Before the Reichstag Fire

World War Wednesday: Interwar Austria

Welcome to World War Wednesday, a weekly dive into the continuous, thirty-year epoch of global conflict from 1914 to 1945. Here, I strip away popular myths to analyze the dynamics of industrial warfare, institutional behaviors, and the ideologies that shaped the world we inherited.

After the fall of the House of Habsburg and the disintegration of their empire, what was now called Austria was a broken rump. Four million Austrians were forcibly transferred to the rule of their Italian, Czechoslovak and Serbian-ruled Yugoslav neighbors as a result of losing the Great War. These persons were denied the right of self-determination to remain Austrian and be led by Vienna, or to join the new German republic governed from Berlin; instead, they were made minorities in states that had seized their lands. The almost 7 million Austrians left were vulnerable, left with so little arable land to farm that some feared that the state was not viable. Yet it limped on for eight years before tensions between the religious right, the radicals and the social democrats exploded.

As in Germany, there was paramilitary violence throughout the 1920s by groups that rejected the Versailles settlement and its ban on Austria unifying with Germany, and targeted social democrats and workers’ groups. However, the Roman Catholic Church was much stronger in Austria and for a time this acted as moderating influence on the conservative elements of society. Yet, some of the groups that might appear to be aligned with conservative interests were actually far more radical and merely shared a dislike of the social democrats and communists. Then, in 1927 the political equilibrium of Austria was shattered by a breakdown in law and order.

In the small border town of Schattendorf, on January 30th, gunmen opened fire on paramilitary members of the SDAP, the Social Democratic Party of Austria. In the shooting they killed a Croatian war veteran, a child, and wounded five others. It was quickly known that the killers were members of the Frontkämpfervereinigung Deutsch-Österreichs, the Frontline Veterans’ Association of German-Austria.

Earlier that day the right and leftwing paramilitaries had got into an altercation when the rightwing decided to provoke the left by holding a paramilitary meeting in a social democratic town. The left responded and the shooting happened when three Frontkämpfervereinigung members barricaded themselves in a home and opened fire on passing leftist Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection League) members. The ideology of Mussolini’s trenchocracy—the idea that hardened rightwing veterans of the First World War trenches had the right to do as they pleased and remake the rules of society—had come to Austria with bloody intent.¹

The ex-Austrian nazi, Walter Riehl rushed to defend the shooters. Austrian law and order were deteriorating; the authorities were less than enthusiastic about enforcing the law against violent paramilitaries who were anti “the Left.” Corruption for the right cause. Then on July 14, the obviously guilty murderers were acquitted.

The result was the Wiener Justizpalastbrand, the Vienna Palace of Justice Fire.

The acquittal ignited an immediate general strike that paralyzed Vienna. The next day, a furious working-class crowd gathered in the Ringstraße, the boulevard encircling the city-center, after being pushed away from other targets by police. Armed with stones and convinced that the courts were practicing partisan class justice (Klassenjustiz), the demonstrators targeted the Palace of Justice, as the symbol of a corrupt legal system. They breached the building and began smashing and breaking. And then the building burned. The mob which began ransacking the palace without a plan may not have intended to burn the building, however, when it went up in flames and as the building became fully engulfed, the rioters enthusiastically sabotaged hydrants and harassed the firefighters, making the conflagration worse.

While the moderate Social Democrats tried and failed to de-escalate the chaos, the Vienna Police Chief Johann Schober decided to suppress the revolt. Going around the mayor and the city government that refused to call in the army for aid, he simply armed the police with military rifles and ordered them to fire into the crowds, leaving around ninety demonstrators and half a dozen police officers dead. The blow to the prestige of the courts and to the credibility of the left helped the rightwing paramilitaries slowly build their power as Austria moved into the dangerous 1930s. Austria had many problems that they could not blame on Hitler and the German nazis, though later, they tried.

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Photo by Michael Pointner on Unsplash

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