| Karl Burian | |
| Death Date: | 13 March 1944 |
| Death Place: | Vienna, Nazi Germany |
| Death Cause: | Execution |
| Nationality: | Austrian/Austro-Hungarian |
| 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 of the country 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 were those who wanted the reinstation of pre-World War I monarchies. After the war, Burian created the monarchist combat organization Ostara,[2] and was later in the Legitimist academic fraternity Corps de Ottonen.[3] In the late 1930s, legitimists rallied around the son of the late Austro-Hungarian emperor Charles I, Otto von Hapsburg, who had been in exile in Steenokkerzeel, Belgium. Their attachment to Austria-Hungary "became more insistent as National Socialism displayed more disregard for the separate Austria identity."[4]
Nazi Germany annexed Austria on 12 March 1938, and Hapsburg pleaded for armed resistance in a Paris speech on 15 March. The Corps de Ottonen was dissolved that month, and three days later, fifty of its members went underground. The previous senior president, Willi Klein, emigrated to Paris, and Burian took his place. Burian created the Legitimist Central Committee. Leading Committee members were Josef Wotypka, Burian's deputy, Rochus Kozak, in charge of "organizational affairs", Julius Kretschmer, in charge of propaganda, Ludwig Krausz-Wienner, in charge of "ideological problems", and Josef Krinninger, their courier. The Committee communicated with the Hebra and Zemljak legitimist groups, and was supplied with funds from abroad. They communicated with Hapsburg through the former Greek Consul in Vienna, Michael Georg Koimzoglu, and other associates of Krinninger's in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia.[5] In May, the assets of Hotel Metropole in Vienna were seized by the Gestapo, who made it their headquarters. Burian's resistance group planned to blow the hotel up. One of the hotel's expropriated co-proprietors and a legitimist, Karl Freidiger, came to the group with the hotel's floor plans. The bombing plan, and Burian's direct contact with Hapsburg, made Burian a "particularly dangerous" threat to the Gestapo.
A former member of Corps de Ottonen, Dr. Othmar Slavik, who was then living in Solothurn, Switzerland, arranged a meeting for 27 August between Burian and a supposed Polish intelligence agent, to whom Burian would supply German mobilitzation plans. The man was actually Gestapo spy Josef Materna, who was also an Abwehr informant in their Vienna office. The Gestapo and Abwehr Vienna office had been exchanging information.[6] Burian was arrested on 13 October 1938, while leaving the coffeehouse where Materna had given him military documents. Other members of the group were arrested later that month. He was interned for five years on charges of espionage,[7] sentenced to death on 9 December 1943, and executed in Vienna on 13 March 1944.