Kurt Schuschnigg

Infobox Officeholder
name = Kurt Schuschnigg


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small

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order = 15th Federal Chancellor of Austria
term_start = July 29, 1934
term_end = March 12, 1938
president = Wilhelm Miklas
deputy = Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, Eduard Baar-Baarenfels, Ludwig Hülgerth, Edmund Glaise-Horstenau
predecessor = Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (acting)
successor = Arthur Seyss-Inquart
order2 = Acting Federal Chancellor of Austria
term_start2 = July 25
term_end2 = July 26, 1934
president2 = Wilhelm Milklas
predecessor2 = Engelbert Dollfuß
successor2 = Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg (acting)
birth_date = December 14, 1897
birth_place = Riva del Garda, then Austro-Hungary, now Italy
death_date = November 18, 1977 (aged 79)
death_place = Mutters, Tyrol, Austria
constituency =
party = Patriotic Front
spouse =
children =
profession = Lawyer, Professor
education =
religion =


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Kurt Alois Josef Johann Schuschnigg (December 14, 1897 - November 18, 1977) was an Austrian politician who in 1934 succeeded the assassinated Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor of Austria and dictator, as leader of the regime often called "Austrofascism". In 1938, he was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp, as a political prisoner, by Nazi Germany following the Anschluss.

Biography

Name

Schuschnigg came into a Tyrolean family of Carinthian Slovenian descent. The family name was originally transcribed from Slovenian Šušnik. One of his ancestors was invested with a hereditary title similar to a Baronet in 1898, so he became Kurt Alois Josef Johann Edler von Schuschnigg. In 1919, after the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nobility was abolished by law in the Republic of Austria, and it was no longer permitted to bear the titles, so he became Kurt Alois Josef Johann Schuschnigg, known always as Kurt Schuschnigg.

Early life

Schuschnigg was born in Riva del Garda (current province of Trento, Italy, then part of Austria-Hungary). He received his education at the Stella Matutina (Jesuit School) in Feldkirch. Schuschnigg fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. After the war, he became a lawyer in Innsbruck.

Political career

Schuschnigg joined the Christian Social Party and was elected to the Nationalrat in 1927. As he did not trust the Heimwehr, he founded the "Ostmärkische Sturmscharen" in 1930. In 1932 Dollfuss appointed Schuschnigg as his minister of justice, then in 1933 Schuschnigg became Austria's minister of education. When Dollfuss was assassinated in 1934, Schuschnigg became Austria's new federal chancellor. At the age of 36, he is the youngest person to have ever held this position. He disbanded the Heimwehr, a national paramilitary defence force, in October, 1936.

The Anschluss

In February 1938 at Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler forced Schuschnigg to take the Austrian Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart into his cabinet. On Sunday, February 20, Hitler gave a speech to the German Reichstag in which he warned that Germany would know how to protect the ten million Germans living on its borders--seven million in Austria and three million in Czechoslovakia. Four days later, Schuschnigg answered Hitler's Reichstag speech with a speech of his own in the Austrian Nationalrat. Schuschnigg declared that Austria had reached the limit of concessions "where we must call a halt and say: This far and no further."

Schuschnigg attempted to regain control of the situation by arranging for a plebiscite to be held on 13 March. However, this move was preempted when the German Wehrmacht invaded on March 11th. Schuschnigg resigned and was imprisoned by the Nazis in a tiny room for seventeen months while the SS tormented him both mentally and physically. After losing 85 pounds, he spent the remainder of the war in two different concentration camps, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, as he recalled in his book "Austrian Requiem". He was freed by American troops in 1945.

Later life

After World War II, Schuschnigg emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a professor of political science at Saint Louis University from 1948 to 1967.

He died at Mutters, near Innsbruck, in 1977.

Works

* "My Austria" (1937)
* "Austrian Requiem" (1946)
* "International Law" (1959)
* "The Brutal Takeover" (1969)
* "Im Kampf gegen Hitler. Die Überwindung der Anschlussidee" (1969)

Further reading

* [http://www.otr.com/austria.html Schuschnigg's career as Austrian Chancellor]