Friedrich Adler (politician)

[1][6] Adler was engaged in the international trade union movement and in 1911 he finally gave up his scientific activities to become the secretary-general of the SDAP in Vienna, an office he held until 1914.

On 21 October 1916, in the dining room of the Viennese hotel Meissl & Schadn, he shot the Austrian minister-president Count Karl von Stürgkh three times with a pistol, killing him.

The Social Democratic party organ Arbeiter-Zeitung called the assassination a "strange and incomprehensible" act, whereas left leaning German-language-newspapers outside the censorship of Germany and Austria, in neutral Switzerland, attributed his deed to an understandable matter of last resort against an anti-democratic tyrant, who had successfully blocked the Austrian parliament from convening since 1913.

[7] After a period when attempts were made to avoid a trial by declaring Adler insane, he was brought to court in May 1917 where he was able to publicly present the killing as a revolutionary action in the context of the case against the war[8] as well as against 'reformist' Social Democrats like Karl Renner.

Upon the death of his father on 11 November 1918, Friedrich Adler, together with his party fellows Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch, paved the way for Karl Renner's German-Austrian government.

He was subsequently active in the formation of the Labour and Socialist International, serving as secretary-general firstly jointly with Tom Shaw then on his own until 1940,[9] witnessing the rise of Nazism.