Family to Safety

A tormenting question dinned last week in the brain of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss: "Where will my wife and the children be safe?"

The spunky little Dictator had just hurled a drastic ultimatum at his Nazi enemies. He gave them five days in which to hand over all their explosives to his government. After that anyone caught with such a thing in Austria faced sentence of Death, by decree of Engelbert Dollfuss. Well he knew that this decree invited instant bomb attacks on himself and family.

Two days before the ultimatum expired a shattering blast wrecked the important power station of Opponitz in Lower Austria, stopped every streetcar in Vienna for an hour until another power station could be hooked up to serve the capital. Minor bombs were popping all over Austria. To the railway station sped Chancellor, frau and children. Their train snorted toward Italy. At the frontier Chancellor Dollfuss, a pious believer in Providence, got off and prepared to go back to Vienna.

"You will be safe where you are going," he told Frau Dollfuss, kissed her and waved goodby. Safely next morning Frau Dollfuss and kinder arrived at Riccione to be house guests in the safest little seaside villa in all Italy, that occupied by Her Excellency* Rachele Mussolini, portly and placid wife of Il Duce. Later this month, if all goes well, the two Dictators will join their wives for a week-end conference at Riccione, the third personal conference in a year of Mussolini and Dollfuss (TIME, Aug. 28; March 26). In Vienna the little Chancellor announced: "Austria's foreign policy will not be changed from our main principle of independence. So far as internal policy is concerned we must now take the most severe measures against enemies of the State!"

The severe measures included last week a cabinet reshuffle in which Chancellor Dollfuss, who was already his own Minister of Foreign Affairs and Forestry & Agriculture took on the War Ministry and Ministry of Security as well, thus bringing under his direct control the entire armed forces of Austria as well as the police. Since the Dollfuss Government seemed about to resort to bloody execution to enforce its anti-explosives decree, the official press printed a plethora of alibis in advance. "Responsibility rests on Adolf Hitler," declared the Abendzeitung. "He has forced us to raise our hands for a last blow at the Brown criminal gangs organized in Austria by German agents. Austria must safeguard herself against the anarchy that prevails in Germany.''

Few days later, police vigorously denied participation in the killing of Austrian Nazi Cornelius Zimmer, shot in the streets of Vienna while his shrieking sister begged mercy.

*Only a score of Italians are members of the Order of the Annunziata, headed by His Majesty, and only their wives have the right to be called "Her Excellency."

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