by James Longo
On March 10, 1910, Lueger’s death brought the artist, the Emperor, and the Archduke together. Adolf Hitler, Franz Joseph, and Franz Ferdinand were joined by a quarter of a million grieving Viennese when diabetes took the life of the sixty-six-year-old mayor. For a brief moment, friend and foe united. The Emperor and Archduke led the mourners at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
Franz Joseph never warmed to the popular mayor. The Archduke, however, genuinely admired him. When Franz Ferdinand wed Sophie Chotek, Lueger publicly saluted their nuptials as a “triumph of the heart.” The Archduke never forgot such gestures. No other public official in Vienna had the courage to champion his controversial marriage.
Hitler later wrote, “When the mighty funeral procession bore the dead mayor from the city hall toward the Ring, I was among the many hundreds of thousands looking on the tragic spectacle. I was profoundly moved and my feelings told me that the work, even of this man, was bound to be in vain, owing to the fatal destiny which would inevitably lead this state to destruction.”
That summer Adolf Hitler had his business partner, Reinhold Hanisch, arrested for defrauding him of profits from his paintings. Hanisch underestimated Hitler. He thought he could manipulate and use him. Others would make the same fatal mistake, with disastrous consequences. Hitler called a Jewish friend from their hostel to act as a witness, and won his court case against Hanisch.
Hitler was, indeed, a man of contradictions. Despite his growing anti-Semitism, he continued to depend on Jewish friends. He never forgot Dr. Bloch, the Jewish doctor who lovingly cared for his dying mother. In a postcard sent to Bloch, he wrote, “From Vienna I send you my greetings. Yours, always faithfully, Adolf Hitler.” He also sent the doctor a watercolor sketch, dried in front of a hot fire to preserve it and give it the appearance of an antique print. Its caption read, “Prosit Neujahr—A toast to the New Year.” On the back he wrote, “The Hitler family sends you the best wishes for a Happy New Year. In everlasting thankfulness, Adolf Hitler.”
Free of Hanisch, a newly confident Hitler began selling his paintings and watercolors directly to Jewish dealers. Hoping to get a better price, he sometimes presented himself as a graduate of the Fine Arts Academy. Other times he told dealers financial problems caused him to drop out of the school, or that he had been forced out because of his political beliefs. He had learned much from Hanisch, including self-promotion, but his skill at self-delusion and his lies were his own.
Hitler bought a new set of clothes, shaved, cut his hair, and had his shoes repaired and polished. Some days were again spent at museums, some nights at the opera. He even considered reapplying to the Art Academy, but the deceit over his art credentials caught up with him. When he was threatened with arrest, he could not understand why luck had turned against him. A favorite verse from Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger played over and over in his head. “And still I don’t succeed. I feel it and yet cannot understand it; I cannot retain it, nor forget it, and if I grasp it, I cannot understand it.”
Time was running out for Adolf Hitler in Vienna. Even as his arrest for fraud seemed imminent, an even more serious threat confronted him. He had avoided military service since 1909. But ever since the conscription of his roommate and the annexation crisis over Bosnia-Herzegovina, he paid close attention to the high number of men being called into the army. A fellow resident remembered Hitler saying, “I can’t wait any longer until I can finally rid myself of the dust of this country, especially since I might have to go to the military call-up. But under no circumstances do I want to serve in the Austrian army.”
In one of his final rambling discourses, Hitler denounced Austrian bureaucracy for smothering all genius. “Patronage and distinguished background was all that counted. … All talented people and all inventors in Austria only found recognition abroad, that’s where they found fame and honor.” As his twenty-fourth birthday approached, Hitler fled to Munich, calling it “the most German of all German cities.”
