July Revolt and suspension of Parliament

Political antagonisms in Austria escalated in 1927 when members of the right-wing Front Fighters' Union (Frontkämpfervereinigung) in Schattendorf (Burgenland) shot and killed two people, including a child, during a demonstration by the Republic Protection League. In the trial of the Schattendorf case, the jury acquitted the alleged perpetrators. On 15 July 1927, the day after the verdict, the SDAPÖ's leadership was not able to control the demonstrations of an outraged crowd. During the July Revolt, the Vienna Palace of Justice was stormed and set on fire. After police guardrooms were also attacked, the police president, Johannes Schober, gave orders to disperse the demonstrators with armed force. People who were trying to flee as well as some who were not involved in the demonstration were caught in the police fire. The result was 89 dead, including four policemen, and 1,000 wounded.^[7]

The problems facing the First Republic worsened in the following years. The Great Depression resulted in high unemployment, and after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Nazi sympathisers who wanted unification of Austria with Germany threatened the Austrian state from within.

Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss wearing a Heimwehr uniform (1933)

On 4 March 1933, Engelbert Dollfuss, the Christian Social chancellor, suspended the Austrian Parliament. In a close vote on railway workers' wages in the National Council, each of the three presidents of parliament tactically resigned from their positions to cast a ballot, which left nobody to preside over the meeting. Even though the bylaws could have resolved the situation, Dollfuss used the opportunity to declare that Parliament had ceased to function and then blocked all attempts to reconvene it. Police forces barricaded the parliament building to prevent members from entering.^[8] The SDAPÖ thus lost its primary platform for political action. The Christian Socialists, facing pressure and violence not only from the left but also from Nazis infiltrating from Germany, were able to rule by decree on the basis of a 1917 emergency law. They began to suspend civil liberties and imprison members of the Social Democratic Party.^[9]

In the wake of armed conflicts, the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) was banned on 26 May 1933,^[10] as was the SDAPÖ's Republican Protection League on the 31st.^[11]

Dollfuss, the Fatherland Front and the Heimwehr then set about the destruction of the last remnants of the Social Democratic and Marxist-oriented workers' movement. On 24 January 1934, the order went out to search party buildings and members' homes for weapons belonging to the Protection League. The leaders of the SDAPÖ did not respond to the step-by-step disempowerment and disarming of their movement. Their cornerstone policy allowed them to fight only if the party were banned, the unions dissolved or the government of "Red Vienna" suppressed.^[12]

Short term

Memorial stone for a police officer killed on 12 February 1934 in Linz during the civil war

The Dollfuss government published a statement on 1 March 1934 reporting that 193 civilians had been killed and 493 wounded in the fighting, while among the police and Army there were 104 dead and 309 wounded. Analyses by later researchers vary widely, going as high as British journalist George Eric Rowe Gedye's estimate of 2,000 dead and 5,000 wounded.^[17] According to a comprehensive 2018 study by historian Kurt Bauer, between 350 and 370 people lost their lives in the fighting – about 130 of them uninvolved civilians and 110 each among the government forces and members of the Protection League. The largest number of deaths – about 200 to 220 – were in Vienna.^[1][18]

On 11 November 1933, all of Austria had been placed under martial law, during which the death penalty was reintroduced for certain crimes. An emergency decree of 12 February 1934 extended the list to rebellion, so that Protection League members who had been taken prisoner while armed (estimated at around 10,000)^[19] could be sentenced to death. The defendants were tried within three days in abbreviated procedures by summary courts consisting of four professional judges.^[20][21]

The summary courts condemned 24 people to death, of whom 15 were pardoned.^[22] Nine men, some of them prominent members of the Protection League, were executed.^[15] Carrying out the death sentences was controversial even among those in the government who were responsible for it. Heimwehr leader Ernst Starhemberg saw it as a shameful act of revenge and without sense, while Emil Fey, also a leader in the Heimwehr, insisted on the executions. Pleas for clemency from Cardinal Theodor Innitzer and the Holy See were ignored. The detention camp at Wöllersdorf, which opened in the fall of 1933 for opponents of the regime – initially mostly communists and National Socialists – also held Social Democrats after February 1934.^[23]

The leadership of the SDAPÖ under Otto Bauer (the leading theoretician of Austromarxism), Julius Deutsch and others fled to Czechoslovakia on 13 February,^[24] a move that the representatives of the government exploited as propaganda.

Long term

The incidents of February 1934 were taken as a pretext by the government to ban the Social Democratic Party and its affiliated trade unions altogether. In May, the conservatives replaced the democratic constitution by a corporatist constitution^[25] modelled along the lines of Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy, for which the socialists coined the term Austrofascism. The Patriotic Front, into which the Heimwehr and the Christian Social Party were merged, became the only legal political party in the resulting authoritarian regime, the Federal State of Austria.

Memorial to the victims and fighters at the place where the civil war started, in the courtyard of the Hotel Schiff in Linz

The government found itself isolated domestically because the Social Democrats – above all due to the death sentences that had been carried out – turned away from the state and either called for open resistance using such means as leaflets or went into a kind of inner emigration. In his speech during the 1936 socialist trial of 28 people accused of violating the ban on the SDAPÖ, Bruno Kreisky (who was himself on trial) alluded to the issue:

It is also possible that in a difficult moment, the government will have to call on the broad masses of the people to defend the borders. But only a democratic Austria will respond to such a summons. Only free citizens will fight against the gagging of Austria.^[26]

In detention centres and prisons of the Second Republic, Social Democrats and National Socialists come into contact with one another. For both, Austrofascism was the enemy. The common ground was to affect the political assessments of former National Socialists after World War II.

With a greater passage of time it became clear that Austria's ability to resist National Socialism was decidedly weakened by the Austrian Civil War and its consequences. By later estimates, only about a third of the Austrian population supported the dictatorial state.

After the Second World War, when Austria reemerged on the political landscape as a sovereign nation, politics again fell under the domination of the Social Democrats and the conservatives, the latter in the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). To avoid repeating the bitter divisions of the First Republic, leaders of the Second Republic of Austria were determined to promote the principle of a broad consensus as a core element of the new political system. They introduced the concept of the Grand coalition in which the two major parties shared the government and avoided open confrontation. The new system brought with it stability and continuity.