Hitler and the Habsburgs

The Führer's Vendetta Against the Austrian Royals

James Longo

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781635766509
• eBook ISBN: 9781635764758
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

"A detailed and moving picture of how the Habsburgs suffered under the Nazi regime…scrupulously sourced, well-written, and accessible."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
It was during five youthful years in Vienna that Adolf Hitler's obsession with the Habsburg Imperial family became the catalyst for his vendetta against a vanished empire, a dead archduke, and his royal orphans. That hatred drove Hitler's rise to power and led directly to the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—offspring of an upstairs-downstairs marriage that scandalized the tradition-bound Habsburg Empire—came to personify to Adolf Hitler, and others, all that was wrong about modernity, the twentieth century, and the Habsburgs' multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were outsiders in the greatest family of royal insiders in Europe, which put them on a collision course with Adolf Hitler.
As he rose to power Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's sons, who became outspoken critics and opponents of the Nazi party and its racist ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Germany, and sent to Dachau. Within hours they went from palace to prison. The women in the family, including the Archduke's only daughter, Princess Sophie Hohenberg, declared their own war on Hitler. Their tenacity and personal courage in the face of betrayal, treachery, torture, and starvation sustained the family during the war and in the traumatic years that followed.
Through a decade of research and interviews with the descendants of the Habsburgs, scholar James Longo explores the roots of Hitler's determination to destroy the family of the dead Archduke—and uncovers the family members' courageous fight against the Führer.

CHAPTER ONE

HITLER AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL, 1938

“I resolved that night that someday I would come back to the Imperial Hotel and walk over the red carpet in that glittering interior where the Habsburgs danced.”

—ADOLF HITLER

At five thirty on the evening of March 14, 1938, Adolf Hitler’s gray and black Mercedes-Benz limousine slowly drove past Schönbrunn Palace to the Hotel Imperial in the heart of Vienna. The forty-eight-year-old native son was returning to conquer the city, and the country, that once conquered him. Twenty-five years earlier, Hitler had been a homeless vagrant on Vienna’s streets, a hungry dreamer sitting on a park bench in Schönbrunn’s public gardens. Ten years later, he was sent to a German prison for treason. By the spring of 1938, he was the undisputed dictator of both nations.

Schönbrunn Palace and Vienna had once been home to the Royal and Imperial Habsburg family, rulers of an empire stretching across Europe and around the globe. The seeds of Hitler’s remarkable rise to power, his Faustian rags-to-riches story, could be traced to his hatred of the Habsburgs and their multinational vision for the future of Europe.

Hitler’s sleek, heavily armored convertible needed no bulletproof windows or armor that day. Hours earlier his army of one hundred thousand German soldiers had seized his Austrian homeland without a shot fired. Thunderous cheers greeted him as he stood erect and unsmiling for all of Austria and the world to see. Many unbelievable political and military victories would soon be his, but none was sweeter than this one. His greatest dreams since childhood were to unite Austria with Germany, and to destroy everything the Habsburg Empire represented to him. Everything else grew from these dual ambitions. On that deceptively mild March afternoon, he had achieved half of his goals. The second half would kill millions and destroy much of Europe.

Adolf Hitler could have stayed in any of Vienna’s magnificent palaces but insisted on staying at the Hotel Imperial. It held a powerful attraction for him. Two decades earlier when he was a failed art student reduced to earning money by shoveling snow, a crystalizing experience occurred right on that hotel’s doorsteps. The occasion was a reception honoring the Habsburg heir to the throne, Archduke Karl, and his wife, Archduchess Zita. The evening Hitler triumphantly returned to the city that had rejected him, he shared only one story with his entourage about his five fateful Vienna years. The memory he shared was of that bitterly cold night:

I could see the glittering lights and chandeliers in the lobby, but I knew it was impossible for me to set foot inside. One night, after a bad blizzard which piled up several feet of snow, I had a chance to make some money for food shoveling snow. Ironically enough, the five or six of us in my group were sent to clean the street and sidewalk in front of the Imperial Hotel. I saw Karl and Zita step out of their imperial coach and grandly walk into this hotel over the red carpet. We poor devils shoveled the snow away on all sides and took our hats off every time the aristocrats arrived. They didn’t even look at us, although I still smell the perfume that came to our noses. We were about as important to them, or to that matter to Vienna, as the snow that kept coming down all night, and this hotel did not even have the decency to send a cup of hot coffee to us. I resolved that night that someday I would come back to the Imperial Hotel and walk over the red carpet in that glittering interior where the Habsburgs danced. I didn’t know how or when, but I waited for this day and tonight I am here.

