Kurt Schuschnigg

Kurt Schuschnigg was the last chancellor of independent Austria before it vanished from the map in 1938. For almost four years after the Nazis murdered Engelbert Dollfuss, he tried to preserve the country’s independence in the face of the growing might of the Third Reich. He did so as a dictator: he governed without parliament, with a single permitted political organisation, and treated as enemies the Social Democrats, whose support might have saved him. His announcement of a plebiscite in March 1938 provoked Adolf Hitler into immediate action. Schuschnigg’s parting words in his radio address of 11 March, “God protect Austria!”, passed into history, and he himself spent seven years in Gestapo prisons and concentration camps. To some he was Austria’s defender against Hitler; to others a co-founder of the dictatorship that weakened that defence.

Early years

He was born on 14 December 1897 in Riva del Garda on Lake Garda, then in Austrian Tyrol. He came from a family of professional officers with Carinthian, Slovene roots (the Slovene form of the name is Šušnik). In 1898 his grandfather received hereditary nobility with the title “Edler von”, abolished in Austria in 1919. His father, Artur, rose to the rank of general. Kurt was educated at the Jesuit college Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, which shaped him into a devout Catholic and a conservative. In 1915 he volunteered for the army, fought as a lieutenant on the Italian front, including on the Isonzo, and at the end of the war was taken prisoner by the Italians, returning from captivity in September 1919.

He studied law at Freiburg im Breisgau and at the University of Innsbruck, where he took his doctorate in 1922. He opened a law practice in Innsbruck and joined the Catholic Christian Social Party. In 1927 he became the youngest member of the National Council. He distrusted the paramilitary Heimwehr, which was leaning more and more towards fascism, and in 1930 founded his own Catholic armed formation, the Ostmärkische Sturmscharen (Eastern March Storm Troops). The formation was markedly Catholic in character, and antisemitic as well.

Minister of a dictatorship

On 29 January 1932 Chancellor Karl Buresch appointed him Minister of Justice. He kept the post in Dollfuss’s government and from May 1933 also headed the Ministry of Education. He was one of those members of the cabinet who spoke openly of governing without parliament. When, on 4 March 1933, all three presidents of the National Council resigned in a procedural dispute, the government prevented it from meeting again and from then on ruled by decree. As Minister of Justice, Schuschnigg reintroduced summary courts in November 1933, together with the death penalty, which had been abolished after the war.

In February 1934, after a brief civil war, summary courts sentenced 24 members of the Republican Protection League (Schutzbund) to death. Nine were hanged, among them the severely wounded Karl Münichreiter, who was carried to the gallows on a stretcher. Schuschnigg did not pass the petitions for clemency on to the president, as swift executions were meant to deter others. For the Austrian left, he and Dollfuss remained “workers’ murderers” for decades. Many years later he himself called Münichreiter’s execution a “faux pas”. He took part in drafting the corporate constitution of 1 May 1934, which turned the republic into the authoritarian Federal State of Austria.

Chancellor

On 25 July 1934 Austrian SS men shot Dollfuss dead in the Chancellery. During the July Putsch President Wilhelm Miklas entrusted Schuschnigg with running the government, and on 29 July appointed him chancellor. He was 36. The Heimwehr leader, Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, became vice-chancellor. Schuschnigg continued his predecessor’s course, though in a less impetuous manner. In the autumn of 1934 more than 13,000 political prisoners, Nazis and Social Democrats, were held in internment camps such as Wöllersdorf and in police cells. Historians label this regime in various ways: Austrofascism (PL), the corporate-state dictatorship or semi-fascism. Schuschnigg wanted Austria to be the “second, better German state”, Christian as opposed to the pagan Reich. His ideology, however, was German and did not build a distinct Austrian identity that he could have set against the Nazis.

On 13 July 1935 the chancellor’s car crashed near Linz. His wife Herma was killed, and Schuschnigg and their son Kurt were injured. In May 1936 the chancellor got rid of Starhemberg and took over the leadership of the Fatherland Front himself. In the autumn the Heimwehr was dissolved. In April 1936, in breach of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, he reintroduced universal military service. He also favoured the legitimists, who dreamed of a Habsburg return, but did not dare to restore the monarchy, knowing that Hitler would treat it as a pretext for intervention.

