1940: Parliament Becomes the Gauhaus

The parliament building on Vienna’s Ringstrasse was built at the end of the 19th century and was designed by the Danish architect Theophil Hansen for the Imperial Council. After the end of the monarchy, in 1919 it became the seat of the National Council and Federal Council of the Republic of Austria. From 1934 onwards it housed the pseudo-democratic committees of the Ständestaat dictatorship and was known as the Haus der Bundesgesetzgebung (House of Federal Legislation).

Following the “Anschluss” (“annexation”) on 12 March 1938, Josef Bürckel made parliament his headquarters and the centre of Nazi power. He resided here first as the “Representative of the Führer for the Plebiscite in Austria” and, from 23 April 1938, as the “Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich”. Bürckel was the key figure in pushing through the “Anschluss” and also became Gauleiter (Nazi district governor) of Vienna on 30 January 1939. Even so, it was his successor in this post, Baldur von Schirach, who relocated the party’s district headquarters to the parliament building in August 1940. It remained the Gauhaus, the headquarters of the Vienna Nazi Party, until the end of Nazi rule. On 29 April 1945 the provisional government under Renner took over the parliament building from the Soviet commandant of Vienna, Alexei Blagodatov. In a demonstrative act of reappropriation, the provisional government held its first session in the partially damaged building.