Kurt Schuschnigg

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Kurt Schuschnigg in a propaganda manifesto.

Kurt Alois Josef Johann Schuschnigg (December 14, 1897 - November 18, 1977) was an Austrian politician who in 1934 succeeded the assassinated Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor of Austria. In 1938, he was imprisoned by Nazi Germany following the Anschluss.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 Further reading

Schuschnigg came into a Tyrolean family of Carinthian Slovenian descent. The family name was originally transcribed from Slovenian Šušnik. One of his ancestors was invested with a hereditary title similar to a Baronet in 1898, so he became Kurt Alois Josef Johann Edler von Schuschnigg. In 1919, after the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, nobility was abolished by law in the Republic of Austria, and it was no longer permitted to bear the titles, so he became Kurt Alois Josef Johann Schuschnigg, known always as Kurt Schuschnigg.

Schuschnigg was born in Riva del Garda (current province of Trento, Italy, then part of Austria-Hungary), and fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. After the war, he became a lawyer in Innsbruck.

Schuschnigg 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. At the age of 36, he is the youngest person to have ever held this position. 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. On Sunday, February 20, Hitler gave a speech to the German Reichstag in which he warned that Germany would know how to protect the ten million Germans living on its borders - seven million in Austria and three million in Czechoslovakia. Four days later, Schuschnigg answered Hitler's Reichstag speech with a speech of his own in the Austrian Bundestag. Schuschnigg declared that Austria had reached the limit of concessions "where we must call a halt and say: This far and no further."

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 his arrest Schuschnigg was incarcerated in a tiny room for seventeen months while the SS tormented him both mentally and physically. After losing 85 pounds, he spent the remainder of the war in two different concentrations camps, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, all accounted for in his book Austrian Requiem.

After World War II, Schuschnigg emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a professor of political science at Saint Louis University from 1948 to 1967.

He died at Mutters, near Innsbruck, in 1977.