Rumors of the Week

Masons, plasterers and glaziers clambered around wooden scaffolding busily repairing gaping holes in Vienna's great municipal apartment houses. Street-corner telephone booths, kiosks and blank walls suddenly blossomed with green and white posters of Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg and Vice Chancellor Emil Fey. From Budapest arrived sleek bespectacled Fulvio Suvich, Italian Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who had been discussing a possible Italian-Austro-Hungarian trade alliance with the Hungarian Government. He closeted himself for several hours with little Chancellor Dollfuss, then rushed off for Rome. In Trieste, earlier in the week, Italian police suddenly arrested three Nazis bound for Austria, seized trunks full of smoke and tear gas bombs, bundles & bundles of pro-Nazi propaganda. In Vienna Heimwehr troops suddenly assembled with rifles, full equipment and rations for three days, piled into motor trucks and departed. Such was Austria's first week after the bloody suppression of the Socialists (TIME, Feb. 26). What could be heard but not seen last week was the following prize collection of rumors:

P: Following Nazi Theodor Habicht's "radio ultimatum'' giving Austria eight days to accept a Nazi Government, the Heimwehr men were being sent to the border where 10,000 men of the famed Austrian Legion were supposed to be ready to invade the country through the narrow valley at Braunau--Adolf Hitler's birthplace. U. S. correspondents investigated privately, could find no signs of unusual activity on either side of the border. From Berlin they learned that Handsome Adolf himself had suppressed news of the Habicht ultimatum in Germany and was thinking of pensioning or retiring him from his post as "Inspector General for Austria."

P: The Heimwehr men had left Vienna in order to stage a fascist march on Vienna in imitation of Mussolini's famed March on Rome. Chancellor Dollfuss was a party to this, willing to step down to accept either von Starhemberg or Emil Fey as Heimwehr Dictator. Prince von Starhemberg scotched this story himself: "Please deny energetically any rumor of a Heimwehr march on Vienna. There is no need for such a march. We are a part of the Government and fully support the Government."

P: Kindly old Wilhelm Miklas had resigned as President of Austria in protest against the shelling of the workers' apartment houses a fortnight ago.

P: Archduke Otto was about to be restored to the Habsburg throne.

P: Fulvio Suvich was preparing not a commercial but a political-military alliance between Italy, Austria and Hungary.

At the end of the week an under-official in the War Office at Vienna gave the most plausible explanation of all the marchings of Heimwehr men. They were preparing for no particular crisis but merely parading to show their strength in the provinces. Troops from different villages were being transferred to others where they would not be recognized because German Nazis long ago discovered that the entire impressiveness of a thunderous parade may be spoiled by one small child shrilling, "Ach, look at Uncle August!"

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