Karl Burian
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Karl Burian | |
|---|---|
| Died | 13 March 1944 |
| Cause of death | Execution |
| Known for | Military strategizing, monarchist activism, and Nazi resistance |
Hauptmann Karl Burian (died 13 March 1944) was an Austrian captain for Austria-Hungary during World War I, activist for the restoration of the Austrian monarchy, and an important figure of the Austrian resistance against Nazi Germany. After Germany's Anschluss, or annexation of Austria, in March 1938, Burian created a resistance group, the Legitimist Central Committee, which planned to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, the Hotel Metropole. Later that year, he attempted to give German mobilization plans to a contact who was secretly a Gestapo spy. He was sentenced to five years in prison, and executed in Vienna in 1944.
Hauptmann[1] Karl Burian was an Austrian captain for Austria-Hungary during World War I, and a legitimist. "Legitimists" in this context were those who wanted the reinstatement of pre-World War I European monarchies, such as Austria-Hungary, which dissolved in 1918 at the war's end.[2][3] After the war, Burian created the monarchist combat organization Ostara,[4] and was later in the Legitimist academic fraternity Corps de Ottonen.[3] In the late 1930s, legitimists rallied around Otto von Hapsburg—the son of the late Austro-Hungarian emperor Charles I—who had been in exile in Steenokkerzeel, Belgium. Legitimists' attachment to Austria-Hungary, historian Radomír Luža writes, "became more insistent as [German Nazist ideology] displayed more disregard for the separate Austria [cultural] identity."[5]
