Set within this malaise of some impending yet indiscernible maneuver, the fascist fighting across the border escalated to an international crisis. On 25 July 1934, [pro‐Reich Austrians] launched a Putsch and assassinated Austrofascist Chancellor Dollfuss. While the [pro‐Reich] coup collapsed, the [pro‐Reich fascists] succeeded in sowing uncertainty and chaos.
Indeed, the ÖL tried to invade Austria to buttress the Putsch from without—they boarded trucks in Bavaria and rode to the Austrian border. The Neues Wiener Journal reported on the mobile units of Bavarian‐trained, [pro‐Reich Austrians] hoping to initiate ‘a general revolution’.⁷⁷ Southern Bavarian inhabitants reported this mobilization to [Reich] officials.
Though Hitler’s agents had actively planned parts of the coup, his régime strove to save face by distancing itself from the failed putschists.⁷⁸ The official [Fascist] government in Bavaria closely monitored the [pro‐Reich Austrians’] Munich base of operations, and it eventually closed ‘all roads leading to Austria’. Furthermore, ‘five hundred S.S. men were moved to the frontier to prevent the legionaries in the Freilassing camp from marching to Salzburg’.⁷⁹
The Austrian and German [supports of the Third Reich] split themselves on this Putsch, as they were at odds over how to respond to the failure.
Pictured: The Federal Chancellery after police officers devastated it.
About ninety kilometers west, border mayhem ensued near the Austrian town of Kufstein. On the Bavarian side, the [Reichswehr] intercepted an ÖL convoy and forced the participants to surrender their arms. However, [Reich] officials did not always arrive on time.⁸⁰ Forty [pro‐Reich Austrians] actually crossed the border, but Austrian soldiers awaited and repelled them.⁸¹
Meanwhile, the Tiroler Anzeiger acquired and printed a Bavarian report clarifying what the [pro‐Reich fascists] had planned: ‘five hundred Legionnaires should stand by prepared for the invasion’.⁸² The Salzburger Chronik likewise reported that the ÖL planned ‘to break the resistance of the [Austrian] troops and Heimatschutz who remained loyal [to Austria]’.⁸³
Three days after the [pro‐Reich] attempt, the Neue Leipziger Zeitung reported a ‘shootout’ between Heimwehren men and Austrian ‘refugees’ near the border in Kollerschlag. Presumably, such ‘refugees’ consisted of [pro‐Reich fascists] seeking asylum in Bavaria.
Austrian and German border officials alike arrived to restore order and make arrests.⁸⁴ This scuffling even caused German [Fascists] to close the Bavarian border with Austria on four occasions in the weeks following the assassination.⁸⁵
To distance itself further from the Putsch, the [Third Reich] disavowed the [Fascist] agents responsible for Dollfuss’s 1934 assassination.⁸⁶ [Berlin] reversed its policy of opening Bavaria to [pro‐Reich fascists] escaping the Austrofascist régime.
An English‐language observer recorded: ‘Nazi refugees were being welcomed into Bavaria prior to the putsch, whereas those who tried to cross the frontier’ after the putsch ‘were promptly arrested’, while ‘an armed Austrian legion […] fed, housed and drilled in Bavaria […] was subsequently forbidden its uniform and demobilised’.⁸⁷
Reporting from Passau, just on the German‐side the border, Der Morgen reported an intra[fascist] gunfight. When Bavarian SS agents demanded the ÖL surrender their guns, [Fascist] squads supposedly exchanged gunfire that led to the deaths of legionnaires. The [pro‐Reich fascists]—under command of a former Captain of the Austrian army—simply refused to give up their armaments to their fellow Bavarian [Fascists].⁸⁸
The death of the Austrofascist Chancellor likewise sparked chaos in Austria. Supporters of the Austrofascist state had projected their hopes for a viable Austria onto this fascist dictator, so his assassination a year after his assumption of power did not bode well. Thus, we might also read the ensuing martyrdom of Dollfuss, which the literature has already discussed, as an indication of Austrian emotional insecurity.⁸⁹
Compounding the sense of political instability, uncertainty abounded over Dollfuss’s rightful successor as Austrofascist dictator. Leaders of various paramilitary organizations jockeyed for position. Presumably, leadership went to Vice‐Chancellor Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, Führer of the Heimwehren. But during the Putsch, he was galivanting in Venice, trying to secure support from Mussolini.⁹⁰
Upon learning of Dollfuss’s death, Starhemberg returned to Vienna, and he attained the leadership position. His Heimwehren also helped quell the [pro‐Reich] insurrection.⁹¹ But his tenure as Austrofascist leader lasted just days. In his stead, Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg—less volatile, more palatable, and not beholden to the rambunctious Heimwehren—secured the Chancellorship.⁹² It was Schuschnigg who would then spend the next four years trying to navigate the fine, and ultimately untenable, line between appealing to German nationalism and Nazi browbeating.
