by James Longo
In mid-April a distant cousin whose father had been a hunting partner of Franz Ferdinand visited Konopiste. Count Friedrich von Nostitz-Rieneck was a handsome twenty-six-year-old war hero. Family and friends called him Fritz. He told Sophie, Maximilian, and Ernst that since his return from the front he could not stop thinking about them. He wanted to be sure they were safe. They appreciated his thoughtfulness, especially Sophie. The visit provided her, her brothers, and their aunt comfort and companionship.
Sophie had kept a diary since she was a young girl, but the only page she ever read and reread from those unhappy days was the page on which she wrote about the Count’s welcome arrival. She had him sign the guest book her parents kept at the castle for distinguished guests. None of them knew it at the time, but Fritz von Nostitz-Rieneck would be the last guest they would ever host at Konopiste.
During his visit, Czech police arrived at the castle informing everyone within it they were no longer safe. The country’s newly elected president, Tomas Masaryk, ordered them to leave at once until their safety could be guaranteed. Despite all that was happening around them, the order to leave Konopiste came as a shock. Assurances were given that they would be able to return as soon as the countryside could be cleared of armed looters.
Sophie never told her younger brothers at the time, but the fate of the Czar and his family in the Russian revolution rushed through her mind. Horror stories of Russian aristocrats being hunted down and murdered continued to be reported in the newspapers. She was careful to show no emotion or display any fear in front of their Czech “protectors.” Each of the Hohenberg orphans was allowed to pack one small suitcase with a change of clothes and their school books. No mementos, personal possessions, family photographs, or photo albums could be taken. The children and Aunt Henrietta carefully packed under the watchful gaze of their evictors. When one of the police officers briefly looked away, Sophie slipped her diary into her bag. Maximilian tried to return to his room to get a photo of their parents but was turned back.
They were assured everything at Konopiste and Chlumetz would be guarded by the Czech government so that nothing could be stolen, damaged, or destroyed by looters. As they left the castle, it became clear this was no ordinary evacuation. The police searched their bags. Sophie’s diary was found, but she was allowed to keep it.
Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck traveled with them until they safely reached the home of their Uncle Thun. Konopiste, the castle their father had saved and lovingly restored, had become government property. Each of the children would live in many places during their lives, but in their minds, Konopiste remained their true home. Following a brief stay with Thun relatives, they traveled to Vienna to visit their Habsburg grandmother, Archduchess Maria-Theresa. They then made their way to Artstetten where they waited for the call to return to Konopiste that never came.
Franz Ferdinand had renovated and modernized Artstetten, capping its seven distinctive towers with onion domes he had seen on Eastern Orthodox cathedrals. The castle’s most famous neighbor to the east was the thousand-year-old Melk Benedictine Abbey. To the west was their parents’ favorite place of worship, the pilgrimage shrine of Maria Teferl. Artstetten’s own large chapel served as the local village church. Underneath its sanctuary rested the tombs of their mother and father.
In the nearby village square stood a memorial to local soldiers killed in World War I. Like thousands of other stone and wooden monuments in Austria, and around the world, the names of the fallen were preserved there. The first two names on Artstetten’s monument were Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg. The castle was large and comfortable, but it contained none of the happy memories of Konopiste.
The year and a half following the armistice was a time of disillusionment across Europe. Adolf Hitler remained in what was left of the German army. He had no other home, no other place to develop his political skills. After guarding Russian prisoners of war and the Munich rail station, he was selected for training in political agitation and public speaking. He excelled in both. Hitler was then ordered to spy on revolutionary activities in and out of the army.
Hitler was sent to a beer hall in Munich to attend a meeting of the tiny German Workers’ Party. He was told to be as inconspicuous as possible, dress as a civilian, take note of any revolutionary propaganda, and quietly disappear. He disobeyed orders. A speaker advocating the union of German Bavaria with Austria enraged him. Hitler verbally attacked, mocked, screamed at, and belittled the speaker, a highly educated professor, until he silenced him. He attended other party meetings including one at Munich’s much larger Hofbräuhaus. There he made an impassioned speech to an attentive audience of more than one hundred listeners. A secret police report on the event took special notice of “his extraordinary talent as an orator.”
