by James Longo
Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck remained close with her brothers through letter writing, phone calls, and visits to Austria. The happiness of Sophie’s marriage may have motivated Archduchess Maria-Theresa, their Habsburg grandmother, to actively assume the role of family matchmaker. Ernst gently refused her overtures. It had taken years of living in the rugged solitude of Styria’s mountains, forests, and lakes to bring peace to his restless soul. Once he emerged from his Styrian cocoon, his shy personality and boyish good looks attracted the company of strong, beautiful women who wanted to take care of him. Ernst thoroughly enjoyed their attention but was in no hurry to exchange the joys of bachelorhood for domestic bliss.
Maria-Theresa redoubled her efforts to find a suitable marriage partner for Maximilian. She found a willing ally in her childhood friend Princess Marie Lobkowicz Waldburg-Wolfegg. Two years of orchestrated meetings between the Archduchess’s grandson and the Princess’s granddaughter brought the desired result. Weeks after he earned a law degree at the University of Graz, a Viennese newspaper reported on July 2, 1926, “Dr. Maximilian von Hohenberg, the eldest son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, who was assassinated at Sarajevo in June of 1914, became engaged today to Countess Elisabeth Waldburg-Wolfegg.”
There was no escaping Sarajevo. Even in Maximilian’s wedding announcement, the assassination of his father was prominently featured.
And although Elisabeth Waldburg-Wolfegg descended from her own ancient, princely family, her ancestral home in southern Germany, a twelfth-century medieval castle fortress, could not protect them from the violence of the twentieth century. Two of her brothers had been killed in the First World War. Following their marriage, Dr. Hohenberg and his wife would be addressed in Austria as the Duke and Duchess of Hohenberg, but mention of Sarajevo usually quickly followed.
On November 16, 1926, Max and Elisabeth’s wedding provided the Hohenbergs the opportunity for a family reunion. Sophie and Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck traveled to Germany for the ceremony. Ernst served as his twenty-four-year-old brother’s best man. Maximilian’s marriage to his twenty-two-year-old bride supplied his sister with wonderful memories, a sister-in-law she loved, and wedding photographs she could finally enjoy.
Maximilian chose Lequieto, a small fishing village on the northeastern coast of Spain, for their honeymoon. It was the home of the exiled, penniless, widowed thirty-year-old former Empress Zita.
Twice in 1921, Emperor Karl had tried to restore the monarchy in Hungary. Twice his efforts failed. He and Zita were exiled two thousand miles from their homeland off the coast of Africa on the rocky Atlantic island of Madeira. Within months, pneumonia, exhaustion, and a broken heart claimed the Emperor’s life. He was thirty-eight years old. His tragic life and death seemed to encapsulate the uncertainty of life and death in the twentieth century. It also abruptly ended any attempt by Max to restore Karl to the throne.
But Karl and Zita had eight children, five of them boys. There was more than a whiff of curiosity during the visit to Lequieto about the possibility of one of Max’s male cousins as a future monarch. In the final months of Karl’s reign, Austria’s last Habsburg Emperor had proposed federalizing the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire along the lines that Max’s father had proposed, but it was too late. Millions of lost lives, ethnic rivalries, and the rising tide of nationalism ended any hopes of uniting the peoples of central Europe. Prior to his premature death, Karl worried that Austria and central Europe would be caught in a power vacuum Germany and Russia would fill by force. He drafted a proposal for a neutral Danubian Federation to unite, protect, and safeguard its people.
In the year of his marriage, Maximilian wanted to connect with someone who shared the vision of his father. His visit with the Emperor’s widow and her oldest son, Otto, fulfilled that need. It also gave his life a new sense of purpose.
In 1929, the New York stock market crashed, followed by the collapse in Vienna of the Rothschild’s Creditanstalt Bank. The depression that followed destabilized Europe’s political and economic landscape. Everyone was impacted. Artstetten’s Austrian neighbor, the Benedictine Melk Abbey, sold its Gutenberg Bible from the year 1455 to Yale University. In Vienna, apartments in Franz Joseph’s vacant Schönbrunn Palace were rented to pay for its upkeep. A suite of rooms for a family of five was advertised for seven dollars a month. There were few takers.
