Pioneer Fascist

Austria's prewar democracy had many pallbearers, but the most prominent, after Adolf Hitler, was a good-looking young blueblood named Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg. He was a fascist when the world barely knew what the word meant. In 1923, he stood by Hitler's side in the unsuccessful Munich beer hall Putsch. Back in Austria, he was fond of bleating such sentiments as: "We have much in common with the German Nazis . . . Austria will go fascist sooner or later. Better sooner than later . . . Asiatic heads [meaning Jews] will soon roll in the sands." In 1934, his green-shirted private army, the Heimwehr (Home Guard), attacked social democratic Vienna, beat up and murdered hundreds of Socialists. When the Heimwehr finished, it had obliterated Austria's one solid bloc of resistance to Naziism.

Starhemberg in the '30s seemed to be riding the wave of the future. But he made one great error. At a time when Hitler and Mussolini were still at odds, he chose the wrong fascist as his patron. With Mussolini footing the bills, he fought the Nazi Anschluss. When the "Nazis finally took over the Austria that he had so diligently weakened, one of their first acts was to confiscate the Starhemberg castles and estates.

The prince next popped up in 1940 wearing the uniform of De Gaulle's Free French air force. Soon afterward he went to Argentina, where he teamed with old friend Fritz Mandl, onetime Austrian munitions-maker who had also bet on the wrong fascist. Mandl, now doing business with Peron, put Starhemberg up in style, but the prince yearned for his own acres.

Last week, for a while, he came close to getting them back. Acting under a law restoring property confiscated by the Nazis, the Austrian courts ruled that the pioneer fascist was a victim of the fascists and ordered the return to him of 18 castles, hundreds of dwellings, mines, vineyards, 21,000 fertile acres--worth, in all, over $20,000,000.

But the Socialists, again Austria's No. 2 party, had not forgotten. They had waited 17 years for this day. They called protest meetings, "flash" strikes in streetcars and buses. The Communists got into the act too. They, as well as the Socialists, made speeches in Parliament demanding a special statute barring Starhemberg from benefiting by the restitution law. At week's end, it seemed a good bet that Prince von Starhemberg wouldn't get back his estates after all.

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