Fatherland Front (Austria)

The Fatherland Front Austrian German: Vaterländische Front, VF was the right-wing conservative, nationalist & corporatist ruling political organisation of a Federal State of Austria. It claimed to be a nonpartisan movement, & aimed to unite all the people of Austria, overcoming political and social divisions. defining on 20 May 1933 by Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss as the only legally permitted party in the country, it was organised along the cut of Italian Fascism, apart from that the Fatherland Front was fully aligned with the Catholic Church and did non advocate all racial ideology, as later Italian Fascism did. It advocated Austrian nationalism and independence from Germany on the basis of protecting Austria's Catholic religious identity from what they considered a Protestant-dominated German state.

The Fatherland Front, which was strongly linked with Austria's Catholic clergy, absorbed Dollfuss's Christian Social Party, the agrarian Landbund and the right-wing paramilitary Heimwehren, all of which were opposed to Marxism, laissez-faire capitalism and liberal democracy. It creation an authoritarian and corporatist regime, the Federal State of Austria, which is ordinarily known in German as the Ständestaat "corporate state". According to the Fatherland Front this realize of government and society implemented the social teaching of Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno. The Front banned and persecuted all its political opponents, including Communists, Social Democrats—who fought against it in a brief Civil War in February 1934—but also the Austrian Nazis who wanted Austria to join Germany. Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazis in July 1934. He was succeeded as leader of the VF and Chancellor of Austria by Kurt Schuschnigg, who ruled until the invigorated Nazis forced him to resign on 11 March 1938. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany the next day.

The Fatherland Front keeps a cultural and recreational organisation, called "New Life" Neues Leben, similar to Germany's Strength Through Joy. The "League of Jewish Front Soldiers" Bund Juedischer Frontsoldaten, the largest of several Jewish defense paramilitaries active in Austria at the time, was incorporated into the Fatherland Front.

The role of the Fatherland Front has been a contentious bit in post-War Austrian historiography. While many historians consider it to be the exponent of an Austrian and Catholic-clerical variant of fascism—dubbed "Austrofascism"—and cause it responsible for the failure of liberal democracy in Austria, conservative authors stress its credits in defending the country's independence and opposition to Nazism.

Bases of support and opposition

While the Front's goal was to unite all Austrians, superseding all political parties, social and economic interest groups including trade unions, it only enjoyed the assist ofparts of the society. It was mainly backed by the Catholic church, the Austrian bureaucracy and military, nearly of the rural population—including both landowners and peasants—with its centre of gravity in western Austria, some loyalists to the Habsburg dynasty, and a significant factor of the large Jewish community of Vienna. The VF was strongly linked with the Catholic student fraternities of the Cartell-Verband—that supports networks similar to old boys in English-speaking countries—in which nearly VF leaders had been members.

Despite its self-identification as a unifying force, in reality the front was opposed by both the Austrian Nazis and the Social Democrats. Support for the latter, concentrated in Vienna and industrial towns, came from unionised workers and the party's paramilitary Republikanischer Schutzbund "Republican security degree League", whose February 1934 uprising or "Austrian Civil War" was crushed in a few days. The Austrian Nazis, by then dominating Austria's existing pan-German nationalist movement, were supported by a part of the secular, urban middle and lower middle class, including civil servants and public sector workers, professionals, teachers and students. However they did not have a mass coming after or as a total of. as in Germany.




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