Cowardice & Compromise

Spunky little Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, who rules Austria amid the incessant banging of Nazi bombs, heard himself flayed by radio from Munich last week as a coward.

The Munich radio attack was in violation of Adolf Hitler's promise to Benito Mussolini to keep Nazi hands off Austria (TIME, June 25). But Der Fuehrer apparently found it necessary to have an anonymous speaker explain to the Austrian people just how right he was to put down the "Roehm Mutiny" by bloody executions (see p. 15).

"Dollfuss has more than once been faced by treachery in his own ranks but he smoothes things over by the cowardly method of compromise. How much more admirable was the method of Adolf Hitler! Der Fuehrer has crushed the rebels and it is our duty to tell the Austrian people what a mess he has cleaned up."

The telling involved such a rehash of queer Captain Roehm's unnatural orgies that next day Austrian Heimwehr Commander Prince von Starhemberg retorted: "The Austrian Government cannot remain unmoved when a version of events is broadcast over German radios which is the most unappetizing and dirtiest thing ever broadcast in the German language. Naziism is a version of Bolshevism! I know the present leaders of Germany personally. I know they are incapable of erecting a German system in Germany. Austrians, stand firm! Austria is destined to be the savior of Germanism!"

Whatever Austria's destiny, the Dollfuss Government got a fresh dose of Nazi terrorism last week. In the marble hall of the Provincial Government Building at Salzburg a bomb went off outside the door of the Provincial Director of Public Safety, blowing a great hole in the wall. In Vienna $5,000 damage to the famed City Hall resulted from a terrorist fire brand.

Close-lipped Chancellor Dollfuss remained grimly silent but his official Wiener Zeitung roundly declared: "No reasonable observer of German events believes in the official version that Captain Roehm and his accomplices were just about to launch an armed revolt. It is unthinkable that an experienced soldier like Captain Roehm would spend the last hours before the outbreak of a revolt indulging in orgies in an obscure villa without even guarding its doors."

By implication Chancellor Dollfuss' organ charged Chancellor Hitler with the supreme cowardice of nabbing men in their beds and having them shot on suspicion without possessing tangible evidence that they were plotting against him at all. Significantly recalled was the odd official German statement that "Some of the traitors died with the words 'Heil Hitler!' on their lips."

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