Austrian Civil War
Austrian Civil War | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the interwar period | |||||||
Soldiers of the Austrian Federal Army in Vienna, 12 February 1934 | |||||||
| |||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
| |||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Richard Bernaschek Ludwig Bernaschek |
Engelbert Dollfuss Emil Fey | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
10,000 – 20,000 actively resisting Schutzbund members[1] | Federal Army, police, gendarmeries, and paramilitary Heimwehr forces (est. 60,000)[1] | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
Estimated 110 killed[1] 399 wounded[2] 9 executed[3] |
Estimated 110 killed[1] 319 wounded[2] |
The Austrian Civil War (
The socialists' defeat led to arrests, executions and the banning of the Social Democratic Party. In May 1934, Austria's democratic constitution was replaced by the
Background
History of Austria |
---|
Austria portal |
After the
In the late 1920s the polarised political situation in Austria was exacerbated by paramilitary units such as the Home Guard (Heimwehr) on the right and the Republican Protection League (Republikanischer Schutzbund) of the Social Democrats (SDAPÖ) on the left. By the start of the civil war the Heimwehr were openly fascist and opposed democracy,[4] while the Republican Protection League saw itself as a protector of the Austrian Republic[5] holding the Austromarxist position on the dictatorship of the proletariat that was pro-democracy as part of the Social Democrats' party program.[6] The still small Austrian Nazi Party had its SA and SS, which were also organized as paramilitary units.
July Revolt and suspension of Parliament
Political antagonisms in Austria escalated in 1927 when members of the right-wing Front Fighters' Union (Frontkämpfervereinigung) in Schattendorf (Burgenland) shot and killed two people, including a child, during a demonstration by the Republic Protection League. In the trial of the Schattendorf case, the jury acquitted the alleged perpetrators. On 15 July 1927, the day after the verdict, the SDAPÖ's leadership was not able to control the demonstrations of an outraged crowd. During the July Revolt, the Vienna Palace of Justice was stormed and set on fire. After police guardrooms were also attacked, the police president, Johannes Schober, gave orders to disperse the demonstrators with armed force. People who were trying to flee as well as some who were not involved in the demonstration were caught in the police fire. The result was 89 dead, including four policemen, and 1,000 wounded.[7]
The problems facing the First Republic worsened in the following years. The Great Depression resulted in high unemployment, and after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Nazi sympathisers who wanted unification of Austria with Germany threatened the Austrian state from within.
On 4 March 1933,
In the wake of armed conflicts, the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) was banned on 26 May 1933,[10] as was the SDAPÖ's Republican Protection League on the 31st.[11]
Dollfuss, the Fatherland Front and the Heimwehr then set about the destruction of the last remnants of the Social Democratic and Marxist-oriented workers' movement. On 24 January 1934, the order went out to search party buildings and members' homes for weapons belonging to the Protection League. The leaders of the SDAPÖ did not respond to the step-by-step disempowerment and disarming of their movement. Their cornerstone policy allowed them to fight only if the party were banned, the unions dissolved or the government of "Red Vienna" suppressed.[12]
Civil War
In the early morning hours of 12 February 1934, when police went to search for weapons at the Linz party headquarters of the Social Democrats in the Hotel Schiff, the members of the Protection League, under their local commander Richard Bernaschek, opened fire. A coded telegram to him from the SDAPÖ's leaders that warned him urgently against any action and instructed him to await the decision of party leadership had been intercepted by the authorities and never reached him.[13]
The fighting spread to other cities and towns in Austria. In Vienna, members of the Protection League barricaded themselves in city council housing estates (
A decisive moment in the conflict came when the
The police, Army and Heimwehr divisions that supported them had defeated the poorly networked Protection League relatively easily. Between 10,000 and 20,000 workers stood against a superior force of almost 60,000 men from the gendarmerie and police, the Army and home defence forces.[1] Besides the imbalance in numbers and the Austrian Army's use of artillery, the major reason for the uprising's collapse was likely the failure of the call for a general strike to be heeded. The hoped-for solidarity of law enforcement with the insurgents also did not come about. The Army, police and gendarmerie all remained loyal to the state.[15]
In large parts of the country, (Lower Austria, Carinthia, Salzburg, Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Burgenland) complete calm prevailed. Leading Social Democrats in Carinthia and Vorarlberg distanced themselves at the outset from the uprising. The mayor of Klagenfurt and the deputy governor of Carinthia announced their resignations from the SDAPÖ.
