ABSTRACT
When the four-foot-eleven-inch Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss made himself dictator in March of 1933, and then outlawed the Social Democratic Party after the civil war in February of 1934, he effectively ended the First Austrian Republic. A new constitution promulgated on May 1 solidified the formation of a fascist state in Austria under the absolute rule of Dollfuss’s new party, the Fatherland Front. All opposition parties, including the Nazis and the Communists, were banned; the Social Democrats were forced underground, reorganized as the “Revolutionary Socialists,” and the party’s leaders went into exile. Dollfuss’s fascist state was partly modeled on Italy under Mussolini, whose appeasement was a key part of the Austro-fascists’ ultimately futile plan to keep Austria independent against Hitler’s Germany. Although Dollfuss was assassinated on July 25 in a failed coup attempt by Austrian Nazis, the fascist regime would retain power under Dollfuss’s successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg. Dollfuss and Schuschnigg had no official policy of anti-Semitism, but the banning of the Social Democrats, the political party to which most Jews belonged, and the abolition of democracy under Catholic-fascist rule effectively removed them from government jobs and public political life in general. Despite regular police harassment and imprisonment, the socialist underground thrived and still managed to publish and distribute socialist newspapers—which would lead to Paul Lazarsfeld’s Forschungsstelle being shut down. 1
