This article is part of the series The Road to World War II .

An opportunity to invade Austria and to fulfill his long-lost dream of incorporating his counry of birth into the Reich, arose when Dollfuss was assassinated by Austrian Nazis (1934).

Dollfuss rose to power in 1932 in a fledgling state that was struggling to come to terms with its fate sealed under the Treaty of Versailles.

Under heavy political fire from the Socialist Party on the left and the rapidly growing Austrian Nazi movement on the right, Dollfuss suspended parliament indefinetely in March 1933.

Fearing the Nazis might win the next Austrian elections and merge Austria into the German Reich, Dollfuss banned the Nazi Party in June 1933. To keep Austria’s sovereignity he steered his country ever closer to Mussolini, and streamlined his policies to those of Fascist Italy in exchange for guarantees of Austria independence.

Mussolini, who at this time did by no means have friendly relations with Germany, regarded Austria as a “buffer zone” between Italy and Germany and to keep it this way required an independent Austria.

On July 25, 1934, eight Nazis entered the Chancellory building in Vienna and shot Dollfuss dead in an attempted Coup d’État. Hitlers involvement in the assasination remains unclear, but his reaction was swift: he immediately started to prepare an invasion of Austria under the pretext to “restore order”.

Mussolini, seeing his buffer zone threatened, called Hitler’s bluff and mobilised his troops along the northern Italian border to Austria and himself threatened with invasion in case of a German attack. Hitler, knowing that his troops were not yet ready to sustain a war, backed down.

Hitler’s withdrawal was to be the last time that he followed Mussolini’s footsteps, as he had done previously in his “remake” of Mussolini’s “March to Rome” with his Munich “Beer Hall Putsch”.

The assasination would pave the way for the Anschluss — Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938.