Hitler and the Habsburgs

by James Longo

  It was the happiest day of my life. True, most of my comrades who had earned it just as much were dead. … For four days we were engaged in the fiercest battle, and I can proudly say that our regiment fought like heroes. On the very first day we lost nearly all our officers. … For all that, we beat the English. … Our company was reduced to a mere 42 men. … Ever since, I have, so to speak, been risking my life, every day, looking death straight in the eye.

  The only gunfire heard at Konopiste were Max and Ernst’s hunting volleys. No battles were fought near the Hohenberg’s home, but the war was never far from their thoughts. Casualty lists contained the names of many officers who had served their father. Gardens on the estate and plentiful game supplied them with food, but meals were kept spartanly simple in solidarity with the sacrifices being made on distant battlefields.

  In response to the many condolence letters and telegrams she and her brothers received, Princess Sophie composed a short statement published worldwide. It read, “We are very touched by the sympathy and prayers of the public. I ask you to continue to pray for our parents and for us.” One letter sent to them stood out from all the rest. It was from the fifty-five-year-old Jesuit priest who had administered the last rites of the Catholic faith to their parents. Father Anton Puntigam had been in charge of the Sarajevo charities the Duchess of Hohenberg supported. After touring the priest’s youth programs the day before she was assassinated, the Duchess donated an additional $5,000 in gold to continue his work. It had been her final gift to the children of Bosnia.

  Archduchess Maria-Theresa invited the priest to Vienna where he preached a well-publicized sermon portraying the Archduke and Duchess as Catholic martyrs. Puntigam had one other unique connection to the Hohenberg orphans. He knew Nedjo Cabrinovic, the nineteen-year-old terrorist who had attempted to kill their parents with a bomb. The small but loquacious Cabrinovic once visited Puntigam’s Youth Center, engaging him in a conversation the priest never forgot. During Cabrinovic’s Sarajevo trial, he admitted he never imagined the assassination would start a world war, even as gunfire between the opposing armies could be heard in the courtroom. He ended his emotional remarks by declaring:

  There is something else I would like to say. … Although all of us play the hero, never-the-less we are very sorry, because we did not know in the first place that the late Franz Ferdinand was the father of a family. We are deeply touched by the words which he said to his late wife, “Sophie, don’t die. Live for our children.” Think what you will of us but we are not criminals. For myself and in the name of my comrades, I beg the children of the late Heir Apparent to forgive us. Render whatever verdict you like. We are not evildoers. We are honest people, honorable, idealistic. We wanted to do something good. We loved our people. We will die for our ideals.

  Father Puntigam believed Cabrinovic. He wrote the Hohenberg children and asked them to follow Christ’s example by writing a letter of forgiveness to the Serb terrorist. Princess Sophie read and reread the priest’s letter many times. She spoke with her Aunt Henrietta, Uncle Thun, and her Habsburg grandmother. At one point Jesuit lawyers were consulted because Thun feared any response from the children might be used by Cabrinovic to launch a legal appeal for mercy. Her guardians allowed Sophie to decide for herself whether or not to respond. She wrote the letter and asked her brothers to also sign it. Maximilian did. Ernst refused.

  Years later the memory of the letter continued to bring a spark of lightness to that dark time in her life. She never regretted her decision, believing it was the first time she felt alive following the assassination. Puntigam’s Jesuit superiors ordered him not to deliver the letter, but he did. He wrote Sophie that he talked his way past the prison guards, entered Cabrinovic’s cell, and read the letter aloud to him. Cabrinovic sobbed when he heard its contents and confessed he was ready to face any punishment because the letter had saved his soul.

