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The 250th anniversary of that siege was just what the Dollfuss Government needed. A great memorial exhibition was set up in Vienna's Belvedere Palace, full of hats, gloves, maps, swords and other relics of Prince Eugene and Count von Starhemberg. Colored prints and picture books were issued. In mountain villages prizes were given for Austrian peasant costumes. Orators made speeches. And it worked. Week by week, hundreds of serious young Austrians who had felt that the only hope for their country was immediate political and economic union with Germany, have felt increasing affection for their own red-&-white-striped banner.
Turning of the Tyrol. At the end of April there were municipal elections in Innsbruck, capital of the Tyrol. Austrian Nazis polled twelve times their strength in 1931. Observers admitted that the Tyrol was probably 75% pro-Nazi. Since then has come Chancellor Dollfuss' personal success at the London Economic Conference, the patriotism campaign, the winning of the right to increase Austria's army, Germany's virtual embargo on tourists to Austria, her unbelievably stupid border skirmishing in which she alienated thousands by killing several Austrian frontier guards, and the active fortification of the Austrian frontier (TIME, Sept. 18). Last week tight-lipped Major Emil Fey, Minister of Public Safety, was able to crow to correspondents:
"Don't worry about the Tyrol. . . . When they [the Nazis] come over singly, we take them singly and deal with them. If they come over in force we shall fight them in force. . . . Beside the regular troops we have between 60,000 and 70,000 trained Heimwehr men, and we have arms for them in our magazines."
Dollfuss. What is left of Austria is four-fifths pure scenery, a great patch of jagged mountains, pine forests and narrow little valleys. Along the southern bank of the Danube and sweeping round Vienna is a narrow crescent of good farm land that is supposed to feed a city of 2,000,000 souls. Almost in the centre of this arable crescent, in the village of Texing, province of Lower Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss was born Oct. 4, 1892. There his black-shawled old mother and his stepfather still live. Who his father was foreign correspondents have been unable to prove and his adherents will not say. He graduated from the University of Vienna law school, studied National Economy in Berlin. At the outbreak of the War, Engelbert Dollfuss promptly enlisted in the Kaiserschützenregiment, a corps of Tyrol Alpinists.
Little Engelbert Dollfuss got his fill of mountains. He served 37 months at the front (six times as much active service as the average U. S. soldier saw), won himself a string of decorations and the edelweiss embroidered collar tabs, the capercailzie plumes of a First Lieutenant.* Considering his peasant upbringing and uncertain antecedents, this promotion, in the extremely aristocratic army of Franz Josef, was a notable achievement. For months at a time Lieut. Dollfuss and his men held a tiny valley in the Dolomites against the Italian advance. Natives near Trent still call it Dollfussthal (Dollfuss Valley).