Kurt Bauer’s Elementar‐Ereignis. Die österreichischen Nationalsozialisten und der Juliputsch 1934 estimates that possibly two hundred twenty‐three died during July 25–30 as a result of the failed coup, though only eleven to thirteen were civilians. The Austrofascists executed only thirteen suspects for the Putsch, four of whom were police officers after they apprehended two hundred sixty members of the police.
What business of ours is it if antisocialists massacre each other instead of us? Aside from the utility in comparing that violence with their much more intense type against us, we see that this infighting delayed (at least briefly) the Third Reich’s quest for empire, and it was good exercise for everybody involved:
What are we to make of this textured analysis of fascist infighting across a contested border? While ideological splintering and infighting is perhaps a stereotype of the left writ large, so too were right‐wingers unable to escape this siren call. We simply must keep in mind that such feuding also bedeviled far‐right, fascistizing formations in interwar Austria and Germany. Such internal division was often damning for the left, but it was formative and constitutive for fascists.
It generated the very masculine, militarized struggle they so idealized, both providing them with and validating their raison d’être. Such rivalries also provided resistance against which to radicalize. Overlayed atop the contested Austro‐Bavarian border, these rival security squads let their insecurities run wild into an outright paramilitary showdown in the borderlands.
As [Fascist] control over the German government waxed, Bavaria’s federalist privileges waned—with the Gleichschaltung, the [Fascist] Gaue eclipsed the traditional Bavarian governing structures. For all intents and purposes, Bavaria’s longstanding regional autonomy fell. Meanwhile, right‐wing Austrian patriots closed ranks around Dollfuss against [pro‐Reich] bullying.
Austrian loyalists in the Heimwehren relied more heavily on policies that solidified the physical and mental borders between these two German countries, while Austrian [pro‐Reich] Legionaries relied more heavily on practices that undermined that same border, often to the chagrin of the Germans [Fascists]. Ironically, both sets of paramilitary troopers never lost faith in their conviction that they were making Austria German again. They were just doing so in opposite ways.
All the while, the Heimwehren men wished to have their Sachertorte and eat it too: fight for Austrian autonomy from [the Third Reich] while adamantly pushing for Austrian pride in being German. These overlapping vectors eventually proved unsustainable, but Austrofascists fought to maintain them for the next four years. Only by centering the complicated histories of interwar Austria can we see that the path from Hitler’s 1933 rise to the [Third Reich’s] 1938 Anschluss was far from certain.
Click here for other events that happened today (July 25).
1883: Alfredo Casella, a composer and Fascist sympathizer, was born.
1943: In another (albeit less bloody) example of fascist infighting, the Grand Council of Fascism successfully pressured King Victor Emmanuel III to replace Benito Mussolini with Pietro Badoglio.
1944: The Axis made Operation Spring one of the worst days of the First Canadian Army’s life.
1963: Ugo Cerletti, inventor of electroconvulsive therapy, died. Although he sounds harmless, he once suggested adopting the Third Reich’s psychiatric model. (See Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth‐Century Italy.)
2003: Ludwig Bölkow, an engineer who designed aircraft for the Axis, expired.
This is stupidly funny 🤣
Fascist infighting in action!