by James Longo
“Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, ‘Stay, thou are so fair.’”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Now that the king has been dethroned, there is certainly no other person in England who is ready to play with us.”
—ADOLF HITLER
The major news story occupying the hearts and minds of most people in 1936 was not the Berlin-Rome axis Hitler and Mussolini announced that autumn. It was the royal scandal shaking England. American journalist H. L. Mencken called it “the greatest news story since the resurrection.” Three hundred twenty-seven days after the Prince of Wales became the British King he abdicated his throne to marry his mistress. His determination to marry Mrs. Simpson, an American divorcée with two living ex-husbands, created a constitutional crisis, a romantic fantasy for believers in fairy tales, and a nightmare for monarchists. Diplomat Harold Nicolson and other members of the British establishment worried that belief in royalty itself was being undermined. For Austrian monarchists, the timing was their worst nightmare. At the very time they were feverishly promoting their own royal prince as their nation’s savior, the indiscreet romantic entanglement of England’s young king cast a dark shadow over the institution of monarchy.
Stanley Baldwin, his country’s Prime Minister, bluntly told Edward, “There is an obligation on the king as head of the British Empire to choose a queen who definitely meets the obligations of her position. The king and queen are symbols of the Empire—not just the king. If the king wants to sleep with a whore, that’s his private business, but the Empire is concerned that he doesn’t make her the queen.”
Edward did not appreciate the Prime Minister’s frankness.
Much to the embarrassment of the Hohenbergs, Winston Churchill and other supporters of Edward cited the morganatic marriage of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek as a possible solution to the crisis. Edward would be king. His wife would be his consort, but never queen. The British government and the Church of England vetoed the proposal, pointing out Mrs. Simpson was no Duchess of Hohenberg.
In addition to her tangled marital history, British Intelligence had become convinced that even if Mrs. Simpson was not a spy, she was certainly a dupe of the Nazis. They may have identified the wrong dupe. A disappointed Adolf Hitler wrote his Ambassador in London, “Now that the king has been dethroned, there is certainly no other person in England who is ready to play with us.”
Following his abdication on December 10, 1936, the former King could have flown anywhere, but he chose to fly to Austria until Mrs. Simpson’s divorce became final. He took up residence in the remote country home of Baron Eugène Rothschild, a visit that dragged on for four headline-grabbing months. The Baron’s wife, Kitty, also an American-born divorcée, was a friend of Mrs. Simpson. To the surprise of his host and hostess, Edward passed some of his time watching old films of Emperor Franz Joseph’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. The movies seemed to distract and relax him. Privately he confided to friends that the only thing he was bitter about was the uncensored American press that initially reported his liaison with Mrs. Simpson. The former King naïvely complained, “It is because of the American newspapers, I am here today.”
Baroness Rothschild soon visited American Ambassador Messersmith to complain about hordes of newsmen who “crawled over the walls, roamed through the garden, and even peeped into windows.” The Ambassador spoke to the regular American correspondents. But they were only a small part of the deluge of frenzied journalists besieging Edward, who following his abdication, was retitled the Duke of Windsor.
Once Mrs. Simpson’s divorce became final, the Duke immediately left Austria on the Orient Express. The couple married in France in a beautiful chalet borrowed from Charles Bedaux, a Franco-American businessman who would later be arrested as a Nazi collaborator and die in prison. The marriage allowed Wallis to become a Duchess. To the dismay and frustration of Max Hohenberg and his fellow monarchists, the world’s most famous newlyweds returned to Austria to honeymoon. First, however, they took a well-publicized romantic detour to Venice, where Benito Mussolini treated them royally.
The Windsors brought with them dozens of journalists, 266 pieces of luggage, Dudley Foxwood (the only British servant to remain loyal to Edward), two cairn terriers, and Scotland Yard detectives assigned to protect and spy on them. Their every move filled newspaper headlines. A short time after they returned to Austria, Ambassador Messersmith had dinner with the forty-two-year-old Duke whom he characterized as “a stubborn, underdeveloped boy, but in others he is a man of keen intelligence and wide interests.”
In the fall of 1937, the former boy-king of England and his bride journeyed to Hitler’s Germany. The onetime Prince Charming who had almost single-handedly saved Austria’s tourist economy embraced the dictator who tried to destroy it. Nazi luminaries Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels entertained the couple from one end of the country to the other. The most infamous stop for the British exiles was a well-publicized visit with Adolf Hitler at his Eagle’s Nest retreat in Bavaria. There the dictator and the Duke of Windsor met one-on-one for nearly an hour. The Duchess had tea with Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. Widespread coverage of their tour helped legitimize the Nazi regime. But Ralph Wigram, a British Foreign Service officer, wrote that Edward’s behavior threatened to pound “a firm nail in the coffin of monarchy.” Austrian monarchists were beside themselves. The Duke and Duchess told friends they hoped to settle in Austria before returning permanently to England; but history intervened.
