Word: heimwehr
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When domestic quarrels threaten acute physical violence, nervous householders send for a policeman to restore order. So, last week, did the Austrian Republic. Frightened by the imminent threat of civil war between Austria's two snarling private armies (the semi-Fascist Heimwehr, and the Socialist Schutzbund), the entire cabinet of Chancellor Ernst Streeruwitz, an ineffectual businessman, declared itself incapable of dealing with the situation, resigned in a body. Leaders of all political parties rushed to Vienna's police station, begged sleek white-bearded Police Chief Johann Schober to take over the reins of government...
...administration seemed to justify Vienna's blind faith. Telephoning vigorously, rushing from office building to office building, he completed and published a list of his cabinet within 24 hours, a task that had taken his predecessor Chancellor Streeruwitz three weeks. As a precautionary step against threatened Heimwehr-Schutzbund riots he suspended all military furloughs, ordered all Austrian troops to be ready for immediate action. In Vienna he suppressed an edition of the Communist newspaper Rote Fahne, arrested its editor "for inciting troops to mutiny against the new government." In the country he sent bus loads of soldiers careening over...
...With such folk as the Socialists we can only talk with whips in our hands!" shouted General Hess, a onetime Imperial Austrian Corps Commander, haranguing 1,500 Heimwehr at Waidhofen. "Steady, men! Keep your rifles at the ready!" warned the Socialist organ Arbeiter-Zeitung. "Wait until the Heimwehr attack. Then let them taste steel...
Basically the Heimwehr demanded as the only alternative to revolution, that the Austrian Constitution be amended to strengthen the authority of the Cabinet and curb the influence of the potent Socialist element in Vienna. Since a two-thirds majority in Parliament is needed to amend the Constitution and since Socialist Deputies number over one-third, their opposition has always blocked all such amendments. Last week the Heimwehr's truculent Reichspost-official mouthpiece of the strongest man in Austria, stern, bald, beak-nosed onetime Chancellor Ignaz Seipel-proposed a bullying solution of the Constitutional issue: Let Parliament be convened...
Worried by such Heimwehr-Schutzbund snarls, members of Chancellor Streeruwitz's cabinet finally announced that they would soon submit to Parliament proposals to change the Austrian Constitution in a way which might placate the reactionary Heimwehr yet be mild enough to win the grudging approval of the Socialist Schutzbund. Nettled by such temporizing, Heimwehr authorities in Vienna issued a sensational "Last Warning to Politicians"-a flat ultimatum to the Government of Chancellor Streeruwitz that a revolution will be staged within a fortnight unless he consents to the Heimwehr scheme of jamming through their Constitutional amendment...