  Despite writing lengthy letters to people Adolf Hitler considered friends in Linz, Vienna, and Munich, he never received a single response during four years of war. A soldier who served with him wrote, “Every man had gotten letters or parcels from home. Everyone, that is, except Hitler. Somehow Hitler never got even a letter!” That winter Hitler wrote to a Munich acquaintance and revealed his thoughts, feelings, and desires that Germany would be cleansed by the war. “Those of us who are lucky enough to see their homeland again will find it a pure place, less riddled with foreign influences, so that the daily sacrifices and sufferings of hundreds of thousands of us and the torrent of blood that keeps flowing here day after day against an international world of enemies, will not only smash Germany’s foes outside but that our inner internationalism, too, will collapse. This would be worth much more than any territorial gains.” As the war stretched into its second summer, even Hitler found himself worn down by the blood, mud, and fighting as he wrote to his Munich landlady, “The enthusiasm gradually cooled and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear. The time came when every man had to struggle between the instinct for self-preservation and the admonitions of duty.”

  On July 7, 1916, an article in the New York Times that was carried by other American newspapers reported, BOYS IN AUSTRIA PRAYING FOR PEACE. SON OF MURDERED ARCHDUKE FORMS A LEAGUE WHICH DRAWS 14,000 MEMBERS. The story read:

  A Vienna dispatch says that Prince Maximilian Hohenberg, son of the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand heir to the Austrian throne had founded the “Youth Association of Prayer for a Speedy and Favorable Peace.” The Association already has 14,000 members. … As Prince Maximilian is only 14-year-old; he must have had a good deal of help, presumably from high official circles, in the accomplishment of a task so large. The organization, or the announcement of its existence, has therefore considerable significance of Austrian sentiment. … The significance, however, is confirmatory of what has already been known, rather than a revelation that the Austrians are tired of the conflict in which they have suffered so much.

  With the exception of formal birthday greetings to the Emperor, the Hohenberg children had no contact with “high official circles” at the Habsburg court. The unofficial circle behind the league seemed to have been Archduchess Maria-Theresa, Archduke Karl, and Archduchess Zita. Maria-Theresa’s supervision of nurses and caring for the wounded in Vienna’s hospitals turned her against the war. Karl and Zita were equally horrified and sickened by the casualties and carnage caused by Army Chief of Staff Hötzendorf’s battlefield blunders.

  The future Emperor, Empress, and Habsburg grandmother they shared with the Hohenberg orphans wanted Austria’s desire for peace known. Maria-Theresa decided newspapers in a large neutral country like the United States could best convey that message. It was her decision Franz Ferdinand’s oldest son was the perfect messenger. Like Emperor Franz Joseph’s four previous heirs, Karl was frustratingly excluded from government and military decisions inside of Austria. On November 16, 1916, that abruptly changed.

  After sixty-seven years on the throne, his Imperial and Royal Majesty Franz Joseph died at Schönbrunn Palace, the same palace where he had been born eighty-seven years earlier. In many ways, he had never left its suffocating walls.

  Karl Habsburg then wasted no time in earning the title the “Peace Emperor.” His first proclamation read, “I shall do everything in my power to end the horrors and sacrifices of war at the earliest possible moment, and to restore the blessings of peace as soon as honor, the interests of our allies, and the cooperation of our enemies permit.” To the Hohenberg children and millions of others, peace suddenly seemed possible. The twenty-nine-year-old Emperor recalled many of Franz Ferdinand’s scattered advisors back to Vienna. The new Prime Minister and new Foreign Secretary had both been members of the late Archduke’s inner circle at Belvedere.

  Much to the disgust of Austria’s war party and to Adolf Hitler, Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf was relieved of his command. Despite his repeated military blunders and the resultant slaughter, Hitler later claimed Hötzendorf “the mos
t intelligent commander of the first World War.” Karl sent his new Foreign Secretary to meet the Kaiser with a pledge and a question: “We shall hold out to the last until the collapse of the monarchy, but tell me, what is the advantage in that?” In Berlin, Adolf Hitler had been taken to a Red Cross Hospital to recover from a wound in his thigh. He was stunned by what he found there. “Dire misery everywhere” and “a few wretched scoundrels agitating for peace.” To Hitler, Karl was one such scoundrel.

