first part: Austrofascism
In the 1890s, the founding members of the conservative-clerical Christian Social Party (CS) like Karl von Vogelsang and the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger had already developed anti-liberal views,[2] though primarily from an economic perspective considering the pauperization of the proletariat and the lower middle class. Strongly referring to the doctrine of Catholic social teaching, the CS agitated against the Austrian labour movement led by the Social Democratic Party of Austria. The CS also spread antisemitic prejudices, albeit never as virulent as the Nazis eventually became.
During the Great Depression in the First Austrian Republic of the early 1930s, the CS on the basis of the Quadragesimo anno encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931 pursued the idea of overcoming the ongoing class struggle by the implementation of a corporative form of government modelled on Italian fascism and Portugal’s Estado Novo. The CS politician Engelbert Dollfuss, appointed Chancellor of Austria in 1932, on 4 March 1933 saw an opportunity in the resignation of Social Democrat Karl Renner as president of the Austrian Nationalrat, after irregularities occurred during a voting process. Dollfuss called the incident a “self-elimination” (Selbstausschaltung) of the parliament and had the following meeting on 15 March forcibly prorogued by the forces of the Vienna police department. His fellow CS party member, President Wilhelm Miklas, analogous to Adolf Hitler’s victory in the German elections of 5 March 1933 did not take any action to restore democracy.
Chancellor Dollfuss then governed by emergency decree, banning the Communist Party on 26 May 1933, the Social Democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund paramilitary organization on 30 May and the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party on 19 June. On 20 May 1933 he had established the Fatherland’s Front as a unity party of “an autonomous, Christian, German, corporative Federal State of Austria”. On 12 February 1934 the government’s attempts to enforce the ban of the Schutzbund at the Hotel Schiff in Linz sparked the Austrian Civil War. The revolt was suppressed with support by the Bundesheer and right-wing Heimwehr troops under Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, and ended with the ban of the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions. The path to dictatorship was completed on 1 May 1934, when the Constitution of Austria was recast into a severely authoritarian document by a rump National Council.
Dollfuss continued to rule by emergency measures until his assassination on 25 July 1934 during the Nazi July Putsch. Although the coup d’état initially had the encouragement of Hitler, it was quickly suppressed and Dollfuss’s education minister, Kurt Schuschnigg, succeeded him. Hitler officially denied any involvement in the failed coup, but he continued to destabilise the Austrian state by secretly supporting Nazi sympathisers like Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Edmund Glaise-Horstenau. In turn Austria under Schuschnigg sought the backing of its southern neighbour, the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Tables turned after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War of 1935–36, when Mussolini, internationally isolated, approached Hitler. Though Schuschnigg tried to improve relations with Nazi Germany by amnestying several Austrian Nazis and accepting them in the Fatherland’s Front, he had no chance to prevail against the “axis” of Berlin and Rome proclaimed by Mussolini on 1 November 1936.
https://www.theviennareview.at/archives/2012/original-sin-the-dollfuss-legacy
Finally, Austria seems to be clearing out the skeletons in its closet: In 2009, court convictions of soldiers who deserted the National Socialist Wehrmacht During World War II were formally annulled. And a memorial in Vienna, planned for 2013, will finally honour the conscientious deserters, seeking to redress having been disowned so long ago by the Austrian state.
But the government’s ambivalent treatment of a period that is intimately linked to the National Socialist regime, casts doubt on its commitment to seriously re-appraise the country’s political past.
In January, the Parliament passed a “Rehabilitation Act” (Aufhebungs- und Rehabilitierungsgesetz) declaring convictions of treason handed down during the Austro-Fascist regime of 1933 – 1938 as unlawful. But the new law stops short of condemning the regime outright: That would have meant a fall from grace for the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), whose honoured former leader, Engelbert Dollfuss, was the chancellor presiding over many of the atrocities of the 1930s. Instead, the ÖVP holds on to the myth of Dollfuss as the martyr who defended Austria against the encroachments of Nazi Germany.
In 1934, Dollfuss dissolved parliament, banned oppositional parties, and introduced authoritarian rule based on a hierarchy of professions. While this ostensibly served to protect Austria from subversion by the National Socialist Party, NSDAP, the regime mainly targeted socialists, communists, and liberals. The socialists’ February Uprising of 1934 was brutally crushed and the internment and execution of some 140 of the regime’s opponents followed.
Far from repelling the Nazi threat, the Austro-fascist government helped lay the ground for the Anschluss in 1938, by eliminating fascism’s opponents on the left.
Against this background, the Rehabilitation Law is little more than a half-hearted compromise. Most striking is the absence of any political classification of the era in question: Neither Ständestaat – the propaganda term used by the regime – nor any of the more recent historiographical terms, either proto-fascist, Austro-fascist, or clerical-fascist, are mentioned. The true “nature of the beast” is only alluded to.
While the law grants a reprieve to those who “fought between the 6 Mar. 1933 and the 12 Mar. 1938 for an independent, democratic Austria, aware of its historical duty” and who were subsequently prosecuted for their actions, the reasons for their protest are meticulously avoided. No word of the dissolution of Parliament, the internment camps, or the executions. Moreover, the law clearly rules out compensation payments to the victims’ descendants.
A thorough re-evaluation of the era would look very different.
The law finally recognises people who suffered at the hands of an unjust system seventy years ago as victims. Yet any evidence of the regime’s crimes is painstakingly sidestepped, as that would raise questions that the modern ÖVP would be hard pressed to explain.
If the conservative party confessed to the character of the Austro-fascist Ständestaat, many of the party’s forefathers and their involvement in that very regime would come under renewed scrutiny. Prominent figures of the ÖVP’s post-1945 founding generation, who went on to hold high offices in the Austrian Second Republic, would suddenly appear in a very questionable light.
By hesitantly endorsing the law, the ÖVP is stuck in a paradoxical situation: One the one hand, the law recognises the regime opponents’ democratic justification; on the other, the ÖVP continues to defend the honourable intentions of the chancellor who crushed those very opponents. How long can the ÖVP maintain this historical schizophrenia?
The willingness to support a long over-due law is not the same as grasping the necessity to re-assess the era in question. Nothing illustrates the ÖVP’s continued denial better than the prominent display of Dollfuss’s portrait in the party’s clubroom in the parliament. There, he continues to look down on visitors to the very democratic institution he eliminated 78 years ago.