Hitler had come to Vienna to receive an education, and he had. Its streets, homeless shelters, and hostels had been his classrooms; George Schönerer and Karl Lueger his professors; and their anti-Semitic rhetoric his curriculum to power. The pomp, ceremonies, and palaces of the Habsburg court, like the sets of the operas he loved, and the Catholic church of his childhood, taught him to appeal to the eyes, as well as the ears, of audiences. Hitler claimed the five years he spent in the city provided him “a world picture and philosophy that became the granite foundation of all my acts.” In his book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), he declared:
Vienna was and remained for me the hardest, though most thorough school of my life. I had set foot in that town while still a half boy and left it a half man, grown quiet and grave. In it, I obtained the foundations for a philosophy in general and a political view in particular which later I only need to supplement in detail, but never left me.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SPY, THE DRAFT DODGER,
AND THE PEACEMAKER
“External peace for us… that is my profession of faith, for which I will work and struggle as long as I live.”
—ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND
“The Archduke sees things through the eyes of his wife.”
—POPE PIUS X
Adolf Hitler did not travel to Munich alone. Once again he found a friend who became his audience of one. Rudolf Häusler was nineteen when he met Hitler at the men’s hostel in Vienna. Like his new mentor, he was a down-on-his-luck painter estranged from a civil servant father, but close to a devoted mother. Though Häusler’s eyesight was poor, he had excellent listening skills. Hitler introduced him to the operas of Richard Wagner. He quickly fell under the influence of Wagner’s music and Hitler’s words.
A final inheritance from his father’s estate allowed Hitler to make a fresh start in Munich. Dressed in a crisp new suit and polished shoes, he left Vienna on Monday, May 26, 1913. Hitler carried with him one small suitcase, a fully formed racist philosophy that would serve him well in the years ahead, and his newly recruited disciple. He wrote of his new home:
A German city! What a difference from Vienna! I grew sick to my stomach when I even thought back on that Babylon of races!
One day after Hitler left Vienna, Franz Ferdinand received a short telegram at Konopiste from the Commanding General of the Second Army Corps. It read, “Colonel of the General Staff Corps Alfred Redl, General Staff Chief of the Eighth Corps, has this night killed himself in Hotel Klomser for reasons up to now unknown. Letters left behind.” Colonel Redl was the head of Austria’s Counter Intelligence Service, the Empire’s chief spy master. His responsibilities included personally briefing the Emperor and Archduke on the army’s espionage activities. Suicide was not unusual in Habsburg Vienna. The city had the highest suicide rate in Europe, but the suicide of Austria’s spy chief was different.
Redl had returned from Prague the day before and showed no signs he was about to take his life. The Archduke had regularly been receiving “lengthy and brilliant” reports from him. One newspaper wrote, “The highly gifted officer, who was on the verge of a great career, killed himself by a shot in the mouth, an act prompted, it is believed, by mental overexertion resulting from severe neurasthenia.” The always suspicious Franz Ferdinand doubted the version of events unfolding in Vienna. His instincts were correct.
The Archduke’s investigation discovered Redl was a homosexual blackmailed into becoming a highly paid Russian spy. To protect the army’s reputation and hide the depth of the security breach, Army Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf encouraged Redl’s suicide prior to having him interrogated. His death prevented the army and government from learning the full details of what secrets had been leaked, over what period of time, and what other nations had been involved. Franz Ferdinand summoned von Hötzendorf to Konopiste.
The General later recalled the meeting as, “One of the most unpleasant audiences during my time as Chief of the General Staff. His Imperial Highness was indi
gnant over the Redl case. … A flood of reproaches flooded over me.” The next day during lunch with the Empire’s new Foreign Minister, Leopold Berthold, von Hötzendorf openly admitted he had urged Redl’s suicide. He also said the Archduke told him, “You see how fortunate it is that we have not gone to war against Russia with a traitor in our midst.” With an uncharacteristic laugh, he assured Berthold, “What Redl betrayed was quite insignificant. … The damage he caused was slight.” The Chief of the Austro-Hungarian army was engaged in wishful thinking, in denial, or lying. Over a ten-year period, Redl had sold his nation’s complete war plans to Russia, which then passed them on to their Balkan allies. The enemy the Habsburgs most feared gained detailed possession of Austrian fortifications, the time table for mobilization, and all battle strategies. Redl also purposely underestimated Russia’s military strength to his Austrian colleagues. In the great European war to come, Austria would be nearly defenseless.
