Kurt Schuschnigg
Kurt Schuschnigg governed Austria as a dictatorship for four years to keep it out of Germany, and lost it in a weekend. He was a lawyer from Tyrol, a devout Catholic and a monarchist by sympathy, and he became chancellor in July 1934 when his predecessor was shot in the chancellery by Austrian Nazis attempting a coup. He inherited the authoritarian corporate state that predecessor had built - parliament abolished, the Social Democrats crushed by artillery in the workers' housing blocks of Vienna in a four-day civil war, and a single government-sponsored front in place of parties - and he continued it, on the argument that a country facing annexation could not afford politics. It left him defending Austrian independence with the Left in prison or exile and the Right increasingly attracted to the country that was threatening him. His protection had been Italy, which had moved divisions to the Brenner in 1934 when the Germans looked ready to march. That guarantee dissolved as Rome and Berlin drew together over Ethiopia and Spain, and by 1938 Austria had no external support at all. Summoned to Berchtesgaden in February, Schuschnigg was harangued for hours, told that his country's history was one long act of treason to the German nation, and made to sign an agreement legalising the Austrian Nazi party and giving its leader the interior ministry and the police. In March he tried the one move left and announced a plebiscite on independence, to be held in four days with a voting age of twenty-four, which was transparently designed to produce the answer he needed. Berlin gave him hours to cancel it and then to resign. He did both, and broadcast that Austria was yielding to force and that he would not have German blood shed by Germans; German troops crossed the next morning against no resistance and were met with flowers. He spent the war in custody, most of it at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, was freed by American troops in 1945, and taught constitutional law in Missouri for eighteen years.
- Lived: 1897 CE – 1977 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
