Interlude

Schools in Upper Austria will open tomorrow as usual.

Pupils will have every opportunity to attend funerals whenever necessary.

Thus the Superintendents of Schools in Austria last week attempted to pick up the pieces and carry on ordinary life. In Vienna, too, children put on their sweaters to go skating in the Stadt Park. Cafes and cinemas could stay open. Police cleared the barbed wire barricades from the streets and out in the suburbs householders went back to their shell torn apartment houses. More than 1,000 men, women and children lay dead. The Nazis might strike on the morrow. Austria might have only a few weeks more of independence. A new world war might be brewing. But in the meantime one could always find a glass of good red Voeslau and perhaps a Schnitzel.

Armed conflict between the Austrian Fascist Heimwehr and the outlawed Socialist Schutzbund has been inevitable since the bloody riots of 1927. What even the Heimwehr did not anticipate was the fierce bravery of the Socialist defense and the effect it would have on the foreign popularity of little Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. The final outcome was never in doubt, but for nearly 48 hours determined Socialists actually had the upper hand in Linz and Steyr (Austria's Detroit). For a brief time even the Heimwehr commander, theatrical Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, was surrounded. Victorious at last and with a handful of bedraggled prisoners, he announced magnanimously :

"They were so brave that they deserve to be shot rather than hung. But of course a few hangings are unavoidable."

Siedlungen Siege. Bloodiest, most important part of the fighting took place in Vienna's suburbs where concrete municipal apartment houses ring the city on three sides like a chain of forts. For years these great buildings with their community laundries, playgrounds, kindergartens, flower gardens and sunny rooms have been models for municipal housing developments all over the world. Only the upper reaches of Austrian white collar workers could afford private lodgings comparable to the municipal Siedlungen where a lucky workman might rent one room & kitchenet for as little as 50-c- per month. The buildings cost a war-impoverished city an enormous sum. Vienna's Socialist Government raised this money by stiff taxes on existing buildings, luxury taxes of all sorts. Overwhelming number of the workers enjoying those 50-c- flats were Socialists. Simple jealousy made them the first target of the Heimwehr attack, but the Socialists were ready. Machine guns on the roofs, marksmen in the windows spat back at the Heimwehr and the whanging howitzers of the regular army. Women and children loaded rifles, fought beside their men, fell dead with them. Only when artillery had battered the walls unmercifully, and Heimwehr planes fitted with machine guns in open defiance of the Treaty of St. Germain had peppered the roof tops did the workers haul up the white flag and surrender. Some of the fighting Socialists tried to escape out of the city and across the Czechoslovak frontier, only 25 miles away. Others crept down into the cavernous ancient sewers that honeycomb the Inner City. After the siege of the Siedlungen, manhole covers rose cautiously in the Ringstrasse, the blunt noses of Mannlichers poked out and a sharp volley of rifle shots went whistling about the ears of a Heimwehr patrol.

Bravery was not limited to the besieged Socialists. In the height of the fighting the scourge of the Socialists, blue-eyed Major Emil Fey, came unscathed through a shower of bullets, one of which drilled the arm of his adjutant. Wracked by the bloodshed, little Chancellor Dollfuss made offers of amnesty to all Socialists who would surrender and stop fighting. In addition ten dollars will be paid for each machine gun, $1 for each rifle turned in before Feb. 25. Out to the blood-drenched Socialist district of Simmering went the Minister of War, 75-year-old Prince Alois von Schoenburg-Hartenstein, in uniform, unarmed, alone in his limousine with Chancellor Dollfuss' secretary and a pale but determined bugler. Into the midst of a sullen crowd the old gentleman stepped, to talk to them like a patient uncle:

"Please listen for a moment. I am Schoenburg, Minister of War, and this gentleman is the secretary to the Chancellor. . . . Do you know what amnesty is? It means that you will get off free if you drop this hopeless game like sensible people. Look, it is ten o'clock and we have only two hours left. Run off as quickly as you can and spread the news in every direction for I want every one to know."

Bathed in perspiration, secretary and bugler followed the intrepid old gentleman into his car as they drove off to the next workers' suburb.