Austria, or even just Vienna, was far from being in a state of complete turmoil. The daily newspapers of the time had only short reports on the revolts. Stefan Zweig, a contemporary observer who was inclined towards the SDAPÖ, wrote:
I was in Vienna during those historic February days and saw nothing of the decisive events that played out in Vienna and knew nothing, not the slightest bit, while they were happening. Cannons were fired, houses occupied, hundreds of corpses carried away – I saw not a single one. … In the city's central districts, everything went on as quietly and regularly as usual, while in the suburbs the battle raged, and we foolishly believed the official reports that everything was already settled and done with.[16]
Aftermath
Short term
The Dollfuss government published a statement on 1 March 1934 reporting that 193 civilians had been killed and 493 wounded in the fighting, while among the police and Army there were 104 dead and 309 wounded. Analyses by later researchers vary widely, going as high as British journalist George Eric Rowe Gedye's estimate of 2,000 dead and 5,000 wounded.[17] According to a comprehensive 2018 study by historian Kurt Bauer, between 350 and 370 people lost their lives in the fighting – about 130 of them uninvolved civilians and 110 each among the government forces and members of the Protection League. The largest number of deaths – about 200 to 220 – were in Vienna.[1][18]
On 11 November 1933, all of Austria had been placed under martial law, during which the death penalty was reintroduced for certain crimes. An emergency decree of 12 February 1934 extended the list to rebellion, so that Protection League members who had been taken prisoner while armed (estimated at around 10,000)[19] could be sentenced to death. The defendants were tried within three days in abbreviated procedures by summary courts consisting of four professional judges.[20][21]
The summary courts condemned 24 people to death, of whom 15 were pardoned.
The leadership of the SDAPÖ under Otto Bauer (the leading theoretician of Austromarxism), Julius Deutsch and others fled to Czechoslovakia on 13 February,[24] a move that the representatives of the government exploited as propaganda.
Long term
This section needs additional citations for verification. (December 2023) |
The incidents of February 1934 were taken as a pretext by the government to ban the Social Democratic Party and its affiliated trade unions altogether. In May, the conservatives replaced the democratic constitution by a
The government found itself isolated domestically because the Social Democrats – above all due to the death sentences that had been carried out – turned away from the state and either called for open resistance using such means as leaflets or went into a kind of inner emigration. In his speech during the 1936 socialist trial of 28 people accused of violating the ban on the SDAPÖ, Bruno Kreisky (who was himself on trial) alluded to the issue:[27]
It is also possible that in a difficult moment, the government will have to call on the broad masses of the people to defend the borders. But only a democratic Austria will respond to such a summons. Only free citizens will fight against the gagging of Austria.[28]
In detention centres and prisons of the Second Republic, Social Democrats and National Socialists come into contact with one another. For both, Austrofascism was the enemy. The common ground was to affect the political assessments of former National Socialists after World War II.
With a greater passage of time it became clear that Austria's ability to resist National Socialism was decidedly weakened by the Austrian Civil War and its consequences. By later estimates, only about a third of the Austrian population supported the dictatorial state.
After the Second World War, when Austria reemerged on the political landscape as a sovereign nation, politics again fell under the domination of the Social Democrats and the conservatives, the latter in the
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g "Februarkämpfe 1934" [February Uprising 1934]. Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (in German). Retrieved 5 December 2023.
- ^ ISBN 0-00-638255-X.
- ISBN 978-0521316255.
- ^ "Heimwehr". Encyclopedia.com. Encyclopaedia Judaica. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
- ^ "Schutzbund". Encyclopedia Britannica. 23 March 2010. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
- ^ "Linzer Programm" [Linz Program]. Wien Geschichte Wiki (in German). Retrieved 1 December 2023.
- ^ "30 January 1927 - prologue of a fateful day". City of Vienna. Retrieved 2 December 2023.
