German nationalism in Austria an independent Austria, rejected his merger proposal, Strasser said "Don't talk to me about Austria. There is no Austria ... there was once a living corpse which called itself Austria ... that this Austria collapsed in 1918 was a blessing ... particularly for the German people, who were thereby given the chance to create a Greater Germany." After this, tensions between the Nazis and Austrofascists worsened, culminating in the July Putsch of 1934, when Nazis attempted to overthrow the government. Whilst they managed to assassinate chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, the putsch was quickly crushed by the police, army, and Heimwehren. In
Constitution of Austria chancellor. This move away from a government steered predominantly by a fairly large and (by definition) fractioned deliberative body towards a system concentrating power in the hands of a single autonomous leader was made in an attempt to appease the para-fascist movements (such as the Heimwehr, or later the Ostmärkische Sturmscharen and the Social Democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund) thriving in Austria at that time. In 1934, following years of increasingly violent political strife and gradual erosion of the rule of law, the ruling Christian Social Party, which by then had turned to full-scale Austrofascism, formally replaced the constitution by a new