July Putsch | |||||||
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Part of the Interwar Period | |||||||
Police car at Ballhausplatz outside Chancellery building, 25 July 1934 | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
Schutzstaffel (SS) Austrian Nazi Party supportersAustrian Legion Supported by: Nazi Germany | Supported by: Kingdom of Italy | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Fridolin Glass Otto Wächter Anton Rintelen | Engelbert Dollfuss † Wilhelm Miklas Kurt Schuschnigg Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg Emil Fey | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
154 SS (Vienna) thousands (elsewhere) | Entire Federal Army, police, gendarmeries, and paramilitary Heimwehr forces | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
98 [1] –140 [2] killed 13 executed [2] 4,000 detained [2] | 101 [1] –104 [2] killed | ||||||
11 [1] –13 [2] civilians killed |
The July Putsch was a failed coup attempt against the Austrofascist regime by Austrian Nazis from 25 to 30 July 1934.
Just a few months after the Austrian Civil War, Austrian Nazis and German SS soldiers attacked the Chancellery in Vienna in an attempt to depose the ruling Fatherland Front government under Engelbert Dollfuss in favor of replacing it with a pro-Nazi government under Anton Rintelen of the Christian Social Party. The Nazi putsch ultimately failed as the majority of the Austrian population and army remained loyal to the government. The Nazis managed to kill Dollfuss, but Kurt Schuschnigg succeeded him and the Austrofascist regime remained in power.
A German invasion of Austria in support of the putsch was averted because of the guarantee of independence and diplomatic support that Austria received from Fascist Italy. The Austrofascist regime eventually suppressed the coup, with over 200 people being killed in six days of fighting.
The Nazi Machtergreifung in Germany on 30 January 1933, when President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor, gave an enormous boost to Austrian Nazis. When the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss obstructed further sessions of the National Council parliament on 4 March 1933, the Austrian Nazis responded with demands for a new election, massive propaganda and a wave of bomb terror. Dollfuss responded to the actions with authoritarian measures such as house searches and arrests. The situation was exacerbated by the Bavarian Minister of Justice, the Nazi lawyer Hans Frank, who, in a public speech on 8 March, threatened the Austrian government with an armed intervention by Nazi forces. Nevertheless, the right-wing Austrian government initially concentrated on the ban of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund paramilitary organisation. On 15 May 1933, Hans Frank entered the country to speak in Vienna. He openly spoke against the regime and Jews, and addressed Austrian Germans encouraging civic disobedience. In response, Dollfuss ordered Frank and another 100 German Nazis deported. He had nearly 2,400 Austrian Nazis arrested for pelting the Heimwehr with eggs, rocks, and vegetables. In response to a fatal bombing, the Austrian Nazi Party was banned on 19 June 1933. [3] Many Austrian Nazis fled to Germany and joined the Austrian Legion, and others remained in Austria and continued their actions illegally. Hitler's government reacted with harsh economic sanctions aimed at Austrian tourism.
On 25 July 1934, in the midst of difficult social and political tensions, and with the knowledge of official German positions, 154 SS men disguised as Bundesheer soldiers and policemen pushed into the Austrian chancellery. Dollfuss was killed by two bullets fired by Nazi Otto Planetta. The rest of the government was able to escape. Another group of the putschists occupied the RAVAG radio building and broadcast a false report about the putative transfer of power from Dollfuss to Anton Rintelen, which was to have been the call for Nazis all over Austria to begin the uprising against the state. There were several days of fighting in parts of Carinthia, Styria and Upper Austria as well as smaller uprisings in Salzburg. There was fighting in Upper Styria, both the industrial area between Judenburg and Leoben and in Enns, the Deutschlandsberg District in southwestern Styria and in southeastern Styria by Bad Radkersburg. Bloody clashes took place in and around Schladming and Leoben.
In Carinthia, the centres of the coup were in Lower Carinthia and Sankt Paul im Lavanttal. In Upper Austria, in addition to individual actions in the Salzkammergut, the fighting was concentrated in the Pyhrn Pass and in the Mühlviertel, where on the night of 26 July, in the Kollerschlag area on the Bavarian-Austrian border, a division of the Austrian Legion invaded Austrian territory and attacked the customs guard and a police station. [4]
Many of the Austrian Nazis were not armed since they had believed that the Austrian military and police would join them once the coup began, but most forces stayed loyal. [5]
Early on 26 July, a German courier was arrested at the border crossing in Kollerschlag who was carrying precise instructions for the putsch. Called the "Kollerschlag Document", it testified to a clear connection between Bavaria and the July Putsch.
