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In OTL, the Austrian Civil War, also known as the February Uprising (or Februarkämpfe in German), consisted of only a few days of skirmishes between national socialist and conservative-fascist forces between 12 February and 16 February 1934, in Austria. The clashes started in Linz, when a force led by Heimwehr commander Emil Fey, searched Hotel Schiff in Linz, a property belonging to the Social Democratic Party. Linz Schutzbund commander Richard Bernaschek was the first to actively resist, sparking off armed conflict between a conglomeration of the Heimwehr, the police and the Gendarmerie against the outlawed, but still existent, socialist Schutzbund, who were supported by Hitler's Nazi Germany. Most of the action took place in Vienna, where members of the Schutzbund barricaded themselves in city council housing estates (Gemeindebauten), the symbols and strongholds for the socialist movement in Austria, such as the Karl-Marx-Hof building. Police and paramilitaries took up positions outside these fortified complexes and the parties exchanged fire, initially only with small arms. Skirmishes between the two camps also spread to other cities and towns in Austria, such as Steyr, Sankt Pölten, Weiz, Eggenberg (Graz), Kapfenberg, Bruck an der Mur, Graz, Ebensee and Wörgl.

An apparently decisive moment in the events came with the entry of the Austrian Federal Army into the conflict. Though the army remained still a comparatively independent institution, chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss ordered Karl-Marx-Hof shelled with light artillery, and they followed his orders, endangering the lives of thousands of civilians and destroying many flats before forcing the socialist fighters to surrender. Viennese and Upper Austrian fighting ended by 13 February, but continued heavily in Styrian cities, especially in Bruck an der Mur and Judenburg, until 14 or 15 February. After that, there were only small groups of socialists fighting against the armed forces, or fleeing from it; by 16 February 1934, the Austrian Civil War had ended, with several hundred people dead and thousands wounded. The incidents of February 1934 were taken as a pretext by the Austrian government to prohibit the Social Democratic Party and its affiliated trade unions altogether, and in May, the conservatives replaced the democratic constitution by a corporatist 'Austrofascist' constitution modeled along the lines of Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy, with the Patriotic Front (Vaterländische Front), into which the Heimwehr and the Christian Social Party were merged, becoming the only legal political party in the resulting authoritarian regime, the Ständestaat.

So, your alternate history challenge is to somehow make the Austrian Civil War last longer than the Spanish Civil War did IOTL, with similarly high levels of foreign involvement and intervention to assist both sides (the Austrian Nazis and the Austrofascists) in the conflict, and with a higher or equivalent proportionate death toll to OTL's Spanish Civil War (135,000+ fatalities). What do you think- are you up to the task? Whose side do you envision that the respective European powers, and any other major powers in the world, would be more likely to support in TTL's Austrian Civil War (excluding Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, who were already completely committed to backing the Austrian Nazis and Fascists respectively)? Who would be more likely to emerge as the winners in the Civil War, if it did endure for so long (almost 2yrs and 9 months)? And would it be a war which either Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini could have afforded to concede defeat in, after all of that time and effort invested, without either being overthrown in a coup or escalating the conflict into a premature alternate WW2?
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