EVEN THOUGH AUSTRIAN National Socialism is older than its German corollary, its rise to a mass phenomenon in the early 1930s would be unthinkable without the successes of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) in Germany. Austrian National Socialism arose in 1904 in the German-speaking regions of Bohemia as a markedly proletarian offshoot of the pan- German camp (völkisches Lager) surrounding Georg von Schönerer. This group shared Schönerer's political program from the 1880's that combined German nationalism with anticlerical and antisocialist sentiment as well as a form of xenophobic anti-Semitism that emphasized the superiority of the German race. In the relatively stable economic and political conditions during the Habsburg monarchy, this program had little chance of success. In 1911, the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP) sent a total of three representatives to the Imperial Council (Reichsrat).

After the collapse of the monarchy, the DAP split into an Austrian faction and a Czechoslovakian faction. Rudolf Jung, the chief ideologist of the party, remained in Bohemia, while the party's chief propagandist, Walter Riehl, moved to Vienna. While there, Riehl founded the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, DNSAP). For Jung, the defeat of the Central- European powers in World War I was only the climax of a longer struggle in which the very survival of the German people (Volk) was at stake. He blamed Czechs, Jews, and other non-Aryan groups for the difficult condition of the German worker, and he blamed the Social Democrats for supporting non-German forces through their internationalism. Jung saw the incarnation of true German spirit in the castes of small independent farmers and employed tradesmen, led by a Führer whom fate would place at the head of the German ethnic state and protect the general welfare of the larger Volk from the individual interests of the single citizen.

Jung's demands, some of which appeared in the twenty-five points of the NSDAP program in Germany on February 24, 1920, failed to impress the well-organized Social Democratic working class. For these workers, the class struggle was not just a “Jewish invention,” it was reality. The National Socialist ideology too easily resonated with the legacy of the pan-German movement which, during the monarchy, had been strongly associated with the middle class.