The public response to his speech was a revelation to Hitler. He wrote, “I could speak! After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice of those present led to the donation of three hundred Marks.” Three days later, he officially joined the small party. Hitler had found a political outlet for his anger, racism, and rhetorical skills. He later wrote, “From 1919 to 1923, I thought of nothing else but revolution.”
Adolf Hitler believed the party could be used to revitalize and unite Germany against its political and military enemies. It soon changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party with Hitler himself as its principal spokesman. On February 24, 1920, Hitler publicly presented its new platform at Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. Two thousand enthusiastic listeners cheered his performance. Anyone from his Vienna years would have recognized his themes. But he seemed transformed when speaking about a united Germany and channeling his audience’s hidden fears, prejudices, and aspirations. Hitler appealed to his listeners to join him in “a greater Germany… only people of German blood may be citizens of the state… no Jews belong to the nation… foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported from the Reich. … All non-German immigration must be prevented.”
Hitler made no attempt to hide his anti-Semitism. Despite his having Jewish friends at Vienna’s Men’s Hostel, a commanding officer who awarded him the Iron Cross, and a Jewish doctor who cared for his mother, he labeled Jews “a racial tuberculosis among nations.” His rabid anti-Semitism found an appreciative audience. In March, he resigned from the army to work full-time for what popularly became known as the Nazi Party. At that time, almost no one in Germany, and certainly no one in England, had heard of Adolf Hitler.
But they did know about Franz Ferdinand’s royal orphans.
When word of their expulsion from Konopiste reached England’s Duke of Portland, he took up their cause. The Duke initially believed the eviction to be a bureaucratic mistake, but also feared it might be an act of blind revenge against the Habsburgs. Portland wrote a letter to President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia that read, “The definite sequestration of the house and estate of Konopiste was illegal, in view of the Archduke’s marriage being morganatic.” The president personally responded, “The property in question has been seized in order to prevent damage being done by people residing in the neighborhood… as soon as this danger has subsided, the children of the Archduke will be able to remain in possession of the house and its contents… the remainder of the estate will be purchased by the government for the benefit of the children.”
Masaryk’s letter offered the orphans uncertain hope, but something positive emerged from the Hohenberg’s final days at Konopiste. Sophie and Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck began corresponding. Through their letter writing, they fell in love.
A year and a half after their expulsion, Sophie, Max, and Ernst returned to Czechoslovakia, but not to their home. In 1920, they traveled to their Uncle Thun’s estate at Kwassitz for Sophie’s wedding to Fritz. She and her husband would have a large home in Prague, and country homes and estates. Seventeen-year-old Maximilian and sixteen-year-old Ernst were
allowed to attend the ceremony, but ordered to immediately leave the country following the reception. The nineteen-year-old bride would remain in Czechoslovakia to begin her new married life.
Prior to her wedding, Sophie and her Aunt Henrietta were permitted to visit Konopiste hoping she might find something of her mother’s to wear on her wedding day. The return was painful. Former servants who continued to care for the estate greeted them warmly, but surly guards followed them everywhere. Sophie was not permitted to touch anything that had belonged to her parents. Family treasures were no longer where they had been left. Some had vanished. Despite being carefully watched, scribbled notes and whispers from the family’s former cook told Sophie that President Masaryk’s family had used the house as a department store. His American-born wife walked out wearing the Duchess of Hohenberg’s winter fur coat. His daughter took Sophie’s saddle and riding equipment. They had been the last gifts given to her by her parents. Franz Ferdinand’s only daughter left her childhood home with a pair of her own shoes and some underwear, but nothing that had been her mother’s.
