People of the Revolution and the USSR

Austria state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1892–1934 ✕ Assassinated in a Nazi coup

Austrian chancellor who shut down parliament, built the Fatherland Front dictatorship and was assassinated in a Nazi coup in 1934

Born to a poor peasant family in Lower Austria, he studied law at the University of Vienna and served for 37 months on the Italian front in the First World War. Working for the Lower Austrian Peasants’ Union he became known as an agrarian expert, and he was appointed minister of agriculture and forestry in 1931 and federal chancellor in May 1932. In March 1933 he shut out parliament and ruled by emergency decree, banned the Communists, the Nazis and then the Social Democrats, and built a one-party dictatorship under the Fatherland Front modelled largely on Italian Fascism. He crushed the socialist movement in the civil war of February 1934 and in March signed the Rome Protocols with Mussolini and Gömbös. On 25 July 1934 he was shot dead in the Chancellery during an attempted Nazi coup.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1908–1975 ○ Natural causes

A Nazi commando leader magnified by propaganda

Standing before Mussolini at Gran Sasso, Skorzeny became the face of a victory whose command credit belonged elsewhere.

Born in Vienna, Skorzeny became a Waffen-SS officer who directed sabotage and commando operations for Nazi Germany. In the 1943 Gran Sasso raid, he helped locate Benito Mussolini and led an SS detachment at the landing site, but the operation as a whole was planned and commanded by the airborne officers Harald Mors and Kurt Student. Nazi propaganda presented him as Mussolini's liberator, while he also took part in the overthrow of Hungary's government and the Ardennes deception operation. Acquitted at a postwar war-crimes trial, he later lived in Spain amid far-right networks.