- ^ "4 March 1933 - The beginning of the end of parliamentarian democracy in Austria". City of Vienna. Retrieved 2 December 2023.
- ^ Jelavich 1987, p. 199.
- ISBN 978-3215068980.
- ^ "DöW - Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance". braintrust.at. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 5 July 2015.
- ^ Konrad, Helmut (12 March 2018). "Die tiefen Wunden des Bürgerkriegs" [The Deep Wounds of the Civil War]. Die kleine Zeitung (in German). Retrieved 2 December 2023.
- ISBN 978-3-205-23229-2.
- ^ "12. Februar 1934: Österreich stürzt in den Bürgerkrieg" [12 February 1934: Austria plunges into civil war]. Parlament Österreich (in German). Retrieved 7 December 2023.
- ^ a b "Die Februarkämpfe 1934 und wie es zu ihnen kam (4)" [The February Uprising and how it came about (4)]. Erster Wiener Protestwanderweg (in German). Retrieved 2 December 2023.
- ISBN 978-3103970173.
- ^ Bauer 2019, pp. 71–74.
- ^ "Februarkämpfe 1934: "Die meisten Opfer waren Unbeteiligte"" [The February Uprising 1934: "Most of the Victims Were Uninvolved"]. Der Standard (in German). 10 February 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2023.
- ^ "February 1934 – Austrians take up Arms". City of Vienna. Retrieved 8 December 2023.
- ^ Tálos, Emmerich (2013). Das austrofaschistische Herrschaftssystem: Österreich 1933–1938 [The Austrofascist System of Rule: Austria 1933–1938] (in German) (2nd ed.). Vienna: Lit Verlag. pp. 48 f.
- ^ Neugebauer, Wolfgang (2014). "Repressionsapparat und -maßnahmen 1933–1938" [Repressive Apparatus and Measures 1933–1938]. In Tálos, Emmerich (ed.). Austrofaschismus: Politik, Ökonomie, Kultur, 1933–1938 [Austrofacism: Politics, Economics, Culture, 1933–1938] (in German) (7th ed.). Vienna: Lit Verlag. pp. 301 f.
- ^ Garscha, Winfried R. (2012). "Opferzahlen als Tabu. Totengedenken und Propaganda nach Februaraufstand und Juliputsch 1934" [Victim Numbers as Taboo. Commemoration of the Dead and Propaganda after the February Uprising and July Putsch of 1934]. In Reiter-Zatloukal, Ilse; Rothländer, Christiane; Schölnberger, Pia (eds.). Österreich 1933–1938. Interdisziplinäre Annäherungen an das Dollfuß-/ Schuschnigg-Regime [Austria 1933–1938: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Dollfuß/Schuschnigg Regime] (in German). Vienna: Böhlau. p. 117.
- ^ Fiala, Josef (2012). Die Februarkämpfe 1934 in Wien Meidling und Liesing. Ein Bürgerkrieg, der keiner war [The February 1934 Uprising in Vienna Meidling and Liesing. A civil war that was not one] pp. 63, 171 (PhD thesis) (in German). University of Vienna.
- ^ "February 1934 – History of Vienna". City of Vienna. Retrieved 5 December 2023.
- ^ "The State that the Elite Didn't Want". February 1934. Retrieved 5 December 2023.
- ISSN 0022-0094.
- ^ Hoare, Liam (2024-02-14). "Civil War". The Vienna Briefing. Retrieved 2024-03-24.
- ^ "Februarkämpfe: Wie aus einer demokratischen Republik ein faschistischer Staat wurde" [The February Uprising: How a Democratic Republic became a Fascist State]. Kontrast.at. 12 February 2020. Retrieved 5 December 2023. [de]
Further reading
- Bischof, Günter; Pelinka, Anton; Lassner, Alexander, eds. (2003). The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment. Oxford, UK: Routledge. ISBN 978-0765809704.
- Lehne, Inge; Johnson, Lonnie (1985). Vienna: The Past in the Present. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag Gesellschaft. ISBN 978-1572410183.
- Schuman, Frederick L. Europe On The Eve 1933-1939 (1939) pp 55–92 online