The three Hohenbergs had never been apart since their births. Sophie’s marriage meant that now miles, national boundaries, and government bureaucrats separated them. She could visit her brothers at Artstetten, but a hostile Czech government made visits by them to Czechoslovakia difficult. Her wedding day was touched by sadness.
Sophie never liked her wedding photos. The only person smiling in them was Count Thun. Pictures from that day reveal Ernst had inherited the wavy blond hair of his Habsburg cousins and had grown tall and handsome. He was a wiry young man but looked angry and unhappy. Maximilian, with dark hair and features favoring their mother, looked dazed. Sophie, now shorter than her younger brothers, had blossomed into a stately dark-haired beauty, but her face showed no joy.
Weeks before Sophie Hohenberg’s wedding, Prince Joachim of Prussia—the youngest son of the exiled German Emperor—committed suicide. It was whispered that he was unable to face the uncertainty of the future. The despondent Prince was not alone. No one in Europe knew what the future held. Economic uncertainty and political chaos seemed everywhere.
Of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s three children, only his daughter had dreams that seemed briefly to come true. She married a man she loved who shared her deep religious faith, values, and interests. They settled down in the land, if not the country, of their births. Her husband’s large estates northwest of Prague provided them the leisurely life of country squires. Fritz could hunt on lands his aristocratic family had owned for centuries and he and his bride happily embraced nature and the athletic life they enjoyed.
Their large baroque mansion in the heart of Prague held 15,000 rare books, including original manuscripts by Nicholas Copernicus. Its location in the shadow of Prague Castle on Maltese Square gave them ready access to the city’s culture, theatres, and music. Fritz’s family had been the musical patrons of Chopin and Mozart. They had built the city’s opera house where the famous opera Don Giovanni premiered. In time, three sons and a daughter completed their family circle.
If Sophie Hohenberg’s life had been orchestrated as one of the symphonies she loved, her childhood might have played to an allegro tranquillo tempo: quick, bright, lively, but peaceful. The second movement, the sleepwalking years after Sarajevo, might have been a slow, almost lethargic, adagio. Her years as a young wife and mother, the main allegro or scherzo movement, would have been swift paced and joyful but it would have had an unexpected coda, an unforeseen, abrupt end.
In 1921, the Czech government passed a law seizing the country’s large estates, redistributing the land, and striping aristocrats of their titles. Nearly everyone continued calling the nobility by their ancient titles, but the government strictly enforced their land confiscation policy. Sophie and Fritz kept their country homes at Falkenau and Heinrichgrun, but the estates around them vanished with the stroke of a pen.
Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg were not as fortunate. Konopiste and Chlumetz, and all the buildings and land surrounding them, were confiscated. Nothing was left for them in Czechoslovakia but their memories. Despite earlier pledges and written assurances to the Duke of Portland, President Masaryk kept none of his promises.
Masaryk cited a clause in the Treaty of St. Germain permitting the seizure of “all property of the crown, and the private property of members of the former royal family of Austria-Hungary.” Count Thun immediately filed a lawsuit to fight the seizures of the Hohenberg properties. He argued the Archduke’s children had never legally been recognized as members of the royal family by their Habsburg relatives or the state.
The Renunciation Oath signed in 1900 separated Franz Ferdinand’s unborn children from the Imperial House. Following the Archduke’s 1914 assassination, his sons became the owners of Konopiste and Chlumetz, properties he had bought with his own funds that had never belonged to the crown. That inheritance was confirmed by Prague courts in 1916 two years prior to the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain, three years before Sophie and her brothers were expelled from their home, and four years before the treaty was legally enforceable.
When the Czechoslovakian government seized the “Habsburg” properties of his Hohenberg children, Franz Ferdinand was dead eight years. After losing his initial suit in Czech courts, Count Thun took his case to the Allied Reparations Committee in The Hague. The Committee declared it had no authority to interpret the treaty that ended the war. Thun continued filing lawsuits on Max and Ernst’s behalf, but neither property nor the estates surrounding them were returned. They were never compensated for their seizure. Sophie’s brothers retained their land holdings in Austria. But the loss of Konopiste and Chlumetz stole the future they had always imagined they would have managing their estates and raising families in the Bohemian countryside of their youth.
