Word: dollfuss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conjures up pleasant visions of ski weeks at Innsbruck, Vienna Sachertorte, Salzburg's music. Few people now recall two important events in that country that led up to World War II and betrayed a darker side of the Austrian character. One was the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by local Nazis in 1934, part of a coup that failed. The other, which so dramatically succeeded, was the Anschluss of 1938, when the German army annexed Austria unopposed...
Vienna-born Historian Walter Maass is especially intriguing on the Dollfuss assassination, partly because he lived through it all as a young adult. Maass finds it hard to capture the personality of his diminutive (4 ft. 11 in.) "Milli-Metternich." But he shows effectively how Dollfuss forced his "Christian corporate state" too suddenly into a totalitarian mold, basing his power on a single official party while socialists plotted on the left and Austrian Nazis on the right. Maass also demonstrates the appalling lack of official reaction when the government learned of the plot to overthrow it in July 1934. Austria...
...Nazi rebels were no geniuses. One coup leader, separated from his troops, wandered around in the July heat of Vienna "disguised" in an overcoat. But the government bumbling allowed the rebels access to the Ballhausplatz (the residence of Austria's Chancellor), where one of them, Otto Planetta, shot Dollfuss. Maass concedes Planetta may only have been "trigger-happy," but the conspirators completed the crime by refusing Dollfuss both a doctor and a priest. Because the Chancellor had sent his Cabinet away, the coup did not destroy the government. The plotters were executed. Germany was still too weak to intervene...
...little weight with the others. Well, he does. But not enough. Not enough, for example, to justify calling me every other night around one in the morning to tell me what he expects of Charles [the candidate], on the basis of his own keen analysis of Austria before Dollfuss. The hours I've spent listening to that chucklehead outline a strategy which would be just swell if only Consolo [the incumbent governor] were Franz Josef!...I'd rather spend my time chewing the fat with One-Eyed Danny Geegan of the Police Athletic League. At least I'm sure...
...Defense Ministry official said that Beer's name does not appear on the roster of former students at Wiener Neustadt. Beer's vaunted military heroism also faded: veterans of the Socialist Schutzbund (militia), who had defended their Vienna homes for a bloody four days in 1934 against Dollfuss' semi-fascist regime, denied that Beer had fought beside them, nor could any record be found to support his claim that he commanded a Loyalist battalion during the Spanish Civil War. Beer's cultural past vanished as quickly. He had not worked as assistant stage manager at Vienna...