Austrian Civil War
Austria fought a four-day civil war in February 1934 and the winning side was destroyed by the Nazis four years later. The republic created in 1918 had been divided since its foundation between Red Vienna — a social democratic city government running the most ambitious municipal housing programme in Europe — and a Catholic, conservative countryside, each with its own paramilitary formation. Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor in 1932 with a majority of one, and in March 1933 used a procedural accident in which all three parliamentary presidents resigned to declare that parliament had eliminated itself. He then governed by an emergency decree of 1917, banned the Communists and the Nazis, and built an authoritarian corporatist state on Italian lines with Mussolini's backing. The fighting began on 12 February when police searching for weapons at a party building in Linz were fired on. The Schutzbund rose in Vienna and the industrial towns, and the government used artillery against the Karl-Marx-Hof and other municipal housing blocks, which had been designed with defence in mind and were full of families. Several hundred people were killed, the Social Democratic Party was banned, and its leaders were imprisoned or fled. Dollfuss was murdered in July by Austrian Nazis in a failed putsch, and Mussolini moved troops to the Brenner. Schuschnigg governed a country whose largest political movement had been outlawed, and Hitler annexed it in March 1938 against no organised resistance at all. The Karl-Marx-Hof still stands, a kilometre long, with the shell damage repaired and a plaque. Vienna's municipal housing programme was resumed after 1945 and about half the city's population now lives in it, which is the one part of the settlement that survived everything.
- Year: 1934 CE
- Category: Political
