The demise of Parliament in March 1933 was the most significant single act in the march to semifascism in Austria, which began with the formation of the Heimwehr in the early days of the First Republic and was well under way when significant changes were made in the government on September 21,1933, and a concentration camp was established at Wöllersdorf a few days later. Traditional democratic means were employed to abolish Parliament. Dollfuβ, the Heimwehr, and the Christian Social Party only did what parties in power in democracies do when under attack. They used all the means at their disposal to protect their government from being overthrown. The Social Democrats and Greater Germans, likewise, employed only democratic means in their effort to overthrow the Dollfuβ regime and to preserve a democratically elected Parliament. Dollfuβ and the leaders of all but the National Socialist Party in Austria were well aware of the great danger to Austria that stemmed from the intensification of National Socialist efforts to overthrow a democratic form of government in Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany and knew that the German National Socialists were providing financial support to the Austrian Greater German Party to support them in their efforts to take control of Austria.

When Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor of Austria in May 1932, no one dreamed that he would become a fascist dicator.1 Even his bitter opponents in 1933 and 1934 admitted that he was genuine democrat when he became chancellor. He had friendly relations with the leaders of the Social Democratic Party. In May 1932, the Social Democratic Party leader Otto Bauer felt that when the time was ripe Dollfuß intended to form a coalition with his party.

The typical dictator of the interwar period was, like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, already a convinced fascist or authoritarian when he first came to power. This was not the case in Austria, where Engelbert Dollfuß, the semifascist dictator of 1934, was seemingly a genuine democrat when he was appointed chancellor in May 1932. Even his appointment was accidental. Had the Social Democrats accepted Ignaz Seipel's and Karl Buresch's overtures in 1931 to join the Christian Socials in a coalition government, Dollfuß might never have become chancellor. And had they not rejected a second effort by Buresch in April 1932 and demanded new elections, democratic government in Austria would have been strengthened rather than weakened.

Engelbert Dollfuss has not been enshrined in history as a popular political figure. The National Socialists vilified him as a Satanic evildoer who embodied everything they hated. Dollfuß's widow and two children found it imperative to flee to Switzerland immediately after the Anschluss and eventually went to Canada, where Mrs. Dollfuß and their daughter remained until 1956. Their son still lives there.

By the spring of 1927 democratic institutions seemed to have secured a relatively firm footing in Austria. That appearance was deceptive. The same year saw the beginning of the deterioration of Austrian democracy.

The achievement of a secure democratic political environment by 1927 appeared grounded in reality. Within eight years after the Austrian Social Democrats had quashed the threat of a Communist-inspired Soviet republic in Austria, the bourgeois-dominated democratic government had succeeded in building up a reliable police force, gendarmerie, and army adequate to protect it against any internal threats. Rent as it was by the endless power struggles of its leaders, the Heimwehr was still only a relatively weak force on the political horizon. The National Socialist Party, split into quarreling factions, amounted to little more than a noisy opposition group. With the marked improvement in the Austrian economy by the mid-1920s, Austrian anti-Semitism had noticeably declined by the end of 1926. Perhaps most important of all, the foreign financial assistance assured by the Geneva Protocol of 1922 and the subsequent economic stabilization measures under-taken by the government did much to put the country's financial house in good order.

Certain events sometimes exert a decisive influence on the future direction of a person's life. In my case one of the more determinative occurred during a brief week spent in Vienna in early February 1957 For one thing, I discovered in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv highly significant documents in some cartons that had just been returned to Austria from Italy, by mistake as it turned out. The director of the Austrian archives, Gebhard Rath, put these records at my disposal. These papers, together with material of lesser import in the Archivio di Stato in Milan, provided the documentation for an article showing how Austrian officials had thwarted the efforts of an Italian scoundrel to extort money from them. More important than this discovery were my conversations with Professor Hugo Hantsch, of the University of Vienna, during the course of which I promised to supply as complete a list as possible of United States and Canadian writings on the history of the Habsburg monarchy, take the initiative in founding some kind of association for American scholars interested in Habsburg and Austrian history, and endeavor to help the Austrian professor obtain a grant from the Ford Foundation for a large international project on the history of the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 to 1918.