(2 of 6)
Just 15 hours after Socialist Gerl was hanged, Chancellor Dollfuss summoned a Cabinet council in Vienna's big white Ballhaus, the historic Chancellery of Prince Metternich in which Napoleon's Europe was carved up by the Congress of 1815. Routine matters were dealt with and Minister of Education Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg had slipped off with one or two other Ministers to an early lunch. Suddenly a breathless secretary rushed in with a slip of paper which he handed to the little Chancellor and strapping Major Emil Fey, Commissar for Emergency Measures for Defense of the State. "Action against the Government is being prepared," read the paper. Almost before this warning could sink in five truckloads of men dressed as soldiers, Heimwehren ("Home Guards") and police rumbled up to the Ballhaus. So closely did these invaders resemble lawful forces of the State that the Ballhaus' sentries had not even challenged them. Jumping down from a truck, their leader, dressed as a high Austrian Army officer with medals blazing on his chest, barked orders to close and bolt the great oak doors of the Ballhaus. Even this seemed regular enough to the sentries but an instant later they quailed as pistols were pressed to their ribs with the order: "Drop your arms! You and the rest are hostages. If the Ballhaus is attacked you die!"
Upstairs panic-stricken State functionaries tore about with flying coattails, locking the thin, white doors that were now the Cabinet's sole defense. Swinging rifle butts like battering rams, the invaders crashed down door after door, advancing slowly and methodically through the vast building and making up batches of hostages as they went. "This lot is to be shot first, if we are attacked. That lot next."
While Chancellor Dollfuss, Major Fey and Under-Secretary Baron Karl Karwinsky were being trapped in the State Apartments, Vienna's chief radio station RAVAG was falling in the hands of eight desperate youths in Austrian Nazi gear. They had burst in, shot the manager and forced the chief announcer to tell all Austria in a trembling voice: "It is one minute and 30 seconds past one p. m. We have to inform you that the Dollfuss Cabinet has resigned and Anton Rintelen has taken over the Government."
There is only one Rintelen. All Austria knows that last year Chancellor Dollfuss bought off potent pro-Nazi Dr. Anton Rintelen, the uncrowned "King Anton" of the Austrian province of Styria, by the fat plum of making him Ambassador at Rome. The stark, one-sentence radio announcement was seemingly intended to convey to Austria that a Nazi Putsch headed by "King Anton" had succeeded. When a radio actor found a revolver and started shooting, a cool Nazi hurled a hand grenade, blew him to blazes. Meanwhile back at the Ballhaus ten pistol-brandishing Nazis had burst down the last white door and caught Chancellor Dollfuss at bay on the threshold of the historic Yellow Room in which met the Congress of Vienna.
Without a word to the Chancellor Nazi gunmen shot him down, first bullet in the chest, second in the neck, as he threw up his arms and fell, crying "Help!"
"Let the animal die," growled a Nazi. Others roughly picked up bleeding Dollfuss, dumped him on a divan.