter and Rudolf Weydenhammer, liaison man for the party leadership in Munich, he drew up a plan that Habicht approved in Zurich on 25 June. The Nazis were to imprison the entire government, force President Wilhelm Miklas to appoint a new cabinet and win the army over to their side. The new chancellor was to be Anton Rintelen, the former Christian Social governor of Styria, an ambitious politician whom Dollfuss had sidelined in 1933 by sending him to Rome as envoy. The Austrian SA, the SS’s rival, knew almost nothing of the details until the very end. The mistrust between the party’s organisations later proved to be one of the reasons for the failure.

How much Hitler knew was long disputed. After the defeat he claimed that he had had nothing to do with the putsch, and for years many historians accepted that he had at most allowed Habicht to join in any rising by the army. The Austrian historian Kurt Bauer, however, drawing on the diaries of Joseph Goebbels found in 1992, considers it highly probable that Hitler approved the plan in person on 22 July in Bayreuth, where he was attending the Wagner festival. The putsch came less than four weeks after the Night of the Long Knives, and five days after the SS ceased to be subordinate to the SA.

25 July in Vienna

At midday the conspirators gathered in a gymnasium in the Siebensterngasse, where they changed into uniform and were issued with weapons. The authorities had learned of the plan in advance, but the warning reached them by a roundabout route. According to the investigation, a policeman who was supposed to take part in the putsch informed members of the Heimwehr, the right-wing militia, and through them the warning reached the former Vice-Chancellor Emil Fey. Fey passed it on to the Chancellor after a delay that was never explained. Dollfuss broke off the cabinet meeting and sent most of the ministers back to their ministries. Only Fey and the State Secretary Carl Karwinsky stayed in the building with him.

At 12.53 p.m. the attackers drove in. According to the investigation, Dollfuss was shot at close range by Otto Planetta, a former army non-commissioned officer; the second bullet, from a weapon of a different calibre, was fired, according to some sources, by Rudolf Prochaska. Kurt Bauer believes that the fatal shot may have been fired by accident, but this changes nothing about the conspirators’ responsibility. The wounded Chancellor lay there for almost three hours. He asked for a doctor and a priest. The attackers refused. He died at about 3.45 p.m. Fey, held as a hostage, later acted as an intermediary in the talks with the government, and his ambiguous role that day has never been explained.

From the outset things went against the conspirators. The remaining ministers met at the Ministry of Defence. Miklas, who was on holiday in Carinthia, entrusted the running of the government to the Minister of Education and Justice, Kurt Schuschnigg. The army, police and Heimwehr surrounded the Chancellery and recaptured the radio station. Rintelen, who had been waiting at the Hotel Imperial, began denying any part in the plot and tried to take his own life during the night. In the evening the minister Odo Neustädter-Stürmer, with the involvement of the German envoy Kurt Rieth, agreed with the putschists that if they surrendered they would be taken to the German border. The guarantee depended on no one having been killed. When, after the surrender at around 7.30 p.m., it emerged that the Chancellor was dead, the government declared the promise void and the attackers were arrested.

Fighting in the provinces

The radio announcement that was supposed to signal the rising reached Nazi units around the country after varying delays and was understood in different ways. By the time Rintelen had backed out and everything was over in Vienna, the fighting in Styria and Carinthia was only just beginning. It was heaviest in Upper Styria, in the industrial district of Leoben and Donawitz and at Schladming, as well as in southern Styria and in Carinthia, especially in the Lavant valley. In Upper Austria the insurgents fought at the Pyhrn Pass and in the Mühlviertel, and on the night of 26–27 July a detachment of the Austrian Legion crossed from Bavaria near Kollerschlag and attacked a gendarmerie post and the customs guard. On 26 July a courier had already been caught there carrying instructions for the putschists – the so-called Kollerschlag document – which proved the conspiracy’s links with Bavaria. By 30 July the army, the gendarmerie and the Heimwehr had put down the rebellion. Thousands of those who had taken part fled to Germany and Yugoslavia.