  Austria’s Peace Emperor did not forget Franz Ferdinand’s children. He granted Maximilian the hereditary title Duke of Hohenberg. It was the title Franz Ferdinand had wanted and hoped for his son. He and Zita also became the royal sponsors of Father Puntigam’s plans to build a Church of Atonement in Sarajevo dedicated to Franz Ferdinand and his wife, and co-sponsored a youth home to be built in the city named for the Duchess of Hohenberg. Directly across from the assassination site, crews were building an impressive monument as a memorial to the slain couple in time for the third anniversary of their deaths. Puntigam invited the three Hohenberg children to the dedication on June 28, 1917. Sophie thanked him, but declined for herself and her brothers.

  Archduchess Maria-Theresa continued to work to ensure the future of her stepson’s royal orphans. She wrote the German Emperor reminding him of an offer he once made to Franz Ferdinand. Wilhelm suggested the Archduke’s oldest son, Maximilian, might be the ideal candidate to become Duke of the long-disputed territory of Lorraine. Franz Ferdinand had rejected the offer, but his stepmother thought an independent Lorraine ruled by Maximilian might bring a peaceful solution to a region fought over for centuries by both France and Germany. Wilhelm wrote Maria-Theresa that he agreed but felt the time not right for peace negotiations. In fact, relations between Austria and its German ally were about to get much worse.

  In 1917, the United States entered the war due in part to Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, a policy Emperor Karl and Zita had vehemently opposed. But the German Emperor was no longer listening to his Austrian allies. As Franz Ferdinand had feared, the Kaiser became a hostage to his generals. Karl personally appealed to Wilhelm II to seek peace. “We are fighting against a new enemy… international revolution, which finds its strongest ally in general starvation. I beseech you to not overlook this portentous aspect of the matter and to reflect that a quick finish to the war, even at the cost of heavy sacrifice, gives us a chance of confronting upheaval with success.” Convinced by his generals that victory was just one battle away, Wilhelm rejected Karl’s plea.

  Another of Franz Ferdinand’s predictions turned prophetic. The war he feared brought revolutions. Czar Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne in 1917, but the abdication saved neither him nor his family. His Imperial Majesty, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russians, his wife, and five children were brutally assassinated by the revolutionary government. The deaths personally touched and frightened the Hohenberg children. Their father had known and personally liked the Czar and Czarina. Nicholas’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, was Sophie’s age. His murdered son Alexis was the same age as Maximilian.

  Political unrest and revolutions did not stop in Russia. On October 28, 1918, thirty miles from Konopiste, the Czech national assembly declared independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thousands of Czechs marched in Prague to celebrate the event in Wenceslaus Square. Habsburg portraits, flags, banners, and insignias were torn down, smashed, or burned. Three days later, Red Guard soldiers in Budapest broke into the home of the Hungarian Prime Minister. He was assassinated in front of his family. The Habsburgs’ multinational empire imploded.

  Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s greatest statesman, had once declared, “The continued stability of Austria-Hungary is indispensable for Europe’s equilibrium.” In the light of two world wars, the racism and ethnic cleansing unleashed by Hitler, and the subsequent subjugation of central and eastern Europe by communism for half a century, Winston Churchill concluded that Bismarck had been right.

  In the closing days of the war, Serbian troops finally captured Sarajevo. After four years of fighting, a self-appointed local spokesman welcomed the warriors to the embattled city in the names of the assassins of Franz Ferdinand. The soldiers found a huge pile of bricks and construction materials for Father Puntigam’s planned Church of Atonement and nearby Youth Home. Nine hundred and forty thousand Kronen (eight million dollars in today’s money) had been raised to build the monuments. No construction had begun. The elaborate granite monument in Sarajevo recently dedicated to the assassinated Archduke and Duchess was promptly torn down. The lives of the Hohenberg children, not bricks and mortar, would be their memorials to their parents in the difficult years ahead.

  Five days after Sarajevo fell, Germany surrendered. On November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed. It was the birthday of former Army Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf. He lost two sons in the war and saw the Empire he served destroyed; but he retired to the Austrian resort town of Klagenfurt with his former mistress as his bride. As he had hoped, the war had allowed him to marry Gina von Reininghaus. Her ex-husband kept custody of their six children.

