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Red, Green, White | flag = | country = Austria }} The Fatherland Front ((ドイツ語:Vaterländische Front), VF) was the ruling political organisation of "Austrofascism". It claimed to be a nonpartisan movement, and aimed to unite all the people of Austria, overcoming political and social divisions.〔 Established on 20 May 1933 by Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss as a single-party along the lines of Italian Fascism, it advocated Austrian nationalism and independence from Nazi Germany on the basis of protecting Austria's Catholic religious identity from what they considered a Protestant-dominated German state.〔Atsuko Ichijō, Willfried Spohn. Entangled identities: nations and Europe. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005, p. 61.〕 The Fatherland Front which was strongly linked with Austria's Catholic clergy, absorbed Dollfuss's Christian Social Party, the agrarian ''Landbund'' and the right-wing paramilitary ''Heimwehren'', all of which were opposed to socialism, free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. It established an authoritarian and corporatist regime, the Federal State of Austria, which is commonly known in German as the ''Ständestaat'' ("corporate state"). According to the Fatherland Front, this form of government and society implemented the social teaching of Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical ''Quadragesimo anno''. The Front banned and persecuted all its political opponents, including Communists, Social Democrats—who fought against it in a brief Civil War in February 1934—but also the Austrian Nazis who wanted Austria to join Hitler's Greater German Empire. Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated by the Nazis in July 1934. He was succeeded as leader of the VF and Chancellor of Austria by Kurt Schuschnigg, who ruled until the invigorated Nazis forced him to resign on 11 March 1938. Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany the next day. The Fatherland Front maintained a cultural and recreational organisation, called "New Life" ''(Neues Leben)'', similar to Germany's Strength Through Joy. The role of the Fatherland Front has been a contentious point in post-War Austrian historiography. While left-wing historians consider it to be the exponent of an Austrian and Catholic-clerical variant of fascism and make it responsible for the failure of democracy in Austria, conservative authors stress its credits in defending the country's independence and opposition to Nazism. == Bases of support and opposition == While the Front's aim was to unite all Austrians, superseding all political parties, social and economic interest groups (including trade unions), it only enjoyed the support of certain parts of the society. It was mainly backed by the Catholic church, the Austrian bureaucracy and military, most of the rural population—including both landowners and peasants—(with its centre of gravity in western Austria), some loyalists to the Habsburg dynasty, and a significant part of the large Jewish community of Vienna. The VF was strongly linked with the Catholic student fraternities of the ''Cartell-Verband''—that maintained networks similar to old boys in English-speaking countries—in which most VF leaders had been members.〔 In contrast, it was in a two-fronts conflict with the Social Democrats, supported by unionised workers and having its stronghold in the capital Vienna and other industrialised towns, and their paramilitary ''Republikanischer Schutzbund'' ("Republican Protection League")—whose February 1934 uprising (or "Austrian Civil War") was crushed in a few days—on the one, and Austrian Nazis on the other hand. The latter, having taken over Austria's older pan-German nationalist current, were supported by a part of the secular, urban middle and lower middle class, including civil servants and public sector workers, professionals, teachers and students. However they did not have a mass following as in Germany.〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fatherland Front (Austria)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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