Casualty figures vary from author to author. According to earlier findings by the Austrian military historian Erwin Steinböck, adopted by Gerhard Jagschitz, 270 people were killed. Kurt Bauer counted 223 dead: 111 on the Nazi side (including thirteen executed), 101 on the government side and 11 civilians. Between 500 and 600 people were wounded.

Mussolini on the Brenner

The putsch took Mussolini, who had been Dollfuss’s protector for two years, by surprise. The Chancellor’s wife and two children happened to be on holiday at his villa in Riccione, and it was Mussolini who personally broke the news of her husband’s death to her. The Duce had no doubt about who was behind the attack. He gave the Heimwehr leader, Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, who was on holiday in Venice, an aircraft so that he could return to Vienna, and assured him that Italy would defend Austria’s independence. At the same time he ordered several divisions to the Brenner Pass and the Carinthian border. It was a clear signal that if Germany tried to exploit the confusion, it would run into the Italian army. This did not yet mean readiness for war, but it was enough.

Hitler, who received the news of the putsch in Bayreuth, quickly backed away. On 27 July he forbade German party offices to give any support to the Austrian insurgents, and on 3 August he dissolved the Austrian NSDAP leadership in Munich. Habicht lost all his posts, and the Austrian Legion was moved away from the border. The envoy Rieth, who had meddled in the negotiations with the putschists, was recalled. On 26 July Hitler sent in his place, as special envoy, the former Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, who only a month earlier had narrowly survived the Night of the Long Knives. His task was to calm relations with Vienna and to prepare the Anschluss by methods that would no longer provoke such resistance.

Punishment and cult

On 26 July the government set up a special military court. Planetta and Franz Holzweber, one of the leaders of the operation at the Chancellery, were sentenced to death and hanged as early as 31 July. In all, thirteen putschists were executed, among them four Viennese policemen who had helped the attackers. Some 4,000 people were sent to prison or to internment camps. In March 1935 Rintelen was sentenced to life imprisonment. On 29 July Schuschnigg became Chancellor, with Starhemberg as Vice-Chancellor. Dollfuss was buried in Vienna on 28 July, and according to contemporary accounts several hundred thousand people attended his funeral. The state made him a martyr and the “hero chancellor”. 25 July became a day of national mourning, and monuments, chapels and crosses to him were put up all over the country.

The Nazis created a legend of their own. After the Anschluss Dollfuss’s killers were proclaimed heroes, SS-Standarte 89 was named after Holzweber, and streets across the Reich were named after Planetta. Dollfuss’s monuments were destroyed. A commission set up by Heinrich Himmler to investigate the history of the putsch became so mired in mutual recriminations between party factions, and in the unclear role of Hitler himself, that in May 1938 Hitler ordered it to stop work. Members of the conspiracy went on to make careers in the Reich. During the war Wächter was governor of the Kraków District and later of the District of Galicia in the General Government.

Significance

The July Putsch showed that in 1934 Hitler was not yet able to present Europe with a fait accompli. Germany was only beginning to rearm, and Italy, which since 1919 had wanted a weak neighbour on the Brenner rather than a powerful Reich, threatened to intervene. This moment is regarded as the high point of Italo-German hostility. In April 1935 Mussolini met the prime ministers of Britain and France at Stresa, where together they condemned German rearmament and reaffirmed their support for Austrian independence.

That front, however, did not last even a year. Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia set him at odds with London and Paris and pushed him towards Berlin. In July 1936 Schuschnigg, deprived of Italian backing, concluded an agreement with Germany in which he acknowledged Austria to be a “German state” and amnestied the Nazis. In February 1938, at Berchtesgaden, Hitler forced him to take the Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart into the government, and in March the Wehrmacht marched into Austria. This time not a single Italian division appeared on the Brenner. Hitler, who had been forced to retreat in 1934, remembered that four years of patience and winning Mussolini over had given him what the assassination had failed to deliver. Dollfuss’s Austria fell victim to the very forces the Chancellor had fought, but it had also been weakened by his own dictatorship, which had earlier crushed the Social Democratic workers.