Kurt Alois Josef Johann von Schuschnigg (German: [ˈkʊʁt ˈʃʊʃnɪk]; 14 December 1897 – 18 November 1977) was a Slovene-Austrian 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 considered Austria a "German state" and Austrians to be 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 US Army and spent most of the rest of his life in academia in the United States. Schuschnigg gained American citizenship in 1956.
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Early life
Schuschnigg was born in Reiff am Gartsee (now Riva del Garda) in the Tyrolean crown land of Austria-Hungary (now in Trentino, Italy), the son of Anna Josefa Amalia (Wopfner) and Austrian General Artur von Schuschnigg, member of a long-established Austrian officers' family of Carinthian Slovene descent. The Slovene spelling of the family name is Šušnik.
He received his education at the Stella Matutina Jesuit College in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg. During World War I, he was taken prisoner at the Italian Front and held captive until September 1919. Subsequently, he studied law at the University of Freiburg and the University of Innsbruck, where he became a member of the Catholic fraternity A.V. Austria. After graduating in 1922, he practiced as a lawyer in Innsbruck.
Political career
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 had eight insurgents immediately executed, earning him the reputation of an "assassin of the workers". The executions have since been referred to as a vengeful act of judicial murder. Schuschnigg himself later called 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 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, he had to also 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:
Anschluss
On 12 February 1938, Schuschnigg met with Hitler in his Berghof residence in an attempt to smooth the worsening relations between their two countries. To Schuschnigg's surprise, Hitler presented him with a set of demands which, in manner and in terms, amounted to an ultimatum, effectively demanding the handing over of power to the Austrian Nazis. The terms of the agreement, presented to Schuschnigg for immediate endorsement, stipulated the appointment of Nazi sympathiser Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister of security, which controlled the police. Another pro-Nazi, Dr. Hans Fischböck, was to be named as minister of finance to prepare for economic union between Germany and Austria. A hundred officers were to be exchanged between the Austrian and the German armies. All imprisoned Nazis were to be amnestied and reinstated. In return, Hitler would publicly reaffirm the treaty of 11 July 1936 and Austria's national sovereignty. "The Fuhrer was abusive and threatening, and Schuschnigg was presented with far-reaching demands ..." According to Schuschnigg's memoirs, he was coerced into signing the "agreement" before leaving Berchtesgaden.
The president, Wilhelm Miklas, was reluctant to endorse the agreement but eventually did so. Then he, Schuschnigg and a few key Cabinet members considered a number of options:
1. The Chancellor resign and the President call on a new Chancellor to form a Cabinet, which would be under no obligation to the commitments of Berchtesgaden.
2. The Berchtesgaden agreement be carried out under a newly appointed Chancellor.
3. The agreement be carried out and the Chancellor remain at his post.
In the event, they decided to go with the third option.
On the following day, 14 February, Schuschnigg reorganised his cabinet on a broader basis and included representatives of all former and present political parties. Hitler immediately appointed a new Gauleiter for Austria, a Nazi Austrian army officer who had just been released from prison in accordance with the terms of the general amnesty stipulated by the Berchtesgaden agreement.
Prison and concentration camp
After initial house arrest followed by solitary confinement at Gestapo headquarters, he spent the whole of World War II in Sachsenhausen, then Dachau. In late April 1945, Schuschnigg narrowly escaped an execution order by Adolf Hitler, along with other prominent concentration camp inmates, by being transferred from Dachau to South Tyrol where SS-Totenkopfverbände guards abandoned the prisoners into the hands of some Wehrmacht officers, who then freed them. They were then turned over to American troops on 4 May 1945. From there, Schuschnigg and his family were transported, along with many of the ex-prisoners, to the isle of Capri in Italy before being set free.
Later life and death
After World War II, Kurt Schuschnigg was forbidden from joining the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) because the party wanted to distance itself from the Austrian dictatorship. Moreover, the ÖVP did not expect their social democratic coalition partner to tolerate Schuschnigg's presence in the party, since after the civil war of 1934 he had had many social democrats killed as Minister of Justice. Schuschnigg emigrated to the United States, where he was sheltered at the chateau estate Vouziers of the Desloge family in St. Louis, Missouri; and then he became a professor of political science at Saint Louis University from 1948 to 1967. He became an American citizen in 1956.
His first wife Herma died in a car accident in 1935. He remarried in 1938, but lost his second wife, Vera Fugger von Babenhausen (née Countess Czernin), in 1959.
Kurt Schuschnigg went back to Austria where he downplayed his time exercising dictatorial powers as chancellor and tried to justify the regime.
Schuschnigg died at Mutters, near Innsbruck, in 1977.
Awards and decorations
Austria-Hungary: Military Merit Cross
Austria-Hungary: Military Merit Medal
Austria-Hungary: Karl Troop Cross
Austria-Hungary: Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria, Pre-war version (2 awards)
Holy See: Order of St. Gregory the Great, Knight Grand Cross
Kingdom of Italy: Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, Knight Grand Cordon
Czechoslovakia: Order of the White Lion, Knight Grand Cross
other medals
Works
My Austria (1937)
Austrian Requiem (1946)
International Law (1959)
The Brutal Takeover (1969)
In German
Dreimal Österreich. Verlag Thomas Hegner, Wien 1937.
Ein Requiem in Rot-Weiß-Rot. Aufzeichnungen des Häftlings Dr. Auster. Amstutz, Zürich 1946.
Österreich. Eine historische Schau. Verlag Thomas Morus, Sarnen 1946.
Im Kampf gegen Hitler. Die Überwindung der Anschlußidee. Amalthea, Wien 1988, ISBN 3-85002-256-0.
Dieter A. Binder (Hrsg.): Sofort vernichten. Die vertraulichen Briefe Kurt und Vera von Schuschnigg 1938–1945. Amalthea, Wien 1997, ISBN 3-85002-393-1.