by James Longo
We can hardly find words to tell you children how our hearts bleed thinking of you and your indescribable misery. Only two weeks ago we spent such lovely hours with your parents, and now we hear of this terrible sadness that you must suffer. May God protect you and give you strength to bear this blow. The blessings of the parents reach beyond the grave.
Queen Mary of England wrote in her diary:
The horrible tragedy to the poor Archduke and his wife came as a great shock to us… we were really quite attached to them both. … I think it is a great blessing that husband and wife died together, making the future less complicated with regard to the position of the children.
Her son Edward, the twenty-year-old Prince of Wales, stationed at an isolated Officer’s Training Camp, wrote, “I am completely ignorant of all the happenings in the outer World, except that the Austrian Archduke and his wife have been assassinated. I expect it has caused quite a stir in Germany.” His assessment was correct. In Vienna, other feelings stirred in the heart and mind of Emperor Franz Joseph. His favorite daughter, Archduchess Marie Valerie, wrote in her diary:
I found Papa amazingly fresh. Moved to be sure and speaking of the poor children with tears in his eyes; but as I knew beforehand, not personally stricken. In fact, in the course of a sixty-minute conversation which today was never halting, his only reference to it came as I remarked that Karl (the new heir to the throne) would surely do a good job, and he replied very seriously and firmly, “For me, it’s a great deal less worry.”
Despite tears over his dead nephew’s orphaned children, he sent no telegram, condolence letter, or reached out to them in any way. He did order his nephew’s offices at Belvedere Palace closed at once. All the Archduke’s official papers and military documents were seized and ordered sealed for fifty years. Archduke Karl tried to unlock Franz Ferdinand’s private desk to access the papers meant for him, but those, too, had disappeared. What Franz Joseph and his efficient bureaucracy failed to do was order an investigation into the security lapses at Sarajevo.
Traditionalists in the Habsburg Empire felt a sense of relief over Franz Ferdinand’s death. The United States Ambassador wrote Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, “The news of the death of the Crown Prince was received quietly. … While expressing abhorrence of the assassination, as a whole people seemed to feel that the event has solved a very difficult problem.” He may have been speaking for the Emperor and his court, but not for everyone. Count Alphonse Clary spoke for many when he wrote British princess and social reformer Daisy, Princess of Pless:
I am writing to you with my most aching heart and tears in my eyes, tears of sorrow, of terrible rage. Oh, the misery of it, he our future, our leader, who was to be a strong man, he to whom we all looked to in the future, our savior after all the years of ineptitude; he is not there anymore. They have slaughtered him and her too, his wife, whose life was only love, who followed him whenever danger was near, and she died trying to protect him with her body. They lived a life, a noble life of love, and to think of those three little children waiting, waiting for their parents to come home again, they who had known every happiness of family life; now they are quite alone, no one to care for them, no one to love and protect them, against the hardness of life, that they must feel so soon. … We are all in such utter misery.
Vienna was seized by suspicions that Austrian or German secret agents engineered the assassination or stepped back and allowed it to happen. Speculation regarding whether sins of commission or sins of omission killed the Archduke vanished once the Habsburg government placed the blame for the murders on the Serbian government. Rumors of war smothered any questions about Sarajevo’s faulty security.
Archduchess Maria-Theresa and Chotek relatives brought the Hohenberg children to Vienna for their parents’ funeral. No Habsburg relative met them there, but thousands of schoolchildren did. A Viennese newspaper suggested the city’s youngest citizens show their sympathy and support by lining the streets where the royal orphans would pass. As they rode to the Belvedere Palace for the last time, the children of Vienna silently paid their respects.
A large wreath of white roses from the children was placed between their parents’ coffins in the Hofburg Palace’s Imperial Chapel. White was the traditional floral arrangement representing peace. Germany’s Wilhelm II, King George V and Queen Mary of England, President Woodrow Wilson, and other heads of state sent flowers. Franz Joseph and his daughters did not. The only Habsburg represented by floral arrangements were Archduke Karl and Zita, and Crown Prince Rudolph’s widow, Stephanie. To the day she died, Stephanie believed Rudolph’s mysterious death twenty-five years earlier and the Sarajevo assassinations were the work of subterranean elements in Franz Joseph’s government.
