Word: schuschnigg
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...actually made an abortive attempt to seize Austria in 1934, when some 150 SS men dressed in Austrian army uniforms burst into the Chancellery in Vienna and shot down Conservative Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. That was supposed to be the start of a Nazi coup, but Justice Minister Kurt von Schuschnigg rallied the police and had the assassins arrested. Italy, which had guaranteed Austrian independence, mobilized four divisions on the frontier. Hitler backed down. By 1938, however, he had built a threatening army and had won the support of Italy's Mussolini (they had signed a secret protocol in 1936 creating...
Hitler's strategy was a classic example of what came to be known as a war of nerves. All through 1937, Austrian Nazis, armed and financed from Germany, staged demonstrations, street fights, midnight bombings. Schuschnigg, now Chancellor, banned the party and kept arresting its agents. In February 1938 Hitler invited the Austrian leader to his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden. There he stormed at his visitor, declaring that the Austrian problem must be solved or his army would demand its "just revenge." When Schuschnigg asked what it was that Hitler wanted, he was handed a typed "agreement" and told that...
...Schuschnigg surrendered and returned home. But President Wilhelm Miklas, who had not experienced Hitler's persuasion, refused to accept the deal. When Hitler heard that, he ordered the Wehrmacht to mobilize, as publicly as possible. Schuschnigg tried to defend his regime by announcing a plebiscite in four days, on March 13, to decide whether Austrians wanted "a free, independent, social, Christian and united Austria." Hitler, apoplectic, ordered the Wehrmacht to invade Austria on March 12 unless Schuschnigg called off the plebiscite. Once again Schuschnigg surrendered, but Hitler kept increasing his demands. Now he insisted that Schuschnigg resign and be replaced...
Britain and France again protested but did nothing, so Hitler's aggressiveness had conquered a whole country without a shot being fired. And with that conquest came severe repression. When Hitler went to Vienna, Heinrich Himmler's police began to arrest 79,000 "unreliables." Schuschnigg was kept in a single room at police headquarters and assigned to cleaning toilets for 17 months, then shipped to Dachau. Jews were rounded up and made to get on their hands and knees and scrub away Schuschnigg campaign slogans...
DIED. Kurt von Schuschnigg, 79, Austria's autocratic Chancellor before annexation by Hitler's Germany in 1938; of pneumonia; near Innsbruck. Taking power in 1934, he suppressed the Communist and Social Democratic parties but then came under growing pressure from the Nazis for Anschluss, or union. After spending the war years as a Nazi prisoner, he taught political science at St. Louis University for two decades and returned to Austria...