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Gasping for breath and at first almost unconscious the Chancellor was to lie there in agony the whole afternoon, slowly bleeding to death. His weak pleas for a doctor and a priest were ignored, though a Nazi gave him a cup of water. Mean while Major Fey had been forced at pistol point into another room and with him the Nazis parleyed.
"Surrender or We Dynamite!" Since the dying Chancellor was himself almost a one-man Cabinet, the duty of besieging the Ballhaus and the radio station with loyal troops fell to the resolute leader of the Austrian Catholic Storm Troops,* scholarly Minister of Education Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg, luckily at large because of his early lunch. He rushed to the Ministry of Defense, muzzled Vienna's Press which printed not a line of what was happening all afternoon, ordered out the Army and the Heimwehr and telegraphed to kindly old President Wilhelm Miklas who was rusticating in Lower Austria, to dashing young Vice Chancellor Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg who was vacationing with swank friends at Venice.
Easy-going Viennese took no alarm even when the Ballhaus was surrounded by a double ring of army and Heimwehr who grimly unlimbered machine guns. Street cars rattled past. And no one outside the Ballhaus yet knew that Chancellor Dollfuss had been shot.
To hard-faced Major Fey fell the role of playing an astounding series of balcony scenes. With his captors digging pistols into the small of his back he appeared again and again on the balcony of the Ballhaus, out of earshot of Viennese loitering beyond the double ring of State forces.
To the Juliet of nerve-racked Major Fey, Romeo was played by grim State Secretary Baron Neustaedter-Stuermer, acting for that cautious generalissimo Minister of Education Dr. Schuschnigg, who kept well out of the siege.
"What about the Rintelen Government?" shouted down pistol-prodded Juliet Fey.
"There will be no Rintelen Government and unless the Ballhaus is surrendered we will dynamite it!" roared Romeo Neustaedter.
Prodded and primed by his captors, Major Fey blustered: "I have not given any order that this building is to be stormed."
"Neither you nor any other Minister held prisoner by the rebels have any authority," boomed Baron Neustaedter. "President Miklas has so ordered. Authority has passed to Dr. Schuschnigg. Surrender or we dynamite."
Since the Ballhaus telephones were still working, its Nazi captors called up the German Minister to Vienna, Dr. Kurt Rieth, and begged him to intercede. When he at first refused they forced Major Fey to plead by telephone with Diplomat Rieth. Finally at 6:30 p. m. the sleek, aristocratic German Minister drove up to the Ballhaus in his limousine. Soldiers and Heimwehren greeted him with growls : "We ought to shoot the dog ! The shameless fellow has dared to come here!"
At this rough insinuation that Chancellor Hitler might be behind Nazi desperadoes who had telephoned the German Ministry in their extremity, Dr. Rieth paled and said uneasily, "It is true I am the German Minister but I am here only on the request of Dr. Schuschnigg."