Many of the Empire’s oppressed minorities saw Franz Ferdinand as their only political defender and champion. The ribbon on a bouquet from Hungary’s large minority Rumanian population spoke for many. It read, “To Our Last Best Hope, In Loyal Devotion.”
Fifty thousand people waited patiently during the night to pay tribute to the slain couple as their bodies rested in the Imperial Chapel. Most were turned away the next morning to allow a fifteen-minute memorial service for the Imperial Family late that afternoon. The Hohenberg children were not invited to attend. Those who did enter the chapel found two identical coffins surrounded by dozens of burning candles. But the Archduke’s coffin stood twenty inches taller than his dead wife’s since she was not recognized as a Habsburg by the court.
Late that night the coffins were taken to the same train station that had once brought Adolf Hitler to Vienna. They were placed in a hired freight car to transport them to Artstetten Castle for burial. The Habsburgs and the Hohenberg children and their Chotek relatives rode in separate coaches. Court protocol decreed Franz Ferdinand’s children be physically segregated from the Imperial family. At Artstetten, the Catholic Mass for the Dead was co-officiated by Bishop Joseph Lanyi whose premonition of the assassination haunted him for the rest of his life.
Following the Artstetten burial, Colonel Carl Bardolff, who had been with the Archduke and Duchess at Sarajevo, was asked to come to Schönbrunn Palace to provide the Emperor an eyewitness account of the assassination. Franz Joseph specifically asked about the moment his nephew was shot, “And how did the Archduke bear himself?” The Colonel reported, “Like a soldier, Your Majesty.” The Emperor replied, “That was to be expected of his Imperial Highness.” He paused and then asked, “And how were the maneuvers?” He did not ask about the Duchess of Hohenberg who had been killed trying to shield her husband from his assassin.
Austrian aristocrat Prince Ludwig Windisch-Grätz wrote:
I was indignant that every ass should now give the dead lion a kick. … Hardly was he in his coffin before all his protégés, all his creatures, friends and officials were swept out of posts and office. The court cliques and military war lords who had been continually harassed by the Heir to the Throne saw to this being a clean sweep. It could be fairly assumed that henceforth the old system would be firmly and immovably established until Franz Joseph’s death.
Count Otto Czernin, the Austrian Empire’s last Foreign Minister and a friend and neighbor of the Archduke and Duchess, saw the approaching Armageddon and wrote:
Many there were who breathed more freely on hearing the news of Franz Ferdinand’s death. At court in Vienna and in Budapest society there was more joy than sorrow. … None of them could guess that the fall of this strong man would carry them all with it and engulf them in world catastrophe.
A joyful Adolf Hitler celebrated the assassination, and the war he was certain would follow. He wrote in Mein Kampf, “Anyone with constant occasion in the last years to observe the relations of Austria to Serbia could not for a moment doubt that a stone had been set rolling whose course could no longer be arrested.” He was supremely confident that war would elevate Germany above all other nations, make the German people the dominant race on earth, and sweep
away the mongrel Habsburg Empire. “Austria was then like an old mosaic,” he wrote, “the cement, binding the various little stones together had grown old and begun to crumble; as long as the work of art was not touched, it could continue to give a show of existence, but as soon as it received a blow, it would break into a thousand fragments.”
CHAPTER NINE
A KIND OF DULL CATALEPTIC TRANCE
“I never loved our old world more than in those last years before the First World War; I never hoped more for a united Europe. I never believed more in its future than at that time, when we thought there was a new dawn in sight. But its red hue was really the firelight of the approaching conflagration.”
—STEFAN ZWEIG
“A war between Austria and Russia would be very useful to the Revolution in Western Europe, but it is hard to imagine Franz Joseph and Nicholas doing us that favor.”