His rapt listeners applauded his story of the once forgotten man who had turned the world upside down. Few people in history had come from so little, or risen so high, in such a short period of time. Now, on the evening when Adolf Hitler united his adopted country of Germany with his Austrian birthplace, his thoughts turned not to celebrations, but to vengeance. They were not directed toward Karl, who died in 1922, or Zita, who lived in Belgian exile. Instead they fell on the royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the man whose 1914 assassination sparked the First World War. Shortly before Hitler arrived at the Imperial Hotel, Duke Maximilian Hohenberg, the Archduke’s oldest son, his wife, and five children fled the same hotel to go into hiding.

Within hours of Hitler’s return to Austria, the Duke would go from being the human face of the state to being denounced as an enemy of the state, and exchange his palace home for a Nazi prison. His fall from grace was as dramatic as Hitler’s rise to power. Adolf Hitler and his Nazis had an enemies list of thousands of Austrians to be liquidated. Within weeks, seventy-nine thousand arrests were made, but the first two men the Gestapo arrested, deported to Germany, and imprisoned at Dachau were not Jews, Czechs, or the foreign immigrants Hitler denounced and demonized. The night of his greatest triumph, the first two Austrians the Führer ordered arrested were Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg, the sons of Franz Ferdinand. He told Herman Goering and Heinrich Himmler to show them no mercy, a challenge the competitive rivals readily embraced.

Following Austria’s seizure, Hitler also ordered the Gestapo to undertake a more clandestine mission. Gestapo agents were told to help the Jewish doctor who cared for his late mother in her last fatal illness to immigrate to the United States. Two Jewish officers he served with in the First World War were also provided his personal protection. Like his family doctor, they were allowed to escape the Holocaust he would soon unleash on Europe’s Jews. Hitler’s infamous anti-Semitism could be selective, but he was unwilling to show mercy to Franz Ferdinand’s sons. The hatred directed toward them was more personal than Hitler’s animosity toward their dead parents or his aversion to the millions of innocent victims about to die in his name.

Yet even as the arrests of the Hohenberg brothers made headlines in Europe and America, the women who loved them would fight back. Their wives, sister, and female allies would wage an unrelenting guerilla war against the Nazis in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin to free them. Hitler and his Gestapo would be up against the intelligence, strength, and resilience of women motivated by love as much as the Nazis were motivated by hate.

The seeds for Adolf Hitler’s vendetta against the vanished Habsburg Empire, the dead Archduke, and his royal orphans were planted even earlier than his snowy encounter with the Habsburgs at the Hotel Imperial.

Shortly before Hitler’s birth in the Austrian border town of Braunau am Inn, Crown Prince Rudolph, the thirty-year-old charismatic heir to the Habsburg throne, died by his own hand, or by assassination. The government’s clumsy cover-up made the truth elusive. England’s Ambassador spoke for many when he exclaimed, “It is all mystery, mystery, mystery.” The Habsburg Empire, the lynchpin of central Europe for six hundred years, never fully recovered. Emperor Franz Joseph had only one son—Rudolph. No daughter or female relative could inherit the throne. To fill the dangerous vacuum created by Rudolph’s death, the Emperor reluctantly selected his oldest nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as his successor. It was not a popular choice. The Archduke was thought to be a dead man walking, a sickly introvert no one expected to live. The abrupt disappearance of the popular Crown Prince from the public stage thrust Franz Ferdinand into a role not suited for his brittle personality. Stefan Zweig, Austria’s most famous novelist, wrote that Franz Ferdinand lacked the thing most valued by the Viennese—charm.

No one could have imagined that this obscure, tiny, half-dead Archduke, born miles away from Vienna in a rented palace, might someday be Emperor. He was rejected by his own mother within minutes of his birth. As he struggled for each elusive breath, she shouted, “Take it away. If it can’t live, I don’t want to see it.” Rejection followed throughout his life. Poor health, poor school grades, a nervous personality, and a quick temper made him the least popular Habsburg of his generation. In a family known for its mastery of foreign languages and equestrian skills, he struggled with both, inheriting none of the handsomeness or gracefulness his sorely missed cousin Rudolph epitomized. Only his piercing blue eyes marked him as a Habsburg, but most people found them impenetrable.

Yet hidden deep beneath them and his rough exterior was a first-rate mind and a vision for Austria and Europe no other statesman seemed able to imagine. In reserve he held a wry sense of humor and abundant charm when he chose to use it. But he and all of Austria lived under the melancholy shadow of the dead Crown Prince. Few celebrities of the day had been as loved, idolized, or charismatic as Rudolph. Some believe the burden and high expectations he engendered drove him to the brink of insanity and his premature death. The shock, scandal, and void he left behind did nothing to make Franz Ferdinand’s life easier.