Members of the former royal houses were not immune to the financial disaster. Archduchess Maria-Theresa quietly attempted to sell her family jewels. The most famous was Napoleon’s 263-carat diamond necklace given to his second wife, Empress Marie Louise Habsburg, on the birth of their son. The appraised value was $450,000. It was offered for sale in New York for $100,000 and sold for $60,000. Maria-Theresa’s destitute grandnephew, Leopold Habsburg, and two partners negotiated the deal—claiming $53,730 in expenses. The Hohenberg’s grandmother demanded the necklace be returned, and had her grandnephew, a Habsburg Archduke, arrested and jailed for fraud.
Desperate times clouded the judgment of many people. Countries across Europe searched for a leader, a savior, a dictator to rescue them from their economic and political woes. Hitler believed he was that man. He spoke only German, but nevertheless was an extraordinary linguist, a chameleon able to articulate the unspoken emotional language of his listeners. His oratorical talent allowed him to forge a political coalition that Vienna’s mayor Karl Lueger might have envied.
Wealthy industrialists secretly financed Hitler’s rise to power after 1924. In return he quietly promised to destroy the country’s burgeoning Communist Party, smash the nation’s labor unions, and provide his benefactors unparalleled profits. The unemployed were assured full employment, and the forgotten man—respect. Hitler promised the military recruits, rearmament, and a restoration of power and prestige. Aristocrats heard in his siren call the possibility of themselves and the German Imperial Court becoming masters of European society. Veterans of the lost war saw him as one of their own.
But no single group rallied to Hitler more than the young. To them, his dazzling speeches promised a new generation of youthful, vigorous, charismatic leadership. Two-thirds of Hitler’s followers were under the age of forty.
Adolf Hitler had financial support and hundreds of thousands of followers, but he craved legitimacy and political power to make his vision a reality. It was handed to him by the country’s respected president, Paul von Hindenburg, the popular former Chief of the German General Staff in the war. In 1933, in an effort to recognize Hitler’s growing popularity, the eighty-six-year-old appointed him Reich Chancellor. Only Hindenburg held more power in the government. Germany’s new forty-three-year-old Chancellor promised to pursue a policy of peace, “despite our love of the army.” Many doubted his words.
General Erich Ludendorff, Hitler’s ally a decade earlier in his failed putsch attempt, denounced Hindenburg for delivering “our holy Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all times. I solemnly prophesize this accursed man will bring our Reich into the abyss and cause our nation unimaginable suffering.” He ended his prophetic warning with the words, “For this act you will be cursed in your grave by future generations.” Hitler’s own first message as Reich Chancellor sent “best wishes” to the “brotherly German people of Austria.” His mind, heart, and plans were never far from Austria.
In order “to overcome economic catastrophe” and root out “high treason and treachery,” Hitler quickly persuaded the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Bill, granting him dictatorial powers. Labor unions were banned and books by Jewish authors and other “enemies of the state” were publicly burned. Munich’s law and order police chief, Heinrich Himmler, opened the country’s first “concentration camp” dedicated exclusively to housing political prisoners. It was named Dachau for a nearby picturesque village, and quickly filled with labor, trade, and union leaders. Hitler wasted no time in turning his gaze to Austria. A tariff of one thousand Reichsmarks was placed on any German citizen traveling there. The tariff was
designed to destroy Austria’s thriving tourist industry. In a cynical nod of rendering to Caesar the things that were Caesars, Hitler wasted no time neutralizing Germany’s politically powerful churches. On the anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, June 28, 1933, independent Lutheran Churches across Germany were united into the newly christened “Protestant Reich Church.” An ardent Nazi, Ludwig Müller became its presiding bishop. He carefully vetted Lutheran clergy to ensure they were “politically reliable,” meaning they accepted the principle of “the superiority of the Aryan Race.”
