AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: Live Chancellor, Dead Premier

Live Chancellor, Dead Premier

One day last week obese Nazi Air Minister Hermann Wilhelm Goring strove fretfully in Vienna to kill time, loitering in shops unrecognized. When he tried to inspect the Habsburg Treasures, an unimpressed attendant told him to come back at an hour when they would be open to the public. The reason why General Goring was thus dawdling in Vienna turned out afterward to be because of an elaborate ruse devised by the German Minister to the Austrian Republic, scheming Franz von Papen. It was his idea that Goring should as if by chance happen to appear on the Vienna station platform just as Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg was about to depart for Budapest to attend the funeral of Hungarian Premier Julius Gombos. The Chancellor would then be obliged, as a matter of courtesy, to invite Goring into his private car, and when they alighted together at Budapest it would appear that Dr. Schuschnigg was hand in glove with the Nazis.

This piece of elephantine German clever ness came to naught when pious little Chancellor Schuschnigg never did show up on the station platform and disgruntled General Goring climbed into his sleeping car berth grunting curses at von Papen’s scheme. Unknown to the Germans and as a complete surprise to most Austrians, Dr. Schuschnigg was engaged in seizing supreme power for himself and his following of Catholic bigwigs by a drastic Cabinet decree in effect making the Chancellor a Dictator. He was able to make this move because the 120,000 irregular “troops” of the Austrian Heimwehr had fortnight ago divided in a split so drastic that Vienna Heimwehr Leader Major Emil Fey last week actually challenged to a duel the aristocratic founder of theHeimwehr, Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. Sly Dr. Schuschnigg has for months been taking discreet measures to under mine the Prince’s power and last spring jockeyed him out of the post of Vice-Chancellor (TIME, May 26). When Dr.

Schuschnigg suddenly struck last week, Prince Starhemberg found himself so weak that instead of calling upon the Heimwehr to rise, he told these mercenary troopers: “Do not become traitors to the Heimwehr spirit by offering any resistance to the Government.” Easy-going Viennese called this Prince Starhemberg’s “political abdication” and his easy-going Heimwehr submitted quietly to being dissolved, inasmuch as they were offered a chance to join up at similar pay as members of the new Dictator’s own so-called Front Militia. These sweeping changes occupied Chancellor Schuschnigg the whole night. By dawn the Schuschnigg Clericals appeared to have such a stranglehold on Austria that Chancellor Schuschnigg dared to leave Vienna, hopped at 6 a. m. into a plane which flew him to Budapest in time for the funeral and a scowl from bulbous, bemedaled General Goring.

At Budapest the burial of Premier Gombos and assumption of power by Deputy Premier Koloman Daranyi were quiet incidents in the life of Hungary’s perennial strongman. tough Admiral Nicholas Horthy de Nagybanya who since 1920 has been known as His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary. The late General Gombos, who had known for at least a year that his kidneys were giving out, had created himself Field Marshal, thus realizing a life-long ambition, and upon being asked to resign as Premier before betaking himself to the Munich sanatorium in which he died, snorted: “No! I am resolved to die as Premier of my beloved Hungary!”