Engelbert Dollfuss - Early Life

Early Life

He was born in Texing in Lower Austria to unmarried mother Josepha Dollfuss and her lover Joseph Weninger. The couple of peasant origin was unable to get married due to financial problems. Josepha married landowner Leopold Schmutz a few months after her son's birth, who did not adopt Engelbert however as his own child. Dollfuss, who was raised as a devout Roman Catholic, was shortly in seminary before deciding to study law at the University of Vienna and then economics at the University of Berlin. Here he met Alwine Glienke, a German woman from a Protestant family, whom he married in 1921. The couple had a son and two daughters, one of which died in early childhood.

Dollfuss had difficulty gaining admission into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I because he was only 153 cm tall. He was eventually accepted and sent to the Alpine Front. He was a highly decorated soldier and was briefly taken prisoner by the Italians as a prisoner of war in 1918. After the war he worked for the agriculture ministry as secretary of the Farmers' Association and became director of the Lower Austrian Chamber of Agriculture in 1927. In 1930 as a member of the conservative Christian Social Party (CS), he was appointed president of the Federal Railway System. (One of the founders of the CS was a hero of Dollfuss', Karl Freiherr von Vogelsang.) The following year he was named Minister of Agriculture and Forests.