1920s: Escalation of Violence

Violent riots, clashes, Heimwehr (Home Guard) and Schutzbund (Protection League), and mounted police are the defining images of everyday political life in the First Republic. However, a state monopoly on violence was never successfully enforced – probably because a part of the political elite was never interested in it and wanted to use paramilitary organisations for its own purposes. The history of the First Republic can also be written as a history of escalating violence: from the founding days of the Republic with their communist coup attempts, and its individual acts of violence from the right and the left, past July 15, 1927, the failed Pfirmer Putsch of 1931, Nazi terrorism in 1933, up to February 12, 1934, and the July Putsch of the Nazi Party in 1934.

The chronicle of political violence in the First Republic reveals a latent civil war. It was the “spirit of the trenches” of the First World War that persisted in the uncompromising hostility of the political camps – and finally escalated into the elimination of democracies and the destruction of Austria.

That the bloody consequences of the July 1927 riots, with 89 deaths and countless injuries, prompted the police to rethink their traditional weapons, can be seen as an exception in this escalation. The sabre-wielding police inflicted severe injuries on the protestors, radicalising them further.  By decree, the police’s armament was replaced in 1928 with rubber clubs. While this was a “humane” reform on the one hand, on the other hand, traces of mistreatment, as US experience has shown, were more difficult to detect: the club was primarily directed against the muscles of the arms and legs. Beatings against the head and the face had to be avoided.