Engelbert Dollfuss
Engelbert Dollfuss was Chancellor of Austria from 1932 to 1934, dismantled its parliamentary democracy, and was murdered by Austrian Nazis months later. Born in Lower Austria in 1892, the illegitimate son of a peasant woman, he was very short — about 150 centimetres, which earned him the nickname Millimetternich — and was rejected for military service before being accepted as a volunteer in 1914, serving throughout the war. He studied law in Vienna and economics in Berlin, and made his career in the agricultural chamber of Lower Austria, becoming minister of agriculture in 1931 and chancellor in May 1932, aged thirty-nine, with a majority of one. Facing the Depression, a Social Democratic opposition with its own paramilitary force, and a Nazi movement that grew rapidly after Hitler took power in Germany in January 1933, he chose authoritarian rule. In March 1933 a procedural tangle led all three presidents of the National Council to resign; Dollfuss declared parliament had eliminated itself and refused to let it reconvene, governing by an emergency decree from 1917. He banned the Nazi Party in June 1933 and the Communists, and established the Fatherland Front. In February 1934 a search for weapons in Linz triggered four days of fighting with Social Democratic militia in Vienna and elsewhere; artillery was used against the Karl-Marx-Hof housing block, hundreds died, and the party was banned. In May he promulgated a corporatist constitution creating the Austrofascist Ständestaat. He depended on Mussolini to deter German annexation. On 25 July 1934 Austrian SS men in stolen uniforms entered the chancellery and shot him. He was left to bleed for hours and died at thirty-nine.
- Lived: 1892 CE – 1934 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: chancellor, statesman
