Walter Riehl

Walter Riehl (born November 8, 1881 in Wiener Neustadt , Lower Austria ; † September 6, 1955 in Vienna ) was an Austrian politician and lawyer.

Youth and education

Walter Riehl was the son of Anton and Hermine Riehl. Hans Riehl was his half-brother. Walter attended grammar school in Wiener Neustadt and then studied law at the University of Vienna , where he was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD . From 1906 to 1908 he was a trainee judge in Reichenberg , then a trainee lawyer in Karlsbad until 1910 and then until 1912 a lawyer in Bozen , Meran , Klagenfurt and Vienna.

During the First World War , Riehl did military service from 1914 to 1917 and took part in several Isonzo battles.

From 1918, Walter Riehl lived and worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Vienna.

Political and professional career

Politically, Riehl was first a social democrat . In April 1905, as head of the constituency conference, he submitted an application to the Wiener Neustädter Zeitschrift Gleichheit , with which Anton Ofenböck became editor and succeeded Adolf Duda . Employed as a civil servant in Reichenberg since 1905 , he developed there from a social democrat to a radical German nationalist who tried to combine the bourgeois German-national movement with a national workers' movement. He joined the German Workers' Party (DAP) in 1909 and was one of its leading figures. In 1910 he was dismissed from civil service because of his radical stance. After his party split up into the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy , Riehl took over the chairmanship of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (DNSAP) in what was now the Republic of Austria in 1919 . In August 1920, the creation of an “intergovernmental chancellery” was agreed, through which the NS sister parties in Austria, Poland , Czechoslovakia and the party that had meanwhile been founded in the German Reich were to be organizationally consolidated and the NS movement as a whole to be strengthened. Riehl was entrusted with the management of this law firm and at the same time advanced to become the "leader" of all National Socialist parties.

After the World War, Riehl was one of Austria's leading National Socialist politicians in the 1920s. By taking over the presidency of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in Munich by Adolf Hitler in 1921, there was a gradual deterioration of the previously harmonious relations between the Austrian and German Nazi leadership. Hitler claimed sole leadership of all National Socialist parties and began to interfere more and more often in Austrian affairs. Associated with this were ever more violent disputes within the DNSAP, which were sparked above all by the question of whether the party should steer the essentially democratic-parliamentary course that Riehl advocated or Hitler's revolutionary-extra-parliamentary course. The decision was made in August 1923 at a party congress in Salzburg, in line with Hitler's wishes . Riehl therefore resigned from his position as chairman of the DNSAP and as head of the “Interstate Chancellery”. His successor in the DNSAP was the foreman Karl Schulz . Riehl founded the German Social Association for Austria , which resulted in his exclusion from the DNSAP in 1924. The politically completely insignificant association entered an electoral community with the Greater German People's Party before Riehl dissolved it in September 1930.

In 1930 Riel became a member of the NSDAP Hitler movement , but no longer emerged politically. In 1932 he became a councilor for the NSDAP in Vienna, but was expelled from the NSDAP again in the course of the party ban in August 1933.

In the meantime, Riehl was also involved in the Front Fighter Association of German-Austria and represented the perpetrators of Schattendorf as a lawyer in 1927 ( Schattendorfer judgment ). Riehl was also the defender of other right-wing extremist assassins: in 1925 and 1927 he was the legal representative of Otto Rothstock, the murderer of Hugo Bettauer , and in 1928 of Richard Strebinger, who carried out an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Vienna's mayor Karl Seitz on November 26, 1927 . In 1933 he was the defender of the National Socialist Werner von Alvensleben, who had carried out an assassination attempt on Richard Steidle .

After the "Anschluss" in 1938, Riehl was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo . After his release he tried to re-join the NSDAP, but was turned away.

After the Soviet troops marched into Vienna in April 1945, Walter Riehl was temporarily arrested by the occupying forces. Leopold Kunschak , after the end of the war, first ÖVP deputy mayor of Vienna, stood up for the prisoner. Riehl now saw his political home in the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) . In 1947 he joined the ÖVP organization of the 1st district of Vienna and called on the “alumni” to vote for the ÖVP, “so as not to stand aside all the time as so-called 'fascists'.” For these reasons, Riehl gave up on 1. February 1953, in a programmatic radio speech, made an election recommendation for the ÖVP. In 1953 he joined the “Austrian Association of Academics” and became chairman of the “Social Policy Department”.

literature

• Rudolf Brandstötter: Dr. Walter Riehl and the History of the National Social Movement , Diss., Vienna 1969.
• Linda Erker, Andreas Huber, Klaus Taschwer : The German Club. Austro-Nazis in the Hofburg , Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2020.
• Alexander Schilling: Dr. Walter Riehl and the history of National Socialism , Leipzig 1933.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Riehl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Walter Riehl in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• Biographical data from Walter Riehl in the Biographical Handbook of the Lower Austrian Parliament 1861–1921

References and comments

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Reinhard Müller : Walter Riehl. In: Archives for the History of Sociology in Austria, University of Graz . 2015, accessed August 4, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Andrew Gladding Whiteside: Austrian national socialism before 1918. M. Nijhoff, The Hague 1962, pp. 96-98.
3. ↑ Robert Kriechbaumer : The great stories of politics. Political culture and parties in Austria from the turn of the century to 1945 (=  series of publications by the Research Institute for Political-Historical Studies of the Dr. Wilfried Haslauer Library, Salzburg . Volume 12 ). Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2001, ISBN 3-205-99400-0 , p. 672 .
4. ↑ Wolfgang Stadler: "... I am legally inconceivable." The proceedings of the Vienna People's Court against judges and prosecutors 1945–1955 (= series of publications of the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance on Resistance, Nazi Persecution and Post-War Aspects, Volume 5), Lit Verlag, Vienna u. a. 2007, p. 22.
5. ^ The murder of the writer Hugo Bettauer. In:  Neue Freie Presse , October 6, 1925, p. 9 (online at ANNO ). .
6. ↑ The sick and the healthy Rothstock. In:  Arbeiter-Zeitung , February 2, 1927, p. 7 (online at ANNO ). .
7. ↑ The trial of the assassin Strebinger. In:  Freedom! , May 10, 1928, p. 3 (online at ANNO ). .
8. ↑ One of the Steidle assassins before the jury. In:  Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung , November 22, 1933, p. 10 (online at ANNO ). .
9. ↑ Michael Wladika : On the representation of politicians and mandataries with a Nazi past in the Austrian People's Party 1945–1980. A group biographical study. Research project on behalf of the Karl von Vogelsang Institute. Vienna 2018, p. 46f. ( Online on the institute's website (PDF; 1.5 MB)).