Darkly and deviously the secret struggle between Catholic Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg and Fascist Vice Chancellor Prince Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg for control of the Austrian Cabinet continued last week amid smoking newspaper headlines. Prince von Starhemberg started matters off last month by waiting until Chancellor Schuschnigg was in Italy to crack wide open the scandal of the failure of Jewish-controlled Vienna Phoenix Life Insurance Co. His plain purpose in smearing this $150.000,000 bankruptcy through the Press was to whip up anti-Semitism in Vienna, cause a Cabinet crisis that would allow his Heimwehr to take over the Government (TIME, April 20). Chancellor Schuschnigg's next move was to attempt to force the dissolution of Prince von Starhemberg's well-equipped private army on the ground that the Heimwehr was no longer needed since Austria had adopted military conscription for its regular Army. Sticking out his chin, Prince von Starhemberg snapped that the Heimwehr would be disbanded only "over my dead body."
Vienna promptly overflowed with rumors of the number of potent Austrians who had been bribed by Phönix-Wien's mysterious manager, the late Dr. Wilhelm Berliner. Last week Chancellor Schuschnigg revealed that he held a powerful counter-weapon against Prince von Starhemberg, the actual, 24-page list of those whom Phönix-Wien had reached with cash euphemistically described as ''loans" "stock sales" and "insurance policies." This lifesaver, which he had been handed by a high Phönix-Wien official, Chancellor Schuschnigg proceeded to publish.
In the years in which he was rooting his company into every cranny of Austria, pudgy Dr. Berliner took no chances with political investigation. With magnificent liberality he bribed every political group that might possibly make things difficult for him. The amount of the bribe evidently depended on his estimate of the relative political importance of the organization to be bribed. Examples:
To the Jewish National Fund
500,000 schillings ($93,500)
To the Austrian
Nazis 494,000 (92,400)
To the Peasants'
Union 182,000 (34,000)
To the
Heimwehr 95,000 (17,800)
To the Association
of Austrian
Legitimists
(Monarchists) 9,000 (1,700)
To the Socialist
Technicians'
Trade Union 3,000 (560)
To Schuschnigg's
Catholic
Ostmarkische
Sturmscharen 2,000 (375)
In addition there was 430,000 schillings paid to buy houses for Jewish refugees from Germany, and a payment of 108,000 schillings to Anton Rintelen, now serving a life sentence for participation in the Nazi Putsch which led to the murder of Engelbert Dollfuss. Maintaining the goodwill of the Austrian Press cost Phönix-Wien 1,098,000 schillings.