The dire presentiment which caused devout little Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss to send his young wife and chubby children away to Italy with the words "You will be safe where you are going" (TIME, July 23) was fulfilled last week by a grisly and relentless fate.
On the tragic afternoon Frau Alwine Dollfuss, safe at Riccione on the Adriatic as the house guest of Donna Rachele Mussolini, showed her babies, Rudolf and Eva, how to make sand pies. She had taken them in to supper and put them sleepily to bed before she learned that in Vienna 144 brutal young men had contrived the assassination of her husband in a manner which, said the outraged London Times, "makes the name of Nazi stink in the nostrils of the world."
There were tears in Benito Mussolini's eyes as he put Frau Dollfuss aboard an airplane in which she insisted upon dashing to her husband's bier. Wordlessly Il Duce gripped her hand. He knew that she expects a child within five months. Cried Donna Rachele, weeping as she kissed Frau Dollfuss goodby: "I will take good care of your children. Come back to us soon."
As the plane roared away Premier Mussolini, longtime patron of the Dollfuss Dictatorship, stepped into his motorcar and sped to Rome. There he issued orders which galvanized the Great Powers (see p. 14), mobilized 140,000 Italian troops to guarantee the independence of Austria, took steps to break with Adolf Hitler.
"Let the animal die!" Last week after more than a year of terrorist Nazi bombings in Austria, Chancellor Dollfuss had reluctantly enforced for the first time his recent drastic decree-law providing death for civilians caught with explosives. The first terrorist caught and hanged was neither an Austrian nor a Nazi but a wild-eyed Czechoslovak Socialist, one Josef Gerl, who bellowed from the gallows as the noose was put about his neck, ''Long live Austrian liberty!"
This hanging emphasized the delicate position of Chancellor Dollfuss' "Christian Fascist" Cabinet striving to hold the balance between armed Nazis and Socialists in troubled Austria. In Germany the exiled Austrian Nazi leader, leather-lunged Alfred Frauenfeld, promptly took Austria's first terrorist hanging as his text for an ominous threat: "The moment Dollfuss hangs a Nazi civil war will break out in Austria!"