Reprieves. Other stories were not so pleasant. Eager to make the most of their victory, Heimwehr chieftains clapped hundreds of Socialist officials in jail, where they already had Vienna's famed Burgomaster Karl Seitz and the Austrian Republic's first Chancellor, Dr. Karl Renner. Drumhead courts-martial were set up to try rioters, and kept the newly appointed state executioner, Herr Lang, busy hanging the victims. The first day's catch reached him the third day of the fighting. A young married man, one Karl Munischreiter, had been caught with a rifle a few hours after the state radio announced martial law. A police doctor dressed his wounds, testified he was not likely to die of them. Forty-eight hours after his capture, three after his sentencing, bandaged Munischreiter, still protesting that he had never fired his rifle, met Herr Lang and his noose in the Vienna prison courtyard. He was cut down seven hours later at midnight, and replaced by Dr. George Weissl, heroic commandant of the Socialist fight in the Floridsdorf suburb. Said he: "I die with no regrets. I am a worker and I have fought to save my home."

The natural common sense of Vienna police saved the lives of six prisoners who had been picked up in the streets, sentenced to be hanged "within three hours." Word reached Austria's Christian Socialist President Dr. Wilhelm Miklas, silent at his home all through the days of bloodshed, that the evidence against them was slight. But time was passing. At the end of three hours the policemen turned the clock back, sent out for coffee with whipped cream. Soon up rushed the State's Attorney, waving reprieves like the warden in a melodrama. "Thank God, I am not too late!" he gasped. The smiling police got another cup.

Bratislava. All through the fighting, leader of the Socialist forces was dumpy Dr. Julius Deutsch, Minister of War in Austria's first Republican Cabinet and ancient adversary of her Catholic Chancellor, the late great Mgr. Ignaz Seipel. The New York Times's sympathetic G. E. R. Gedye found him safe at Bratislava, just over the Czechoslovak border, guarded by a cordon of Czech Socialists from attempted assassination. A ricocheted bullet in his left eye left Dr. Deutsch so blind that he could only see the outline of objects. He was sick, exhausted, but eager to talk.

"I will answer no questions that will endanger my comrades in Austria," said he, "The hangman is busy enough as it is. . . . But if you must have a story of a romantic retreat, tell that of the 47 Republican defense corps men who fought their way all the way from Vienna to the Czechoslovak frontier and marched triumphantly across the border carrying their machine guns and rifles which they surrendered at the first village they entered. . . .

"Characteristic of the discipline of the splendid men of my defense corps is the fact that in the whole four days and nights of fighting there was not a single case of plundering. My men had nothing to eat and were ill clad and badly shod. And such men the Fascists dare to call 'revolutionary rabble.'

"I reached the Czech frontier in the early hours of Thursday morning. I was not disguised but I was wearing the worker's clothes in which I had fought and I had my hat pulled over my wounded eye. I had hastily blackened my eyebrows with gunpowder before leaving Vienna. . . . I had some narrow escapes. In my blindness I had to rely on my sense of hearing to protect me. Once, hearing steps, I tried to leave the road for the woods but was challenged by a Heimwehr patrol. I cursed them roundly in local dialect. They took me for a drunken peasant. But for the darkness they would have seen that my clothes were drenched with blood. Another time I was crawling up a snow-covered hillside when I again heard Heimwehr men. They passed by me only three yards away and I suppose they took me for a stone.

"The Government is revenging itself on the few of us who escaped by persecuting our womenfolk. My sister has been arrested and my wife had to flee and I don't know where she is. Now my 18-year-old daughter is in peril through a fool Czech journalist who invented the lie that she fought beside me at the barricades."

"Saddest Week." Stories like this were rapidly losing little Chancellor Dollfuss most of the foreign sympathy that has been his in heaping measure since he began his fight for Austrian independence. To counteract them correspondents were summoned to the Chancellery, where pale, hollow-eyed little Dollfuss received them himself under a framed portrait of the old Emperor Franz Josef. Exhibit A was a long, green baize covered table piled high with hand grenades and home-made bombs, seized in the preliminary raids on Socialist headquarters in Vienna last week (TIME, Feb. 19). Baron Karl Karwinsky. Chief Secretary of the State Police, gingerly picked one up.