  Striking workers and disillusioned soldiers filled the streets of Berlin and Vienna. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his Crown Prince abdicated and fled to neutral Holland. Emperor Karl refused to abdicate but signed a document reading, “I renounce all participation in the affairs of state.” For the first time in two thousand years, no emperor sat on a European throne. The Hohenberg orphans and their guardians found themselves isolated and alone. In his final public proclamation, the last Habsburg emperor ended his statement with the words, “Only an inner peace can heal the wounds of this war.” There was no “inner peace” at Konopiste, or for Adolf Hitler, temporally blinded by a poison gas attack. Shortly before his injury, Hitler had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class by Hugo Guttmann, his Jewish battalion commander. The citation certifying him as a genuine war hero read, “For personal cold-blooded bravery and continuous readiness to sacrifice himself.” He proudly wore the decoration the rest of his life. Hitler learned of Germany’s unconditional surrender while recovering from the gas attack in a military hospital. He was so stunned by the news that his temporary blindness returned. As he struggled to regain his sight and comprehend the German defeat, he conjured up Jews and Marxists as interchangeable villains responsible for “the greatest villainy of the century.” He wrote:

  Miserable and degenerate criminals! Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first German emperor to hold out a hand to the leaders of Marxism without suspecting that scoundrels have no honor. While they still held his imperial hand in theirs, their other hand was reaching for the dagger. There is no making pacts with Jews.

  Years later, Hitler wrote this was the epiphany that convinced him to enter politics. His admiration for the Kaiser vanished, his revulsion toward Marxism was reinforced, and his hatred for Jews solidified. Hitler declared, “The example of William II shows how one bad monarch can destroy a dynasty. In the same way, those who wish to play their parts in history must understand that one single bad generation can cause the ruin of a whole people.”

  Like Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Adolf Hitler had a gift for prophecy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  EXILES

  “In life, things turn out differently, quite differently, from what one wishes.”

  —ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND

  “I was born… in a great and mighty empire, in the monarchy of the Habsburgs. But do not look for it on a map; it has been swept away without a trace.”

  —STEFAN ZWEIG

  Newspapers in Prague and across the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia looked for villains and scapegoats to blame for the deaths, destruction, and defeat of the war. The assassinated “Austrian” Archduke and his Czech-born wife became popular targets. Headlines and articles, cartoons, and editorials denounced the dead couple for their wealth, their aristocratic background, and their friendship with the exiled German Emperor. No one came to their def
ense.

  Czechoslovakia’s new leaders moved quickly to assess the future role of the nation’s large estates and the aristocrats who owned them. Konopiste was put under the “protective care” of the government. Bureaucrats soon arrived to inventory its assets. Every farm animal and piece of agricultural equipment, every piece of furniture, oil painting, work of art, and family pets were counted and catalogued. State police and detectives were sent to Konopiste to search for the secret soundproof room where Franz Ferdinand and the German Emperor had planned the war. No such room was ever found.

  For the three adolescent Hohenbergs, the uncertainty in their lives since the death of their parents continued. Four years after their father’s death, the Archduke’s will was finally probated, making sixteen-year-old Maximilian Konopiste’s legal owner. Thirteen-year-old Ernst inherited Chlumetz. Seventeen-year-old Sophie was to receive an annual income from both estates. Since she was expected to marry and live in the home of her future husband, she received no property. Local courts and international treaties brought them no peace.

  There were days and nights when telephone lines no longer worked, cutting them off from neighbors, friends, and relatives. Game wardens reported that trespassers were becoming bolder with each passing day. Count Thun and the owners of all the large estates were struggling with gangs of pillaging locals and returning soldiers armed with weapons and revolutionary propaganda against landlords and aristocrats.

  That March of 1919, death threats drove Emperor Karl and his family into Swiss exile. Aunt Henrietta assured her three wards all would be well. But rumors of revolution and disorder, homes being looted, and lives threatened seemed everywhere. No one knew if marauders were coming to drive the owners off the large estates or kill them. Many estate managers reported that their field workers and house servants had fled. At Konopiste, Franz Janaczek and nearly the entire Konopiste staff remained in loyal service to the orphans.