The death of Dollfuss enraged Mussolini, whose wife, Rachele, was entertaining the rest of Dollfuss's family. He moved troops to the Austrian border and told Hitler that he was not to invade Austria. This made Hitler proclaim that he did not support the coup, which ultimately led to its failure.
The coup was finally crushed by the police, military and paramilitary units loyal to the government. There is varying information regarding the number of fatalities. Gerhard Jagschitz took over the work of military historian Erwin Steinböck. In 1965 his figures claimed that the July coup and its immediate consequences lead to the deaths of 270 people: 153 Nazi supporters died (including 13 executed and seven people who committed suicide), 104 died on the Government side, along with 13 civilians. [2] In contrast, Austrian historian Kurt Bauer's extensive studies concluded that there were 223 deaths: 111 Nazi supporters, including the 13 who were executed, 101 on the Government side, and 11 civilians. [1] The number of injured is estimated at 500–600 people.
On 26 July 1934, military tribunals and court-martials were convened to prosecute the rebels. Dozens of death sentences were imposed, of which 13 were carried out. Of those executed, four of them were on-duty police officers who'd collaborated with the rebels during the seizure of the Federal Chancellery. Viennese police officers Josef Hackl, Erich Wohlrab, Franz Leeb, and Ludwig Maitzen were defendants in a mass trial of nine police officers for collaboration. Hackl, Wohlrab, Leeb, and Maitzen were found guilty of treason and executed by hanging on 13 August 1934. The other officers received sentences ranging from 10 years to life in prison. One other collaborator, on-duty soldier Ernst Feike, was executed on 7 August 1934. [6] Another 4,000 rebels received prison sentences or were detained. In Vienna alone, at least 260 police officers were arrested after officials found a list of Nazi Party members while searching a police officer's home. [7] [8]
Many rebels fled to Yugoslavia or to Germany. Kurt von Schuschnigg became the new Chancellor and Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg remained as Vice-Chancellor.
After the failed putsch, Hitler closed down the Munich office of the Austrian Nazi Party. [9]
Engelbert Dollfuß was an Austrian politician who served as Chancellor of Austria between 1932 and 1934. Having served as Minister for Forests and Agriculture, he ascended to Federal Chancellor in 1932 in the midst of a crisis for the conservative government. This crisis culminated in the Self-elimination of the Austrian Parliament, a coup sparked by resignation of the presiding officers of the National Council. Suppressing the Socialist movement in the Austrian Civil War and later banning the Austrian Nazi Party, he cemented the rule of Austrofascism through the First of May Constitution in 1934. Later that year, Dollfuss was assassinated as part of a failed coup attempt by Nazi agents. His successor Kurt Schuschnigg maintained the regime until Adolf Hitler's Anschluss in 1938.
Kurt Alois Josef Johann von Schuschnigg was an Austrian politician who was the Chancellor of the Federal State of Austria from the 1934 assassination of his predecessor Engelbert Dollfuss until the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany. Although Schuschnigg considered Austria a "German state" and Austrians to be Germans, he was strongly opposed to Adolf Hitler's goal to absorb Austria into the Third Reich and wished for it to remain independent.
The Heimwehr or Heimatschutz was a nationalist, initially paramilitary group that operated in the First Austrian Republic from 1920 to 1936. It was similar in methods, organization, and ideology to the Freikorps in Germany. The Heimwehr was opposed to parliamentary democracy, socialism and Marxism and fought in various skirmishes against left-wing and foreign groups during the 1920s and 1930s. Some of its regional groups also opposed Nazism while others favored it. In spite of its anti-democratic stance, the Heimwehr developed a political wing called the Heimatblock that was close to the conservative Christian Social Party and took part in both the cabinet of Chancellor Carl Vaugoin in 1930 and in Engelbert Dollfuss' right-wing government from 1932 to 1934. In 1936 the Heimwehr was absorbed into what was at the time the only legally permitted political party in Austria, the Fatherland Front, and then later into the Frontmiliz, an amalgamation of militia units that in 1937 became part of Austria's armed forces.
