page_title: Kurt Schuschnigg
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Kurt Schuschnigg / Biography / Political career
caption_attribution_description: English: Left to right: Austrian Foreign Minister Guido Schmidt, Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg at the opening of the Austro-Italian Conference in 1936. Deutsch: Guido Schmidt, Galeazzo Ciano und Kurt Schuschnigg, Wiener Konferenz, Unterzeichner der Römischen Protokolle
context_page_description: Kurt Alois Josef Johann Schuschnigg was an Austrian Fatherland Front politician who was the Chancellor of the Federal State of Austria from the 1934 assassination of his predecessor Engelbert Dollfuss until the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany. Although Schuschnigg accepted that Austria was a "German state" and that Austrians were Germans, he was strongly opposed to Adolf Hitler's goal to absorb Austria into the Third Reich and wished for it to remain independent.
  When Schuschnigg's efforts to keep Austria independent had failed, he resigned his office. After the Anschluss he was arrested, kept in solitary confinement and eventually interned in various concentration camps. He was liberated in 1945 by the advancing United States Army and spent most of the rest of his life as part of the academia in the United States.
context_section_description: Schuschnigg first joined the right-wing Christian Social Party and in 1927 was elected to the Nationalrat, then the youngest parliamentary deputy. Suspicious of the paramilitary Heimwehr organisation, he established the Catholic Ostmärkische Sturmscharen forces in 1930. 
  On 29 January 1932, the Christian Social chancellor Karl Buresch appointed Schuschnigg Minister of Justice, an office he retained in the cabinet of Buresch's successor Engelbert Dollfuss, and he also served as Minister of Education from 24 May 1933. As justice minister, he openly discussed the abolition of the parliamentary system and restored the death penalty. In March 1933, he and Chancellor Dollfuss took the occasion to dissolve the National Council parliament. After the socialist February Uprising of 1934, he pressed for the execution of several insurgents, earning him the reputation of an "assassin of the workers". He would later call his orders a "faux pas."
  On 1 May 1934, Dollfuss had erected the authoritarian Federal State of Austria. After Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazi Otto Planetta during the July Putsch, Schuschnigg on 29 July was appointed Austrian chancellor. Like Dollfuss, Schuschnigg ruled mostly by decree. Although his rule was milder than that of Dollfuss, his Austrofascist policies were not much different from the policies of his predecessor. He had to manage the economy of a near-bankrupt state and to maintain law and order in a country which was forbidden, by the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain, to maintain an army in excess of 30,000 men. At the same time, had also to cope with armed paramilitary forces in Austria, which owed their allegiance not to the state but to various rival political parties. He also had to be mindful of the growing strength of the Austrian Nazis, who supported Adolf Hitler's ambitions to absorb Austria into Nazi Germany. His overriding political concern was to preserve Austria's independence within the borders imposed on it by the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which ultimately failed.
  John Gunther wrote in 1936 of Schuschnigg: "It would not be too much to say that he is as much a prisoner of the Italians now [as he was during World War I]—if the Germans don't get him next week".  His policy of counterbalancing the German threat by aligning himself with Austria's southern and eastern neighbours—the Kingdom of Italy under the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini and the Kingdom of Hungary—was doomed to failure after Mussolini had sought Hitler's support in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and left Austria under the increasing pressure of a massively rearmed Third Reich. Schuschnigg adopted a policy of appeasement towards Hitler and called Austria the "better German state", but struggled to keep Austria independent. In July 1936, he signed an Austro-German Agreement, which, among other concessions, allowed the release of imprisoned July Putsch insurgents and the inclusion of the Nazi contact men Edmund Glaise-Horstenau and Guido Schmidt in the Austrian cabinet. The Nazi Party remained banned; however, the Austrian Nazis gained ground and relations between the two countries deteriorated further. In reaction to Hitler's threats to exercise a controlling influence over Austrian politics, Schuschnigg publicly declared in January 1938: 
  There is no question of ever accepting Nazi representatives in the Austrian cabinet. An absolute abyss separates Austria from Nazism ... We reject uniformity and centralization. ... Christendom is anchored in our very soil, and we know but one God: and that is not the State, or the Nation, or that elusive thing, Race.
caption: Chancellor Schuschnigg (right) with his state secretary Guido Schmidt and the Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, 1936
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