AUSTRIA: Gallows and Assistants

The gallows in my garden, people say, Is new and neat and adequately tall. —G. K. Chesterton.

Adequate though small is Engelbert Dollfuss. Last week the mite of a Chancellor (4 ft. 11 in.) who holds the balance between Austria’s raging Nazis and scarcely less irate Socialists, decided that what he needed was a whopping gallows. Not since 1920, when the death penalty was abolished, has there been such a thing in Austria. Engelbert Dollfuss called carpenters. With a mighty thwacking they built in the gloomy courtyard of Vienna’s district jail a monster gallows “adequately tall,” said to be the biggest ever reared in Austria.

Meanwhile Chancellor Dollfuss had declared martial law, “yielding to popular demands for the restoration of the death penalty,” as his Government neatly put it, adding: “The peaceful population of Austria naturally has nothing to fear. . . . On the other hand this measure is to be understood as meaning that henceforth perpetrators and abettors and participants in disgraceful and bloody crimes and violent acts menacing the public safety will not be able to reckon with the light penalty hitherto specified in our laws.”

Enrolled to defend the Dollfuss Government last week were 8,000 newly uniformed and smartly armed persons called “assistant soldiers.” Under the Treaty of St. Germain the Austrian Republic is entitled to 30,000 volunteer soldiers. Britain, France and Italy, all pro-Dollfuss. agreed last summer to let Chancellor Dollfuss add the 8,000 reserve.