Background
Dollfuss Engelbert was born on 4 October in 1892 near Texing, Lower Austria of poor peasant stock.
Dollfuss Engelbert was born on 4 October in 1892 near Texing, Lower Austria of poor peasant stock.
After serving in World War I Dollfuss obtained a post in the Peasants' Association of Lower Austria, later becoming secretary and director of the Lower Austrian Chamber of Agriculture. In October 1930 he was made the director of the Austrian railways, and in March 1931 minister of agriculture; in the latter position he introduced high protective tariffs for Austrian produce. On May 20, 1932, he became chancellor in a parliament in which his party, the Christian Socialists, commanded a majority of only one vote.
Austria's immediate critical problems were financial, and Dollfuss' first task was to raise a second loan (earlier loans had been made in 1922) from the League of Nations. He obtained this, the Lausanne Loan, and steered the legislation necessary for his policies through Parliament in the face of bitter attacks from both the Socialists and the Pan-Germans, who were rapidly going over to Nazism. In March 1933 a peculiar accident enabled him to suspend Parliament, which had rendered itself technically incapable of functioning through the successive resignations, in the course of a single tumultuous debate, of all its three presidents. Dollfuss proceeded to rule by emergency decree, backed by a "Fatherland Front" which he created, and with the support of Mussolini, the dictator of Austria's neighbor, Italy. With Mussolini's encouragement, but also out of conviction, for he was a fanatical anti-Marxist, Dollfuss broke the Austrian Socialist Party by force (Feb. 11-15 1934). On May 1, 1934, he promulgated a new constitution, based on the Quadragesimo Anno (the famous papal encyclical of Pope Pius XI defining the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to modern social problems). Meanwhile, the Nazi agitation mounted even higher, and on July 25 Dollfuss was murdered by Nazi thugs who broke into the chancery in the course of an attempted putsch.
Personally a most endearing man, nicknamed from his minute stature "Millimeternich," and very popular abroad for his courageous resistance to the Nazis, Dollfuss was, however, ruthless in his methods, and the violence by which he died was part of the atmosphere in which he lived.