Militant Anti-Fascism. M. Testa
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 of them—fanned out into Jewish neighbourhoods, looting shops and beating hapless passers-by.’25 As with much anti-Semitic violence, it had as much to do with jealousy and theft as intolerance. As the National Assembly voted for the Anschluss, gangs of storm troopers and vigilantes emerged to settle accounts with Hitler’s opponents, both real and imagined, including Jews, communists and socialists. Leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler arrived with forty thousand police in tow, and the Gestapo techniques of rounding up and arresting political opponents proceeded to channel at least twenty thousand into concentration camps to uncertain fates.
Resistance
Anti-fascist resistance became less prominent and the workers movement had been weakened, badly affected by mass unemployment (a third of the population was jobless) and the rise in the cost of living. Following the February uprising, left-wing activists had gone ‘underground’ and the far right absorbed some of the socialists’ votes. By the summer of 1938, shortages were affecting morale and Vienna saw much ‘lawlessness accompanied by violence, perpetrated by marauding Nazi malcontents’ in Jewish areas.26 Also, Austrian Nazis were being usurped by their more efficient German counterparts. Although active resistance was slight, workers still dissented: the communist underground paper Rote Fahne reported that workers had gone on strike for better wages and that there was unrest throughout industry. In Vienna in 1939, dissatisfaction was widespread and anti-German sentiment was expressed as the communist underground spread further, distributing propaganda and encouraging sabotage.27 The Nazis responded with more surveillance and arrests and ordered the police to arrest ‘all persons of Marxist persuasion—Communists, Revolutionary Socialists and so forth—who might be suspected of undermining the leadership of the National Socialist state’.28 The communists still maintained cells in industry and propaganda activities whilst ‘socialist railwaymen solicited contributions, set up safe houses, and established links with like-minded groups in Bavaria’.29 It was not without risk, and 250 Salzburg railway workers were arrested by the Gestapo alone.
Schlurfs: Youth Against Fascism
The most prominent resistance came from