Also known as the Austrian Uprising, this civil war broke out on 12 February 1934 and ended four days later on 16 February. The clashes started in Linz and rose out of Austrian workers undertaking an armed struggle against a rising fascist regime. The war came about as a result of a culmination of events, including the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of WWI and the Great Depression that followed.
The Austrian military became involved and it has been estimated that more than one-thousand people were killed in the conflict. Though small in scale in an international comparison, and small in scale in the light of the events of WWII which soon followed, the Austrian Civil War nevertheless proved a decisive moment in the history of the Republic.
After World War II, when Austria re-emerged on the political landscape as a sovereign nation, politics again fell under the domination of the Social Democrats and the conservatives, who now formed a party called the Austrian People’s Party.