Franz Ferdinand quickly moved to dismiss the officers involved in the Redl fiasco, including von Hötzendorf. The challenge was to remove them without giving Austria’s enemies a hint of the disarray in the army’s high command. Hötzendorf presented special problems. He had been the Archduke’s own protégé, was instrumental in modernizing the army, and was the popular leader of the government’s war party. His reputation for belligerence had been used by the Archduke to mask his own behind-the-scenes peace efforts. Finding his replacement was a delicate task that would take time.
Behind his confident bluster, von Hötzendorf and his staff were nervous that the Redl affair would destroy their careers and undermine their aggressive war policies. They hoped a war, any war, would derail the Redl investigation. Like his close friend, German Army Chief of Staff Hellmuth Moltke, von Hötzendorf believed the coming war would be a racial war “between Germanism and Slavism.”
Secretly he had a more personal reason for desiring war. He hoped it might allow his mistress, a married mother of six, to divorce her husband and marry him. Only the distraction of war might convince Franz Ferdinand and Catholic Austria to continence such a scandal.
Adolf Hitler was also nervous that spring. As new residents of Munich, he and Rudolph Häusler had to register their name, address, and occupation with the local police. Hitler identified himself as an “arts painter and writer,” but the police in his hometown of Linz labeled him a draft dodger. He had avoided military service for four years. In 1913, Austrian authorities began searching for him. It was only a matter of time until they discovered he was in Germany.
With little money to pay for their rented room and no job prospects, Hitler returned to selling watercolors copied from postcards while Häusler framed the paintings and tried to sell them. They also painted signs for local businesses in exchange for simple meals of bread and milk. Hitler briefly considered attending the Munich Art Academy to study architecture, but never applied. His new life in Germany looked very much like the life he had left in Vienna. He wrote Rudolph Häusler’s worried mother that all would be well:
Opportunities in the German Reich with its almost fifty cities with over one hundred thousand people and its gigantic global trade are surely infinitely better than in Austria. I dare say he shouldn’t feel sorry to be here even if he couldn’t work his way up, for in that case he’d be even worse off in Austria. But I don’t believe that at all.
Optimism did not come as naturally to Franz Ferdinand as it did for Adolf Hitler, but by the spring of 1913, time finally seemed to be on his side. Illnesses undermined Franz Joseph’s steadily declining health. During a recent medical crisis, bulletins from the palace urging prayers reminded his subjects that even the Emperor was mortal. A train had been kept around the clock with a full head of steam near Konopiste ready to rush the Archduke to Vienna to claim the Habsburg crown.
The people’s prayers worked their magic. Franz Joseph miraculously recovered. One Viennese newspaper openly speculated that the eighty-three-year-old Emperor willed himself to live, “by his keen desire to spite his nephew and delay his accession to the imperial throne as long as possible.” Still friends and foes recognized that sooner, rather than later, Franz Ferdinand would be Emperor.
In anticipation of that day, German Emperor Wilhelm II carefully cultivated his friendship with the Archduke, the Archduke’s wife, and even the Archduke’s children. The two men had grown close. Franz Ferdinand genuinely admired Wilhelm for bringing his country twenty-five years of peace and prosperity, but he feared his blind spot for all things military. Wilhelm enjoyed playing soldier so much that he often changed into different military uniforms throughout the day, uniforms he himself sometimes designed. Germany’s Emperor loved the precise drills, the salutes, the stirring music, the reflected glory of being a great nation’s commander-in-chief. Military trappings flattered his insatiable but fragile ego. Franz Ferdinand worried in a moment of weakness Wilhelm would surrender his political judgment, and the fate of his Empire, to his generals.
The Archduke had been trained as a soldier his entire life. He shared Franz Joseph’s belief that the army was the indispensable hinge uniting the diverse ethnic groups of their multicultural empire together. But Franz Ferdinand did not have the blind level of confidence Wilhelm had in his generals. War was the business of generals, but peace, politics, and the prevention of war the responsibility of emperors, especially Habsburg emperors. The Habsburg commitment to peace was one of the reasons Adolf Hitler hated the dynasty.