Between Mussolini and Hitler

Schuschnigg’s Austrian independence rested on Italy. Benito Mussolini, who in 1934 had sent divisions to the Brenner, was its guarantor, and the Rome Protocols of March 1934 bound Austria to Italy and Hungary. This shield collapsed together with the Italian war in Ethiopia. Mussolini, at odds with London and Paris, needed Hitler and made it clear to Vienna that it must come to terms with Germany. On 11 July 1936 Schuschnigg signed an agreement negotiated by the German envoy Franz von Papen. In it Germany recognised Austria’s sovereignty, while Austria acknowledged itself to be a “German state”, promised to conduct its foreign policy in harmony with the Reich, amnestied the Nazis and admitted members of the so-called national opposition into the government. Edmund Glaise-Horstenau entered the cabinet, and in 1937 Arthur Seyss-Inquart joined the Council of State. Schuschnigg hoped the concessions would buy him time. In reality he opened the way for the Nazis to rebuild their influence.

At the beginning of 1938, on Papen’s advice, he agreed to meet Hitler. On 12 February at the Berghof Hitler heaped abuse on him, threatened invasion and presented him with a list of demands. Schuschnigg signed an agreement under which, on 16 February, Seyss-Inquart became Minister of the Interior and Security and imprisoned Nazis were set free. When he saw his new partners stripping him of power, he tried to fight back. On 24 February he ended a speech to the Federal Assembly with the cry “Until death! Red-white-red! Austria!”, and on 9 March in Innsbruck he announced a plebiscite for 13 March on a “free and German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria”. Only now, in the last days, did he talk to representatives of the outlawed labour movement, who promised their support in return for the restoration of freedoms.

Hitler did not wait. On 11 March, under the threat of the Wehrmacht marching in, Schuschnigg first called off the plebiscite and then, when Hermann Göring demanded his resignation, stepped down. In the evening he spoke on the radio. He said that the government was yielding to force and that the army would not resist, so as not to shed “German blood”. The next day the Germans entered Austria, and on 13 March Seyss-Inquart’s government proclaimed the Anschluss. The decision not to resist was, and remains, controversial. The Austrian army stood no chance against the Wehrmacht, and none of the great powers intended to help. Critics point out, however, that the absence of any resistance at all allowed Hitler to present the Anschluss as a voluntary union.

Prisoner

Schuschnigg was immediately placed under house arrest in the Belvedere, and at the end of May he was taken to the Vienna Gestapo headquarters in the former Hotel Métropole. The conditions were humiliating, and guards watched him day and night. In 1938, already a prisoner, he married Countess Vera Czernin, the divorced wife of Count Fugger. In the autumn of 1938 he was moved to the Gestapo prison in Munich and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. As one of the “special prisoners” – people Hitler wanted to keep in reserve for a show trial or an exchange – he lived there in a separate house with his wife, who voluntarily shared his captivity, and their daughter, born in 1941. This relatively mild fate was the exception, not the rule. At the same time thousands of his former officials and supporters were dying in Dachau and Mauthausen.

In April 1945, as the front approached Berlin, the SS moved Schuschnigg via Flossenbürg to Dachau, and from there, together with more than 130 prominent prisoners from all over Europe – among them the former French prime minister Léon Blum and Pastor Martin Niemöller – to South Tyrol. The guards had orders to kill the hostages if they were in danger of being freed. On 30 April at Niederdorf a Wehrmacht unit forced the SS men to leave, and on 4 May the Americans took charge of the prisoners.

In exile

After the war Schuschnigg could not return to politics. The revived Austrian People’s Party, heir to the Christian Socials, did not want him in its ranks, because its coalition partners, the Socialists, remembered February 1934. He lived in Italy for two years and at the end of the 1940s left for the United States. Until 1967 he taught political science and international law at the Jesuit Saint Louis University in Missouri, and in 1956 he became an American citizen. His second wife died in 1959. He published his prison memoirs, Ein Requiem in Rot-Weiß-Rot, and the book Im Kampf gegen Hitler (1969), in which he presented himself as Austria’s defender and wrote little about his own role in dismantling democracy. In 1967 he returned to Tyrol. He died on 18 November 1977 in Mutters near Innsbruck.

Significance

Schuschnigg embodies the dilemma of the small states of Central Europe in the 1930s. He governed a country whose independence was threatened by a powerful neighbour and many of whose inhabitants did not believe it had any reason to exist. He tried to save it first through an alliance with Mussolini and then through concessions to Hitler, and both paths failed. At the same time the left, crushed in 1934 and the most determined opponent of Nazism, had no reason to defend his dictatorship. When Schuschnigg finally turned to the workers in March 1938, it was too late. His fall also showed how Hitler would deal with his next victims: threats, demands on the government, support for local Nazis from within, and finally an ultimatum and a fait accompli. Six months later the same pattern was used in the crisis that ended with the Munich Agreement. After the war Austria long portrayed Schuschnigg as the first defender of its independence against Nazism. Historians today also remember that he was a co-founder of the dictatorship that weakened that independence.