DOLLFUSS, ENGELBERT. – Austrian statesman, born in Texing, Lower Austria, on 4 October 1882, assassinated in Vienna on 25 July 1934. After completing his initial studies at the seminary of Ober-Hollabrunn, he subsequently studied theology in Vienna and Innsbruck, law in Vienna, and political economy in Berlin. After the Great War, in which he took part as a volunteer, he devoted himself to Catholic social organizations, particularly those of farmers and mountain people.
He was secretary of the Union of Lower Austrian Farmers, director of a provincial agricultural chamber, and in 1928 founded the Agricultural Insurance Institute of Vienna, Lower Austria, and Burgenland; in 1930 he became a member of the governing committee of the Austrian Federal Railways. A profound expert in agricultural sciences, he promoted their development and dissemination, especially after he was appointed head of the Ministry of Agriculture in 1931, as a representative of the Christian Social Party. On 20 May he was called by the confidence of the head of state, President Miklas, to the office of chancellor, following Buresch’s retirement. In foreign policy he relied on Italy and Hungary to resist internal and external pressure in favor of the annexation of Austria to Germany. In domestic policy his program was the formation of a Christian-German, corporative, authoritarian state. He therefore first concerned himself with incorporating into the state the militarily organized right-wing forces (Heimwehrme), which dominated the Länder, in order to balance the predominance of the Social Democrats in Vienna—a predominance that ended only when social democracy was outlawed following the insurrection of February 1934.
Convinced of the deficiencies of the Austrian parliamentary regime, because of the multiplicity of parties, incapable of ensuring an efficient government, he promoted a constitutional reform of the state. The new constitution entered into force, by government decree, on 1 May 1934. On that day the Concordat with the Holy See, signed in May of the preceding year, was also ratified. A year later he was killed by a group of insurgents, of Nazi tendency, who wished to seize the government.