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New Government Formed in Austria with Antisemitic Trend: Two Heimwehr Ministers Included: Author of

May 23, 1932
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A Government of the Right with marked antisemitic tendencies and including two Ministers of the antisemitic Heimwehr Organisation has been formed here to-day (as was forecast in the J.T.A. Bulletin of the 7th. inst.) in succession to the Buresch Government which resigned a fortnight ago.

The new Premier, is Herr Engelbert Dollfuss, who was Minister of Agriculture in the previous Government.

An important change is the dropping of the Minister of Education, Dr. Emmerich Czermak, the author of the Students’ Rights Bill, which sought to restore the medieval division of the Universities into student “nations”, one of them being a Jewish student “nation”, which was carried at the first reading on April 29th.

Dr. Czermak had earned the hostility of the Roman Catholic Clergy by his ruling that Jewish students who have become baptised into the Catholic Church are still Jews by nationality, and would have to belong to the Jewish student “nation”, as ineligible for the Christian Aryan student “nation”. “This ruling was opposed by the clergy as detrimental to proselytism, and it is believed that Dr. Czermak’s exclusion from the new Government is the result of this opposition. The new Minister of Education, Dr. Rintele, it is understood, will probably shelve the bill.

When the Heimwehr participated in the Austrian Government in 1930, being represented by two Ministers, Prince Starhemberg, as Minister of the Interior, and Dr. Hueber, as Minister of Justice, they neither of them disguised their antisemitism, and the Jews of Austria were seriously concerned about the anti-Jewish policy which they were conducting in their official capacities. Speaking while he was Minister of Justice, Dr. Hueber declared at a public meeting that “we (the Heimwehr) have the same conceptions, the same purposes, and aims as the Hitlerists”, adding that the negotiations for a bloc with the Nazis had broken down not because of any disagreement on the question of race-antisemitism, but only on tactics.

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