Hitler believed the peace lionized by the Emperor and his heir a cynical attempt on their part to protect their privileged position even as the influence and position of German Austrians deteriorated. He convinced himself that the German people would only be able to take their rightful place in the sun when a war tore the Habsburg’s multinational Empire asunder. Anything less than war was a surrender to racial annihilation. The thought of serving with non-Germans in the “united forces” of Franz Joseph’s army was a major factor in his decision to flee Vienna.
Conrad von Hötzendorf, like Adolf Hitler, was anxious for war. In 1913, he made twenty-five separate proposals urging war on real or imagined enemies, even on the Empire’s own allies His final, almost desperate attempt was a telephone call to Konopiste on Christmas day. The Archduke’s famous temper exploded. He hung up on the General.
Franz Ferdinand did not believe the “brisk gay” wars of previous centuries possible using twentieth-century weaponry. He bluntly told von Hötzendorf, “External peace for us… that is my profession of faith, for which I will work and struggle as long as I live!” It was clear to the General and his war party that as long as Franz Ferdinand lived, there would be no war.
At the beginning of 1914, Franz Ferdinand’s commitment to peace was stronger than ever. It was a lonely, unpopular position, but one shared by his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg. Despite earning a hard-won reputation even among her critics as a deeply religious woman, loyal wife, and loving mother, the Duchess did not fit the expected profile of a 1914 Austrian woman. She was well read, well-traveled, and multilingual. As the daughter of a lifelong career diplomat and a cousin to Countess Bertha von Suttner, founder of Peace Associations throughout Europe, she had a unique worldview few men or women of her time could match. Her longtime American friend, Maria Longworth Storer, wife of the United States Foreign Minister to Austria-Hungary, wrote, “The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was captivated, not only by his wife’s unusual beauty, but by her brilliant mind, and the Christian zeal and integrity of her character.”
In the cynical patriarchal atmosphere of the Habsburg court, one of the Archduke’s aides ruefully explained, “The very happiness of this marriage, however exemplary in itself, cast a rather dubious light on Franz Ferdinand.”
During the Bosnia-Herzegovina annexation crisis, the Archduke had asked his wife to share her opinion with his military aides on the need for its peaceful resolution. His request and her input did not go unnoticed in Vienna, Berlin, or Rome. Pope Pius X, apparently an expert o
n marriages as well as ecclesiastical matters, was quoted as saying, “The Archduke sees things through the eyes of his wife.” It was not meant as a compliment.
Despite his friendship with Wilhelm II, Austria’s political isolation and military dependence on Germany worried the Archduke. After traveling to Russia to meet Czar Nicholas II, he instructed diplomats and personal friends to “tell everyone that I am Russia’s friend, and a friend of the ruler. Austrian and Russian soldiers have never yet met in a battle, and I’d call myself a knave if this changed while I have a word to say.”
Franz Ferdinand’s peace overtures did nothing to increase his popularity in Vienna. Hötzendorf publicly and privately lobbied for war, and officers in elaborate military uniforms strutted along the Ringstrasse, bragging in crowded cafés about the war to come. The frustrated Archduke resorted to personal diplomacy to gain political influence for himself, and social acceptance for his wife. In 1912, he and the Duchess had made a private visit to England’s Chelsea Flower Show. He hoped his friendship with the Duke of Portland, a fellow huntsman and the show’s sponsor, might open the doors of Buckingham Palace to them. The Duke was a cousin of the British royal family and an influential member of the Government’s Privy Council. The trip was a public and private triumph. The couple were asked to return to England the next year for a hunt, and a visit with King George V and Queen Mary.
To the discomfort of the Habsburg court, when the Archduke and Duchess returned to London in 1913 they were met by cheering crowds and driven to Windsor Castle in a royal carriage. The King and Queen were charmed by their guests and agreed to visit them in Austria the following year. Queen Mary wrote in her diary, “Her influence has been and is good, in every way. All the people with us who had known him before said how much he has changed for the better.”