"There are enough explosives on this table," said he, "to wreck an entire municipal district."

Little Dollfuss immediately launched into an impassioned apologia:

"There will be no more hangings of Socialist Schutzbund members in Vienna. and no more executions of death sentences under existing martial law -- with the possible exception of very bad cases in Graz.

"No one could be more sorrowful over the suffering and loss of life of innocent people than I. But you cannot put down an armed rebellion with kid gloves. The use of artillery was unavoidable, because the Siedlungen were designed and built like fortresses for a long planned civil war. These buildings even had bombproof shelters and complete machine gun emplacements in the towers.

"We wish now to heal the wounds of the conflict. My wife has just accepted the chairmanship of a committee to provide for relief and support of the helpless victims. We are going to maintain with out discrimination the social insurance and benefits which the Socialists created. Especially those Socialist institutions and collective agreements in which Vienna set an example to the world will be preserved. . . .

"I hope the blood which flowed in our land will bring people to their senses. This has been the saddest week of my life."

Nazis. All this time not one peep had come from the Nazis, the real spider at the centre of Austria's web of worries. Their tactics were to say nothing and do nothing until the Heimwehr had finished for them the messy job of cleaning up Socialism. Then they hoped to rally the disgruntled of all parties to the Swastika. The famed Nazi radio station in Munich that has been the bane of the Dollfuss Government for more than a year led off the campaign with a scornful speech by pale, spectacled Theodor Habicht, Nazi "Inspector General for Austria." Said he:

"The tragedy of the Austrian civil war is that participants are falling in the service of foreign interests as battlers against their own people. The Socialists were armed with French steel helmets, Czechoslovak guns, and Russian munitions. . . .

The leaders of the Nazi Party in Austria will expel any member who responds to Prince Schoenburg-Hartenstein's appeal for old soldiers to come to the aid of the Dollfuss Government. We will sacrifice not a man and not a cartridge because every possible and conceivable outcome of this conflict will result against Germany and the German people. But we will be ready at any time to make any sacrifice for a German solution of the Austrian problem."

Next day, softening his tone, he rhetorically inquired whether the Dollfuss Government "is prepared to find a way into a better German future in common with the National Socialist movement?" As though to give Dollfuss time to answer this preposterous question, he declared an eight-day "armistice'' on Nazi activities in Austria. "Party comrades will be allowed in this period merely to conduct propaganda among former members of the Socialist Party or to ward off direct attacks against their own persons."

Start Something! Not since 1914 has there been such a massing of troops as ringed Austria last week (see map). Italy had 75,000 men at the frontier ready to move in an hour. Due north in Bavaria was the famed Austrian Legion of approximately 30,000 exiled Nazis ready to march back into Austria with weapons from German arsenals whenever Adolf Hitler should nod nis head. Along the Czechoslovak frontier approximately 35,000 men, with the heaviest siege guns in Central Europe, were ready for the first nation that started something. Viennese knew that the Czech frontier is only 25 miles away, that one of the great Skoda guns could blow the steeple off St. Stephen's without crossing the border. In Jugoslavia to the south whole divisions of Serbian troops had been moved up into Slovenia and Croatia and set to patrolling the frontier.

What all were waiting for was the first overt move on the part of Germany. A Nazi Austria openly ruled from Berlin means more than the addition of 7,000,000 souls to the German Reich. It means that: 1) French-supported Czechoslovakia would be surrounded by Nazi land on three sides; 2) Germany would come down to the Brenner Pass and be only 100 miles from the Adriatic; 3) German minorities in Jugoslavia's Slovenia and Croatia would receive all the backing that Austrian Nazis have had; 4) Hungary and Rumania would be the next objects of Nazi attack.

In Paris, despite Sir John Simon's desire to keep Britain out of what threatened to become a nasty business, Italy, France and Britain united in a joint communique. There was no mistaking its meaning: "The three Governments . . . take a common view as to the necessity of maintaining Austria's independence and integrity."

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