—VLADIMIR LENIN TO MAXIM GORKY
The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand crushed the peace party he led, and boldly empowered the war party he opposed. Austria’s political and military war hawks wasted no time in using his assassination as an excuse to fight the war he had desperately wanted to prevent. Even many of his strongest supporters were swept along by the emotions unleashed by his murder.
On July 23, 1914, Count Alphonse Clary wrote to Daisy, Princess of Pless:
We are spending horrid days waiting, and nobody knows for what. I hope it will be for war, because we cannot go on living with an abscess on our side, stinging and poisoning us day by day; it is better to cut it open right away and see if we can possibly get over the operation. … To talk of the future seems rash just now, when the peace of our country, perhaps of Europe, is hanging on the edge of a hair. … We have lost our great leader who was a man of peace. The next man will have to be a man of war.
The day Clary wrote his letter, Austria’s Ambassador presented an ultimatum to Serbia—the home country of Franz Ferdinand’s accused assassins. It was designed to provoke a military, rather than a diplomatic, response. Among its demands were the closing of Serbian newspapers unfriendly to the Habsburg monarchy, the dismissal and arrest of political and military leaders hostile to Austria, a virtual surrender of the country’s independent judiciary in investigating the assassination, and the suppression of all groups, organizations, and clubs Vienna labeled as “terrorists.”
After reading its contents, a young British politician described it to his wife as “the most insolent document of its kind ever devised… I wonder whether these stupid kings and emperors could not assemble together and revivify kingship by saving nations from hell, but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance.” The politician’s name was Winston Churchill.
Franz Ferdinand’s daughter, Princess Sophie Hohenberg, turned thirteen one day after the ultimatum was delivered. For the rest of her life, she had no recollection of her thirteenth birthday. Four days later, one month to the hour of the Sarajevo assassinations, Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia. He did not want armed conflict, but he was loath to lose face. Without Franz Ferdinand to strengthen his resolve, he supported a man he despised and a war he feared. General Conrad von Hötzendorf and his war party won the day.
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany confidently predicted, “The Czar will not place himself on the side of regicides.” He was wrong. As Franz Ferdinand had feared, Russia immediately came to Serbia’s defense. Leon Trotsky, at that time a resident of Vienna, wrote about what he saw that day in the capital of the Habsburg Empire.
I walked along the main streets of the familiar city and observed the crowds which gathered in unusual density on the magnificent Ringstrasse. … They were fired by hope. … Something new, something extraordinary appeared on the scene. The future promised change. Change for the better, or change for the worse?
The Habsburg Empire and Germany were now at war with Serbia and Russia. Privately, Czar Nicholas II of Russia seemed in genuine anguish when he ordered mobilization, telling his government ministers, “Just think of the responsibility you’re advising me to assume! Remember it’s a question of sending thousands and thousands of men to their deaths.” Germany’s Wilhelm II said of his cousin the Czar, “The Czar is not treacherous, but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfills all its functions.” He might have been describing himself.
Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war was issued in fifteen languages, reflecting the multinational character of its army. Russia’s ally France quickly declared war on Germany. England followed, and so, too, did their colonies around the globe. The First World War had begun. In Munich, Adolf Hitler described himself as engulfed in “stormy enthusiasm… I fell on my knees and thanked heaven from an overpowering heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.” After carefully avoiding Austrian military service for five years, he immediately enlisted in the Bavarian army, writing:
My joy and gratitude knew no bounds. … For me, as for every German there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of earthly existence. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle, everything else receded to shallow nothingness.
War of another kind was being waged within the Habsburg family over the future of Franz Ferdinand’s orphans. Henrietta Chotek, their unmarried aunt, had moved to Konopiste to live with them. Count Jaroslav Thun, husband of their Aunt Marie Chotek, assumed management of their legal and financial affairs. Their father’s estate manager, Franz Janacek, continued running Konopiste. But creditors wasted no time in demanding full payment of the Archduke’s debts. Money quickly became a problem.