One month later, Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli signed a concordant with Germany’s Vice Chancellor, Franz von Papen. The Faustian bargain removed the Catholic Church from involvement in the country’s politics or from speaking out on social justice issues. In return for the strict separation of church and state, spiritual, non-political matters were conceded to the Vatican. Within a year, von Papen, a charming German Catholic aristocrat unburdened by a moral compass, became Germany’s Ambassador in Austria. His mission was to encourage Austrian Nazis to undermine the government there. Eugenio Pacelli’s diplomatic skills earned him his own earthly reward. Five years later, he was elected Pope Pius XII.
Adolf Hitler understood the disappointments, fears, and dreams of the underclass. The impoverished had been his constant companions on Vienna’s streets, in soup kitchens, and homeless shelters. They had dogged his footsteps in the trenches of World War I and during the bitter defeat that followed. He recognized their anxiety and dread, the unsaid prejudices of the marginalized. Once he entered politics, he boldly said aloud what many hid in their hearts. They rewarded Hitler by making him the most powerful man in perhaps the most cultured, literate, educated country on earth.
American journalist Dorothy Thompson interviewed Hitler and described him as “an agitator of genius. “She reported, “Hitler is the most golden tongued of demagogues. Don’t bother about the fact that what he says, read the next day in cold news print is usually plain nonsense.”
She warned her readers. “You must imagine the crowds he addresses: Little people. Weighted with a feeling of inferiority. … Patriotism is the cheapest form of self-exaltation. If one is in debt, if one has not made a success of life—still, says Hitler, one belongs to RACE. … ‘All that is not Race is dross!’ is one of his exclamations. He tells audiences, ‘The Germans are a superior race and it is ordained that this superior race shall conquer the earth.’” Hitler portrayed himself as the powerful voice of the voiceless. His followers loved him for validating their hidden feelings. They loved him because he seemed to love, respect, and champion them.
Hitler also had a nearly mystical appeal to many aristocrats. Exiled German Emperor Wilhelm II and three of his sons all saw Hitler as their ally in reclaiming the vacant throne for themselves. Crown Prince Wilhelm hosted Hitler in his home, and in 1930 his younger brothers Prince August Wilhelm and Prince Oskar openly joined the Nazi Party. Prince August introduced Hitler to enthusiastic crowds, and behind closed doors to wealthy monarchists. One-third of Germany’s ancient nobility openly joined the Nazi Party. Others supported him through their silence.
Yet to Hitler’s great frustration and annoyance, Otto Habsburg in exile and Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg in Austria loudly spoke out against him, condemning his Nazi Party, exposing and denouncing the abhorrent racism he sought to legitimize.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand had waited a quarter of a century to become Emperor, and died without achieving his goal. Hitler waited 599 days. When President Paul von Hindenburg died in August 1934, Germany fell into Hitler’s waiting arms.
Economic turmoil and the rising fear of communist revolutions saw Portugal, Spain, Poland, Greece, and Rumania, like Italy and Germany, embrace dictatorships. Britain’s Edward, Prince of Wales, told a German prince, “Dictators are very popular these days and we may want one in England before long.” Joseph P. Kennedy, America’s Ambassador to Great Britain, confided to President Roosevelt that the United States might need to assume, “under other names, the basic features of the Fascist state.” To fight and defeat totalitarianism, Kennedy believed America might “have to adopt totalitarian methods.” Roosevelt demurred.
George Messersmith, an American diplomat and former Pennsylvania schoolteacher stationed in Berlin, recognized what the Habsburgs, the Hohenbergs, and few others did. He wrote:
I wish it were really possible to make our people at home understand how definitely the martial spirit is being developed in Germany. If this government remains in power for another year, and it carries on in the measure of this direction, it will go far toward making Germany a danger to world peace for years to come. With few exceptions, the men who are running the government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would definitely be receiving treatment elsewhere.
