Florian Wenninger | Confronting Fascism. The Republican Defense League and Left-wing Militance in mid-war Austria

Austrian domestic politics in the 1920s was militarised in an unprecedented way. Among all European labour movements outside the Soviet Union, the Austrian one maintained the strongest paramilitary formation: the Republican Schutzbund, which was supposed to prevent a fascist takeover like the one in Italy. This lecture by Florian Wenninger (Institute for Historical Social Research in Vienna) first focuses on the organisational history of the military association and places it in the context of recent research on politically motivated violence in the European interwar period.