Adolf Hitler’s late father, Alois, a fierce supporter of the Habsburg dynasty, worshipped Austria’s elderly Emperor Franz Joseph the way a younger generation worshipped Rudolph. He could not remember a time Franz Joseph had not sat on the throne. His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty had been Emperor since 1848, stubbornly outliving five younger heirs. In the modern world of constant change, he represented stability and permanence.

Alois Hitler’s entire career was spent as a customs official in the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Habsburg’s Ministry of Finance. In a lifetime devoid of successes, it was his only claim to fame. That tenuous link to the Imperial Habsburg dynasty empowered him to become a haughty tyrant at work and a bullying martinet at home.

He religiously celebrated Franz Joseph’s birthday, wore his whiskers “modeled on those of his supreme master the Emperor,” and regularly intimidated, mocked, and beat his children. The people and values Alois Hitler cherished, his son Adolf rejected. As a young schoolboy, Hitler found a kindred spirit in his favorite high schoolteacher. Dr. Leonard Pötsch, an obscure racist, rabid German nationalist, never tired of mocking the Habsburgs and their multinational Empire. Hitler later wrote of Pötsch, “His dazzling eloquence not only held us spellbound but actually carried us away… we sat there, often aflame with enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears… it was then that I became a little revolutionary.”

In reality, Hitler had been a rebel since primary school. He bullied other children and regularly battled with his religion teachers, especially Father Sales Schwarz. The highly ritualized Catholic Church and Habsburg monarchy of his childhood were seen by most Austrians as interchangeable. Father Schwarz lectured him, “In your heart you should have ideals for our beloved country, our beloved house of Habsburg. Whoever does not love the Imperial Family does not love the Church, and whoever does not love the Church, does not love God.” Hitler only laughed. The priest told his mother her son was a “lost soul.” Like most Austrians Adolf Hitler, the soulless revolutionary, believed revolution not possible as long as the old Emperor lived. Reformers and revolutionaries alike believed change only possible after Franz Joseph joined his son and 112 ancient ancestors in Vienna’s Imperial burial vaults. Even the Emperor privately worried revolution would follow him. He did not think his nephew, Franz Ferdinand, could prevent it. Adolf Hitler feared the opposite. He saw the Archduke as someone who would lead a revolution—one antithetical to him—by selling out German Austria to its ethnic inferiors.

Following Rudolph’s death, Franz Ferdinand offered few clues where he would take central Europe’s greatest multicultural empire, but his 1900 marriage provided a hint. The blue-blooded Habsburg could have married any German princess from the royal and imperial courts of Europe. Instead he married a Slav, a Czech Countess whom the rabidly racist Hitler saw as an Untermenschen, a subhuman Trojan horse from the Empire’s largest ethnic minority. To him, the marriage was an abomination, an example of the escalating mongrelization, miscegenation, and the assimilation threatening Austria’s Germans. Reinforcing Hitler’s mistrust, the Archduke preferred living outside of Prague with his family in the Bohemian homeland of his wife rather than the many Austrian palaces at his disposal. To Hitler, Franz Ferdinand was a traitor to his German roots, too tolerant of the ethnic and religious groups poisoning Austria.

For six centuries the Habsburgs had expanded their empire not by the Prussian swords and wars glorified in Dr. Pötsch’s lectures, but in the wedding bed. The result could be found in the twelve distinct nationalities, hundreds of ethnic groups, countless religious traditions, and over fifty million citizens ruled by Franz Joseph. No empire on earth was more diverse.

Franz Ferdinand’s uncle was saluted as the head of state in over a dozen languages in thousands of classrooms across central Europe. Austrians recognized him as their Emperor. In Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, and Galicia he was their King, in Cracow their Grand Duke, in Transylvania their Grand Prince, and in Lorraine, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Silesia, and Modena their ruling Duke. Whether it was the title, history, traditions, or family ties, personal loyalty to Franz Joseph united the diverse pieces of his Habsburg tapestry into one of the world’s largest, wealthiest, most powerful empires on earth. The open borders and diversity Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand championed within the Habsburg Empire, Hitler reviled. To him, immigrants were a cancer stealing his future and destroying Austria. Their social and economic success personally stung him as his own dreams for a career as an artist or architect collapsed. It was during his years in Vienna that he came to believe immigration was engulfing and overwhelming the German people, language, and culture. To Hitler, the mixing of races, cultures, languages, and religions threatened to marginalize Austria’s German population, making them a minority in their own homeland. His roommate remembered, “His fury turned against the state itself, this patchwork of ten to twelve, or only God knows how many nations this monster of Habsburg marriages built up.”

