Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

608 DER FUEHRERit had to govern against its parliament, first by trickery, finally byviolence. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who had been legally chosenby the parliament, used a trifling breakdown of the parliamentarymachine, in a dispute over house rules, as a pretext to send parliamenthome. This was on March 7, 1933, two days after Hitler's Reichstagelections. Czechoslovakia was left as the last democratic island inCentral Europe, now utterly surrounded.Dollfuss, a strict Catholic, based his rule increasingly and a littlereluctantly on the Fascist Heimwehren (home guards). TheseHeimwehren were just what one would expect of a Fascist movement inthe homeland of National Socialism; they were antidemocratic and anti-Semitic. Their leader, Prince Ernst Rudiger Starhemberg, scion of aonce wealthy and important family, is said to have bought his way intothe leadership of the movement; otherwise he was a scatterbrainedyoung man who had been a follower of Hitler some years before.The Austrian Heimwehr can be said with far more truth than GermanNational Socialism to have been a child raised by sections of industry,who organized and armed it to break the Socialist control over a part ofAustria. Its opponent, Austrian Social Democracy, could also be said,with far more truth than its German sister party, to be a Socialistmovement that took its socialism seriously; consequently, theCommunist movement was insignificant in Austria. Austrian SocialDemocracy organized the workers of the city of Vienna with adetermination undreamed of by the American trade unions; and in thesphere of public health, housing, schools, its work was remarkable — inview of the poverty of the country, unique. While in Germany, fascismcould claim to be fighting for a socialism which the Marxists hadbetrayed, Austrian fascism had to attack a socialism in which the tenetsof Marxism had been partially realized. Furthermore, Austrian fascismwas no absolute defender and ally of the Church. The old 'away fromRome' attitude, the resistance to the 'foreign' papacy, also to the baptizedJews (the 'aroma of incense and garlic'), of which there were great numbersin Austria, was strong in the Heimwehr and made them anunreliable ally of the Catholic Dollfuss regime.From 1918 to 1933, it had been taken for granted on both sides