Messersmith soon became the United States Ambassador in Vienna. He had no illusions about Hitler’s anti-Semitism or his designs on Austria. In 1925, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, “In my earliest youth I came to the basic insight which has never left me, but only became more profound: that Germanism could be safeguarded only by the destruction of Austria.”
Maximilian Hohenberg refused to dismiss Hitler’s words as mere rhetoric, fantasy, or fiction. He believed Hitler had to be stopped and Otto Habsburg, the oldest son of Emperor Karl, was the only person able to stop him. With Otto’s approval and himself as president, Maximilian helped organize and then lead a political alliance of Christian socialists, young idealists, conservative Catholics, clergy, former aristocrats, and Jews known as the “Iron Ring.” Their goal was to offer Otto Habsburg to Austria as an alternative to Adolf Hitler. Ernst and Sophie quietly supported their brother’s efforts.
When Otto reached the age of eighteen, the Austrian town council of Ampass voted to make the former Crown Prince an honorary citizen. Eighteen was the age Franz Joseph had become Austrian Emperor, Victoria became Queen of England, and Wilhelmina, perhaps contemporary Europe’s most popular monarch, Queen of the Netherlands. Over the next three years, fifteen hundred Austrian towns declared themselves “Emperor Communities.” As Hitler’s shadow grew, the monarchist restorationist movement also grew. On September 28, 1933, one Austrian newspaper reported:
Through Duke Max [von Hohenberg], son of the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand who was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914, the Archduke Otto [Habsburg pretender to the Austrian throne] has accepted honorary citizenship in the towns of Hain, Mamau and Ragelsdorf and have pledged allegiance to the Pretender, hoping that he will soon be sovereign. … Duke von Hohenberg presented the Mayors of the three towns with letters signed, “Otto in Exile” stating that the exile was doubly hard when the fatherland was heroically fighting for existence against malicious and unscrupulous attacks. Archduke Otto condemned the Nazi movement and added that he trusted the present regime would remove the remaining unjust laws of the revolutionary period against the Habsburgs. He trusted the day was not far distant when relying on God’s help, and with a strong hand, he would lead the Homeland to a happy, certain, and great future.
Adolf Hitler had no intention of allowing Otto, or any other Habsburg, to claim the Austrian throne. In a candid conversation with the Yugoslavian minister, he revealed his outsized hatred of the Habsburgs. He told him his beloved mother was buried in Austrian soil. If he allowed Austria to again be ruled by that “degenerate dynasty,” it would feel as if he was spitting on her grave.
He was determined to unite Germany and Austria under his leadership. Mein Kampf bluntly made that clear. The book was begun in a German prison cell following his failed putsch attempt, but he finished it in a small cabin in the Bavarian mountains surrounded on three sides by the Austrian Alps. Salzburg, only twelve miles away, could be seen in the distance. Profits from Mein Kampf later allowed Hitler to buy his own house there, but he quickly redesigned it to face Austria.
Over the years it was expanded, rebuilt, and rem
odeled many times, making it the most famous, and infamous, political retreat in the world. The house was officially called the Berghof, but journalists christened it Eagle’s Nest because of its location above the clouds. The retreat’s most celebrated feature were its floor-to-ceiling windows offering spectacular views of the surrounding forests, lakes, and mountains. Hitler, the frustrated artist and architect, positioned them toward his homeland. Leni Riefenstahl, Germany’s best-known female film director, a personal favorite of Hitler, visited the Berghof twice. She was awestruck by its location and scenery. During her final visit before the war, Hitler told her:
Look, that’s Austria over there. Every day that I come up here, I gaze across and beg the Almighty to allow me to live until the day when Austria and Germany will be united in a single German Reich. That is the only reason I bought this house, because from here I can look at Germany and Austria.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IMPENDING HORRORS
“Restoration of Habsburgs within Year is Predicted”
—NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINE, October 28, 1934
“What will happen to Austria, will also happen to you. … You too will be the victim. You too will be destroyed by the Nazis.”
—MAXIMILIAN HOHENBERG TO BENITO MUSSOLINI