Franz Ferdinand’s sons did not lack for options, opportunities, or temptations. They were young, handsome, famous, unmarried princes with a storied history, and few responsibilities. Current and former royalty filled newspaper headlines with scandalous escapades, romances, marriages, divorces, illegitimate children, and political misadventures. Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg refused to join their ranks.
Ernst, the youngest Hohenberg, struggled to complete his studies. Only when he took a course in forestry and agriculture did he finally find himself. Following his graduation, he settled in the Austrian countryside north of Graz. There in the isolated beauty of Styria, as the steward of the land given his family through the intervention of Emperor Karl, he finally began to heal from the wounds of Sarajevo.
Maximilian took a different path. As he approached his twentieth birthday, he held his first political meeting at a small Austrian inn. In carefully measured words he announced plans to lead a campaign to restore his nation’s constitutional monarchy and recall his cousin Emperor Karl to the vacant Habsburg throne. The task would not be easy. The punitive Austrian constitution written after the war seized all Habsburg assets, and outlawed Emperor Karl and his descendants from returning to their homeland. Claims to the throne, political involvement, and all former palaces, farms, and estates had to be renounced. The meeting called by Maximilian Hohenberg was a quiet, low-key affair, very different from the bombastic political meetings Adolf Hitler was holding at Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. Only twenty-six people attended. Ernst was one of them, but it put the Hohenbergs on a collision course with Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE MOST GOLDEN TONGUED
OF DEMAGOGUES
“All that is not Race is dross!”
—ADOLF HITLER
“Dictators are very popular these days, and we may want one in England before long.”
—EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES
“One must judge a public speech not by the sense it makes to scientists who read it the next day, but by the effect that it has on the masses.”
—ADOLF HITLER
Threats of violence and civil war, and a march on Rome by th
ousands of his Fascist supporters, resulted in thirty-nine-year-old Benito Mussolini being appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922. One year later, Adolf Hitler and two thousand of his followers attempted a similar march in Munich. It failed and he was arrested for treason.
Hitler brilliantly used his trial to promote himself as a patriot, not a traitor. His putsch was portrayed as an attempt to rescue Germany from communists and the country’s real traitors who stabbed the country in the back, losing the war so they could seize power. He famously exclaimed, “There is no such thing as high treason against those who betrayed the country in 1918.” His defense was dazzlingly bold and deceptive. In effect, he put Germany’s postwar government on trial.
After serving 264 days of a five-year sentence, Hitler left prison more famous, and with more support, than when he entered. On the day of his release, Munich’s Chamber of Commerce, looking for an ally to protect their profit margins, gifted him with a new Mercedes automobile. Hitler would spend the next decade establishing the Nazi Party as the major political force to be reckoned with in Germany. He envisioned a German Reich that was racially pure and homogenous, the exact opposite of the tolerant, inclusive, multinational Habsburg Empire he loathed. Hitler was not the only political activist seeking change. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia campaigned to return the ancient kingdom of Bohemia to its monarchial roots. One name suggested as a possible future king was Prince Maximilian Hohenberg. His handsome features and charming manner reflected his princely heritage, but he refused to flaunt his position, wealth, or intelligence. Like his mother, he was a soft-spoken, meticulous dresser, never a hair out of place. He stood erect, always on time, always the perfect gentleman. The oldest son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg had all the natural instincts of a gifted diplomat, a successful lawyer, and a master chess player. His warm brown eyes were friendly, but his strong face revealed neither his thoughts nor his true feelings, qualities that would serve him well in the tumultuous days ahead. Max quickly and diplomatically disavowed any connections or ambitions with Czech politics; but suspicions of political ambitions made it even more difficult for the Hohenberg brothers to visit their sister in Prague.