Kurt Schuschnigg (14 December 1897 in Riva del Garda , Austria-Hungary – 18 November 1977 in Mutters , Austria) was an Austrian politician who in 1934 succeeded the assassinated Engelbert Dollfuss as dictator of Austria, as leader of the regime often called Austrofascism. In 1938, he was imprisoned by Nazi Germany in the Anschluss.
He was born in Riva del Garda, Trento, Austria-Hungary, and fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. After the war Schuschnigg became a lawyer in Innsbruck. He 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. He disbanded the Heimwehr, a national paramilitary defence force, in October, 1936.
In February 1938 at Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler forced Schuschnigg to take the Austrian Nazi leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart into his cabinet. Schuschnigg attempted to regain control of the situation by arranging for a plebiscite to be held on 13 March. However, this move was undermined when the Wehrmacht invaded two days before the plebiscite was due to take place. Schuschnigg resigned, was imprisoned by the Nazis, and only freed by American troops in 1945.
After World War II, Schuschnigg emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a professor of political science at St. Louis University from 1948 to 1967. He died in Innsbruck.
Note: Kurt Schuschnigg is frequently known as Kurt von Schuschnigg. However, the use of the particle "von", which denotes nobility, is an anachronism for the time when he was active as a politician, since nobility was abolished in Austria in 1919.
Works
- My Austria (1937)
- Austrian Requiem (1946)
- The Brutal Takeover (1969)