Ignaz Seipel was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian and politician of the Christian Social Party. He was its chairman from 1921 to 1930 and served as Austria's federal chancellor twice, from 1922 to 1924 and 1926 to 1929. Seipel's terms in office saw the reorganization of the state's finances and passage of the 1929 amendment to the federal constitution that strengthened the role of the Austrian President. As chancellor he opposed the Social Democratic Party of Austria and Austromarxism and supported paramilitary militias such as the Heimwehr, an organization similar to the German Freikorps.
Austrian Nazism or Austrian National Socialism was a pan-German movement that was formed at the beginning of the 20th century. The movement took a concrete form on 15 November 1903 when the German Worker's Party (DAP) was established in Austria with its secretariat stationed in the town of Aussig. It was suppressed under the rule of Engelbert Dollfuss (1932–34), with its political organization, the DNSAP banned in early 1933, but was revived and made part of the German Nazi Party after the German annexation of Austria in 1938.
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Wilhelm Miklas was an Austrian politician who served as President of Austria from 1928 until the Anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938.
The Austrian Civil War of 12–15 February 1934, also known as the February Uprising or the February Fights, was a series of clashes in the First Austrian Republic between the forces of the authoritarian right-wing government of Engelbert Dollfuss and the Republican Protection League, the banned paramilitary arm of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria. The fighting started when League members fired on the Austrian police who were attempting to enter the Social Democrats' party headquarters in Linz to search for weapons. It spread from there to Vienna and other industrial centres in eastern and central Austria. The superior numbers and firepower of the Austrian police and Federal Army quickly put an end to the uprising. The overall death toll is estimated at about 350.
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Austria was part of Nazi Germany from 13 March 1938 until 27 April 1945, when Allied-occupied Austria declared independence from Nazi Germany.
The Fatherland Front was the right-wing conservative, nationalist and corporatist ruling political organisation of the Federal State of Austria. It claimed to be a nonpartisan movement, and aimed to unite all the people of Austria, overcoming political and social divisions. Established on 20 May 1933 by Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss as the only legally permitted party in the country, it was organised along the lines of Italian Fascism, was fully aligned with the Catholic Church, and did not advocate any racial ideology, as Italian Fascism later did. It advocated Austrian nationalism and independence from Germany on the basis of protecting Austria's Catholic religious identity from what they considered a Protestant-dominated German state.
The Republikanischer Schutzbund was an Austrian paramilitary organisation established in 1923 by the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria to defend the Austrian Republic in the face of rising political radicalisation after World War I. The Schutzbund, whose membership peaked at about 100,000 men in 1925, was armed and organised on military lines. In the July Revolt of 1927 it worked with government authorities to try to prevent the spread of violence, but it largely sat out the Pfrimer Putsch in September 1931 because it had failed so quickly.
Otto Planetta was an Austrian National Socialist who assassinated the Chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuß, during the July Putsch in 1934.
Emil Fey was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, leader of the right-wing paramilitary Heimwehr forces and politician of the First Austrian Republic. He served as Vice-Chancellor of Austria from 1933 to 1934, leading the country into the period of Austrofascism under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß. Fey played a vital role in the violent suppression of the Republikanischer Schutzbund and, during the 1934 Austrian Civil War, of the Social Democratic Workers' Party.
Anton Rintelen was an Austrian academic, jurist and politician. Initially associated with the right wing Christian Social Party, he became involved in the July Putsch, a Nazi coup d'état plot, in 1934.
The Federal State of Austria was a continuation of the First Austrian Republic between 1934 and 1938 when it was a one-party state led by the conservative, nationalist, and corporatist Fatherland Front. The Ständestaat concept, derived from the notion of Stände, was advocated by leading regime politicians such as Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. The result was an authoritarian government based on a mix of Italian Fascist and conservative Catholic influences.
Prince Ernst Rüdiger Camillo von Starhemberg, often known simply as Prince Starhemberg, was an Austrian nationalist and politician who helped introduce Austrofascism and install a clerical fascist dictatorship in Austria in the interwar period. A fierce opponent of Anschluss, he fled Austria when the Nazis invaded the country and briefly served with the Free French and British forces in World War II.
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Fridolin Glass, also Glaß was an Austrian Nazi activist and Schutzstaffel (SS) officer. Glass came to prominence in 1934 when he became the effective leader of the July Putsch, a failed coup attempt by the Nazis in Austria.
Franz Holzweber was an Austrian National Socialist who was an accomplice to the assassination of the Chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuß, during the July Putsch in 1934.
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