Wilhelm Miklas (15 October 187220 March 1956) was an Austrian politician who served as President of Austria from 1928 until the Anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938. Early life Born as the son of a post official in Krems, in the Cisleithanian crown land of Lower Austria, Miklas graduated from high school at Seitenstetten and went on to study history and geography at the University of Vienna. From 1905 to 1922, Miklas was headmaster of the Federal Secondary School in Horn, a small town in the Lower Austrian Waldviertel region. Early political career In 1907, Miklas was elected to the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) parliament as a member of the Christian Social Party. Re-elected in 1911, Miklas held a parliamentary seat in the provisional assembly of German-Austria and in the Constitutional Assembly of the First Austrian Republic. A rare opponent of German nationalism, he declared himself against a closer connection with the Weimar Republic and played a pivotal role in adopting the red-white-red Austrian flag. In 1919, Miklas was appointed state secretary in the Austrian government of Chancellor Karl Renner. From 1923 to 1928, he was the speaker of the National Council (Nationalrat). Presidency On 10 December 1928, the representatives of the Federal Assembly elected him president, which he served until the position ceased to exist ten years later. Miklas did not intervene, when on 4 March 1933 after a heated discussion in the Nationalrat parliament over a strike of federal railways employees Speaker Karl Renner as well as his deputies Rudolf Ramek and Sepp Straffner resigned their offices. The assembly was no longer capable for actions and decisions, which gave Miklas' party fellow Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss the pretext to declare the parliament's "self-elimination". The government obstructed any resumption of the session by massive presence of police forces as well as of paramilitary Heimwehr troops led by Emil Fey, a self-coup that enabled Dollfuss to rule by "emergency decrees" following the Article 48 example set by German President Paul von Hindenburg. The president remained passive on 20 May, when the government established the Fatherland's Front as a prospective single-party, followed by the ban of the Communist Party, the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party and the Social Democratic Republikanischer Schutzbund paramilitary organisation. The prohibition of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Worker's Newspaper) and the measures against the Austrian labour movement led to the outbreak of the Austrian Civil War on 12 February 1934. As