Habsburg Vienna convinced Hitler only a political earthquake or war could save German Austria from a tide of immigration and assimilation. Emperor Franz Joseph seemed blind to the danger, but at least he had married a German, a good Bavarian princess. Not so his unpopular heir. Franz Ferdinand’s marriage to a Czech Countess made him the Habsburg most hated by Adolf Hitler. Decades before he displayed any trace of the anti-Semitism that devoured him in Vienna, Czech classmates, not Jews, were the object of his youthful scorn. In his mind, the Archduke’s marriage confirmed his worst suspicions: Franz Ferdinand and his Czech wife were the architects behind the Slavization, marginalization, and destruction of German Austria.

The Archduke was a member of a conservative, tradition-bound family, an unlikely reformer, and an even more improbable peacemaker. He was a military man infamous for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of animals during his travels on four continents. Yet he had a vision for peace, and a plan to achieve it. The Archduke was one of the few royals to travel to America. He saw the ethnic diversity there as a strength, studied and recognized the genius behind the United States’ federal system of government, and, along with his wife, had close personal friends who were Americans. In the speech he planned to give at his accession to the throne, he wrote:

We desire to treat with equal love all the peoples of the monarchy, all classes and all officially recognized religious faiths. High or low, poor or rich, all shall be held in the same before the throne. … Just as all people under Our scepter shall have equal rights of participation in the common affairs of the monarchy, equality requires that each of them be guaranteed its national development within the framework of the monarchy’s common interest, and all nationalities, all classes, all occupations shall, where this is not yet done, be enabled by just electoral laws to protect their interests.

A longtime aide of the Archduke wrote, “Something about Franz Ferdinand raised him above all Habsburgs, the old Emperor included; he had freed himself from the traditional channels… took up problems on his own… looked at new questions… appeared to competence and experience wherever he found them, in or out of office.”

Many outside of Austria saw Franz Ferdinand as representing a hopeful, peaceful future. Among them was the Emperor of Germany, the nation Adolf Hitler most admired. Princess Viktoria Luise, daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, wrote that her father could never understand why many Austrians could not see the wisdom of Franz Ferdinand’s religious and political tolerance in meeting “the various nationalities” of his “multinational State” at least “half way.”

Across the English Channel, William Cavendish Bentick, the Duke of Portland, a member of the British Government’s Privy Council and a cousin of Queen Mary, wrote of his Austrian friend:

From 1900 to 1910 an incessant struggle continued within the country, during which the Archduke put up a tremendous fight in order to achieve a rejuvenation of the State… gradually these ideas prevailed in Austria, and the Archduke found enthusiastic followers to help him remodel the old State in such ways that every nation within its boundaries be given a “place in the sun”… his one aim in life was peace, his policy eminently constructive, and his greatest joy embellishing everything with which he came into contact. His unalterable determination was to strive for a higher standard of living for all people and to bring about internal peace by dealing with the utmost fairness to all.

Franz Ferdinand was not an idealist, but a realist who recognized the rising tide of nationalism could unleash ethnic furies and “Rassenkrieg”—an apocalyptic race war pitting ethnic groups against one another. Such a war would destroy not only the Habsburg Empire, but all of Europe.

Adolf Hitler’s bitter years in Vienna convinced him a race war was not only inevitable, but cleansing and desirable. To him, the sooner the war came the better. Only when Austria was destroyed, Germany free of foreign influences, when those he dismissed as inferior were expelled, enslaved, or destroyed would Germany achiev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Hitler and the Habsburgs
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• CHAPTER 1 Hitler at the Hotel Imperial, 1938
• CHAPTER 2 The Artist, the Archduke, and the Emperor
• CHAPTER 3 Can This Be a Jew?
• CHAPTER 4 The Lion and the Lamb
• CHAPTER 5 The Granite Foundation
• CHAPTER 6 The Spy, the Draft Dodger, and the Peacemaker
• CHAPTER 7 Fate
• CHAPTER 8 Inscrutable Destiny
• CHAPTER 9 A Kind of Dull Cataleptic State
• CHAPTER 10 Exiles
• CHAPTER 11 The Most Golden Tongued of Demagogues
• CHAPTER 12 Impending Horrors
• CHAPTER 13 One Blood Demands One Reich
• CHAPTER 14 Witches Sabbath
• CHAPTER 15 Duel
• CHAPTER 16 Bargain with the Devil
• CHAPTER 17 The Eleventh Commandment
• CHAPTER 18 Apocalypse
• CHAPTER 19 The Whole Country Was As If Under a Spell
• CHAPTER 20 Phantoms and Patriots
• CHAPTER 21 Answered and Unanswered Prayers
• CHAPTER 22 The Good Fight
• CHAPTER 23 The Destiny of One Family
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Selected Research Sites
• About the Author