The Darker Side

By Mayo Mohs

ASSASSINATION IN VIENNA

by WALTER B. MAASS

180 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

ANSCHLUSS

by DIETER WAGNER

and GERHARD TOMKOWITZ

255 pages. St. Martin's Press. $7.95.

For most Americans, the name Austria conjures up pleasant visions of ski weeks at Innsbruck, Vienna Sachertorte, Salzburg's music. Few people now recall two important events in that country that led up to World War II and betrayed a darker side of the Austrian character. One was the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by local Nazis in 1934, part of a coup that failed. The other, which so dramatically succeeded, was the Anschluss of 1938, when the German army annexed Austria unopposed.

Vienna-born Historian Walter Maass is especially intriguing on the Dollfuss assassination, partly because he lived through it all as a young adult. Maass finds it hard to capture the personality of his diminutive (4 ft. 11 in.) "Milli-Metternich." But he shows effectively how Dollfuss forced his "Christian corporate state" too suddenly into a totalitarian mold, basing his power on a single official party while socialists plotted on the left and Austrian Nazis on the right. Maass also demonstrates the appalling lack of official reaction when the government learned of the plot to overthrow it in July 1934. Austria had become such a "nation of informers," he says, that true warnings could hardly be distinguished from false.

The Nazi rebels were no geniuses. One coup leader, separated from his troops, wandered around in the July heat of Vienna "disguised" in an overcoat. But the government bumbling allowed the rebels access to the Ballhausplatz (the residence of Austria's Chancellor), where one of them, Otto Planetta, shot Dollfuss. Maass concedes Planetta may only have been "trigger-happy," but the conspirators completed the crime by refusing Dollfuss both a doctor and a priest. Because the Chancellor had sent his Cabinet away, the coup did not destroy the government. The plotters were executed. Germany was still too weak to intervene.

By 1938 conditions were decidedly different, as German Journalists Wagner and Tomkowitz show in their crisp, well-researched narrative of the seven-day Anschluss. The Germans had a growing war machine and Austrian Nazis in key places of power in the country. Increasingly menaced by Hitler, Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who had succeeded Dollfuss, announced on March 9 that a plebiscite, four days later, would decide whether Austria would keep its independence. A day before the vote could take place German troops were all over Austria. On the 14th, Hitler arrived in Vienna, the city's church bells pealing for him. The next day Hitler was already able to fly back to Germany, looking down on Austrian hills from his plane window. "All that," he said with satisfaction, "is Germany now." But the Anschluss lived only as long as the Reich. The post war generation, Maass notes, possessed the "self-confidence to go it alone"--and despite Austria's perilous position between East and West, has done just that. . Mayo Mahs

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