The Oath of Renunciation the Archduke had signed in 1900 permitted his marriage, but made his wife and children solely his financial responsibility. The Archduke’s will would take years to settle, but his sons and daughter could inherit no money from Habsburg or Este’ family funds. Despite his wealth on paper, Franz Ferdinand was, in fact, land poor. His orphaned children could inherit their father’s homes and the land around them, but received no funds to support them. The Emperor believed that the assassination of a nephew he did not love, and his nephew’s wife, a woman he did not like, did not change his financial obligations to the orphans he barely knew.
Following Sarajevo, Franz Joseph’s government even refused to pay for the autopsies and embalming of the Archduke and Duchess. Events there, officials stated, ended any financial responsibilities on their part to the dead heir, his morganatic wife, or their family. Count Thun insisted Franz Ferdinand had died fulfilling his official duties. The embalmer was “carrying out his duties incumbent on him as an Austrian state medical official. … There can be no question of payment.” The Habsburg court never paid the $400 bill. Mounting debts forced Count Thun to quickly sell the Archduke’s hunting lodge in the Alps, and even the Duchess of Hohenberg’s jewels. The Emperor remained unmoved by financial appeals from their guardians. If he refused to pay for the autopsy of his assassinated heir, why would he be obligated to assist his children?
Maria-Theresa, their Habsburg grandmother, was determined to force the issue. She threatened to make a public announcement that she was selling everything she owned to provide for the financial security of her orphaned grandchildren. Few things were as important to the Habsburg court as the carefully constructed façade of the Emperor as benevolent father to his subjects. Many believed that image, not his army, was the only thing holding his fracturing realm together. Her blackmail worked. Franz Joseph reluctantly offered to provide the orphans a yearly stipend. Archduke Karl made a counter offer: “Wouldn’t it be better to give them property?” He knew Franz Ferdinand would not want his children dependent on the Habsburg court. The Emperor agreed to Karl’s request. He quietly transferred fifty thousand acres of heavily wooded mineral-rich Styrian-mountain land to the Hohenberg children. Ordinarily the old monarch would have stubbornly resisted Maria-Theresa’s threats, and the plea from his fifth and newest heir. But during the summer of 1914, he needed all the sympathy he cou
ld wring from Franz Ferdinand’s assassination as he led his country into war.
General Conrad von Hötzendorf’s “brisk gay war” began poorly for the Habsburg forces. Two weeks and fifty thousand casualties after invading Serbia, the incompetent Governor General Oskar Potiorek’s badly defeated army was driven back into Bosnia. Following Russia’s invasion in the north, Austria’s Minister of War declared the war against Serbia had become “a matter of secondary interest.” On the Russian front near the city of Lemberg, today the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Hötzendorf’s armies suffered 400,000 casualties. The disastrous war Franz Ferdinand feared had become a reality on two fronts.
Hötzendorf wrote at the time, “If Franz Ferdinand had been commander-in-chief he would have had me shot after Lemberg.” The city of Lviv was the home of Colonel Alfred Redl, the spy whose selling of military secrets to Russia left the Empire militarily crippled. Austria’s last Foreign Minister wrote in his memoirs, “We were at liberty to choose the manner of our own death, and we chose the most terrible.” The chaos and carnage of Europe’s eastern front was matched by stalemate and slaughter in the west. German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke, eager for war like his friend Conrad von Hötzendorf, had a complete nervous breakdown six weeks into the fighting. Germany’s Crown Prince publicly declared to an American newspaper, “Undoubtedly this is the most stupid, senseless, and unnecessary war in modern times.” Kaiser Wilhelm II reprimanded his son for telling the truth.
Soldiers, officers, and civilians found much to hate about the war. Adolf Hitler found much to like. He was quickly promoted to corporal, volunteered for the highly dangerous position of dispatch runner, and by December 1914 had earned the Iron Cross second class for his bravery. He wrote his Munich landlady about the decoration: