The League of Jewish Front Soldiers was the biggest organization; it was created in 1932 in reaction to Nazi electoral successes to ‘protect the honour and respect of the Jews living in Austria’.11 The League was a militant organization and followed from the earlier City Guard, Self-Defence Force and Protection Corps, and the later Jewish Armed Sporting and Defence Association, and the Jewish Protection League. In the face of anti-Semitic organizations like the Heimwehr, which was also made up of ex-soldiers, the non-partisan League had around eight thousand members in the main cities as well as its own newspaper and ‘young people would not only acquire military discipline but would also learn not to tolerate the insults of anti-Semites’.12 The Jewish Protection League offered physical opposition against Nazi aggression, responded to anti-Jewish propaganda and organized large demonstrations. They also linked up with non-Jewish veterans and the worldwide Jewish Front Fighters who held a meeting in Vienna in 1936, which the League stewarded and, unsurprisingly, the Nazis chose not to attack. Their entreaties to the more orthodox Jewish organization to form a united front did not succeed and internal differences created factional problems.
The Schutzbund
The strength of the Schutzbund lay…in its political convictions and its relationship to the labour movement.
—Martin Kitchen in The Coming of Austrian Fascism
Political street violence was prevalent and the parties organized militias to defend against provocation: ‘The Socialists (like their counterparts elsewhere in central and southern Europe) had long had [militia]’.13 This was the Schutzbund, whose militancy was quelled by the Social Democrat Party ( SPD) leadership, which ‘abhorred violence and were a truly humanitarian party’. In 1927, ‘workers launched a spontaneous demonstration to protest the acquittal of Heimwehr members who had been accused of murdering a member of the Schutzbundler and a child’, when the Schattendorf jury returned a not-guilty verdict. The SPD leadership considered using the Schutzbund against strikers, although militants within the Bund were amongst the demonstrators. The Palace of Justice, the police station and a newspaper office were all burnt down. The police opened fire on the strikers and unarmed Schutzbundlers and were subsequently viewed in some quarters as being anti-worker. Fighting with the police led to ninety-four deaths. The Schutzbund ended up policing its own militants, and although accused by the right of agitating for a civil war, they clearly were not. The Schutzbund and the SPD leadership were not nearly militant enough and the Bund’s job was to protect the Republic from left and right extremists alike.14
However, despite the overt caution by the Schutzbund, violence between them and the Heimwehr did occur. In 1929, ‘a fight that resulted in four deaths and some sixty injured, was taken by the Schutzbund leadership as triumphant proof that, even when outnumbered the Social Democrats were more than a match for the Heimwehr and that any attempt to launch a “March on Vienna” was bound to fail’.15 The Schutzbund at times seemed immobilised by weak leadership and a lack of militancy, despite pressure from hostile forces and at one point being ‘more concerned about the workers’ Olympics than…the possibility of a fascist coup’.16 The police raided the Schutzbund on government orders, hoping to find stockpiled weapons that would assist them in a civil war, but it came to nothing.
In Simmering in October 1932, the Schutzbund fought the Nazis when the latter attacked their centre, leaving two fascists and one policeman dead. When the authoritarian leader, Engelbert Dolfuss closed parliament in March 1933, the Schutzbund leadership prevaricated; units waited to be mobilised against the move but eventually stood down. Dolfuss subsequently banned the Schutzbund. As with many organizations made illegal, the more active members rebuilt, forming the Young Front for anti-Nazi activity. Despite this, many militants left, angered at the leadership’s failure to mobilise in March. As they watched the erosion of social democracy, the ex-Bunders were still subject to police harassment.
The Socialist leadership kept the Schutzbund on a short leash, opting for a general strike rather than full-on street warfare. This was to prove mostly ineffective and they ‘tried to ignore their Leftists’ insistent demand for militant activity’.17 The leadership also acted weakly when the chancellor, Dolfuss, attacked workers’ organizations and printing presses. Mussolini urged for the final destruction of the socialists, so the diminutive Dolfuss unleashed the ‘police and military forces to crush what had been the best-organized and most solidly entrenched Socialist party in Europe’18 in 1934, which saw the workers take ‘up arms to resist months of unlawful, arbitrary measures aimed at crushing the labor movement’.19 After four days of street violence and shooting in the industrial cities, two hundred people had been killed, ten prominent activists had been hanged, hundreds had been jailed and thousands lost their jobs.
In February 1934, Austria erupted into violence when heavily armed members of the Schutzbund ended up in a shootout with cops in a Linz hotel. The situation escalated as news reached Vienna. Viennese workers immediately went on strike in support, and the Schutzbund occupied strategic positions in a long-delayed confrontation with reactionary forces. Workers occupied a major bakery and kept it running as a cooperative, with a machine gun on the roof to scare off the Heimwehr. The Schutzbund barricaded the workers’ area and took control of the trams—though, crucially, not the entire railway network, which was used to transport more troops into the city, as the government grabbed the opportunity to violently suppress the organized working class. Government forces also fired artillery into the Karl- Marx-Hof workers’ housing complex; Dolfuss considered using poison gas, but it was rejected for fear of ‘a most unfortunate international incident’. The fighting continued from early on the 12th February until nearly midnight on the 15th. Repercussions were harsh, with the bakery workers receiving long sentences and other militants arrested and jailed. Many workers died.
The SPD had been a considerable organization, but once they were banned following the February uprising, their property was seized and redistributed and their leaders and prominent members were subjected to repression and ‘any leaders of the party or the Schutzbund, any prominent agitators or radicals, journalists or lawyers who defended leftists should be sent to concentration camps’.20 In Austria, as elsewhere, funerals turned into sites of resistance, and every flower placed on the grave of the executed radical Georg Weissel became a symbol of silent dissent. In the aftermath, the exiled socialists finally realised that ‘fascist violence could only be met by violence’21 and that what had been needed was ‘an anti-fascist front among widely different political groupings which could not simply be denounced as agents of fascism’,22 and ‘in the face of fascism an offensive not a defensive strategy was needed’.23 Keeping the RDC and Schutzbund on short orders, plus the lack of militant leadership seizing the initiative, had led to disaster.
Later that year, Austrian Nazis assassinated Dolfuss, which led to more violence, which was eventually suppressed by the Austrian army. When the Nazis marched into Austria, they were met with an enthusiasm that transformed into mass outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence, with ‘young toughs heaving paving blocks into the windows of Jewish shops’.24 This was not just a few local fascists: ‘The Nazi brawlers—tens of thousands