That autumn, Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomas Masaryk, died. To most Czechs, he was the beloved father of their country, their nation’s greatest patriot. But not so for Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck, Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg’s sister. She loved Czechoslovakia, the ancient Bohemian land of her birth. Its ethnic patchwork of nationalities made it a smaller version of the once mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had no love for President Masaryk. During the worst winters of the depression, she and Fritz had worked with his government to sponsor soup kitchens in Prague; but she always associated him with the day he expelled her and her orphaned brothers from Konopiste.
Outside his small country, Masaryk’s death merited few headlines. But to Adolf Hitler, Masaryk’s passing was significant. It removed the one man who might have saved Czechoslovakia from Nazi Germany. Two months following the Czech leader’s death, Hitler convened a secret meeting in Berlin, informing military and government officials, “Our first objective must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any operation against the west. … Everything will depend on the degree of surprise and swiftness of our action.” To Hitler, Czechoslovakia was no less a racial abomination than the Habsburg Empire of his youth.
Masaryk’s overflowing library contained thousands of books, but the former professor kept only two volumes on his desk. One of them was Goethe’s Faust—the story of an intellectual who sold his soul to the devil. Many considered it Germany’s greatest contribution to literature. His other book was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Masaryk was a realist who had no illusions about Hitler or the Germany he had transformed into his own image.
Each book in its own way reflected the tragedy of twentieth-century Europe. In the war to come, the Frankfort home of Goethe, his birthplace, his museum, the quaint streets where he walked, his entire prosperous neighborhood, and most of the city where he wrote were destroyed. Much of Europe would suffer the same fate.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler bluntly detailed his hopes for wars, conquests, and the enslavement of those he considered racially inferior. No villain in history and no other mass murderer ever so boldly publicized his plans for all the world to see. Hitler declared that all of Europe would be ruled by Germany’s “master race,” and everyone else would become German allies or their slaves. On page one he stated that Austria would be his first conquest:
German Austria must return to the great German mother country, and not because of any political considerations. No and again no; not even if such a union was unimportant from an economic point of view. Yes, even if it were harmful. It must never-the-less take place. One blood demands one Reich… from tears of war, the daily blood of future generations will grow.
By the mid-1930s, Hitler was no longer a racist author of a popular book many bought but never read. He was a dangerously empowered dictator of one of the largest nations in Europe positioned to put his racist rants into action. Hitler’s fantasies had metastasized into a genuine threat to millions of innocent people.
In response, Maximilian Hohenberg did something no one else in Austria had the courage, audacity, or position to do. On the twentieth anniversary of Sarajevo, June 28, 1937, he publicly spoke out about his parents’ assassination. Like Hitler, Max believed words mattered. He chose as his forum not an Austrian or Czech publication, but a French magazine with two and a half million readers, the largest mass circulation journal in Europe. Max was seeking the most substantial possible audience to discredit Germany. He wrote:
[Franz Ferdinand] envisioned forming a federal entente of all national groups comprising the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of settling in the best interest of each people the troubling Danubian problem. … But this union of national groups, simply administered from Vienna, threatened the interests of certain powers which harbored projects of annexation and conquests. My father’s plans embarrassed them, and it was in order to stop his fulfilling them that they armed in Sarajevo the wretches whose crime was to unleash on the world the most frightful of all slaughters.
It was what he wrote next that caused a firestorm of controversy across Europe, especially in Austria and Germany. “This project worried Berlin very much and it was established that the German secret police worked hand in hand with the conspirators in the preparation of the Sarajevo assassination.”
Whether the Duke of Hohenberg was referring to rogue elements within the German and Serbian secret police or was claiming higher-ups in one or both governments planned his father’s assassination was not clear, but his words unleashed an anti-German backlash across Austria. He wrote his article at the very time Hitler was appealing for Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany.
Max’s words enraged Hitler, the Nazi leadership, and growing numbers of Nazis in Austria. Soon even sporting events took on a political hue. A riot broke out in Vienna Stadium between the Austrian and Italian football teams after an Austrian player “thumbed his nose at his opponents, and was knocked down by one of the Italian players. … Four Italians were severely hurt.” Benito Mussolini responded by expelling Austria’s football team from the Central European cup tournament being held in Italy.
Tensions were running high and Hitler’s calls for racial purity and German nationalism penetrated into the tiny mountain town of Radmer where Ernst was quietly living with his wife and newborn son. American Ambassador Messersmith reported Nazi activities on the rise in Styria, Upper Austria, and Carinthia where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor honeymooned. Salutes of “Heil Hitler” and public support for the Nazis caused Chancellor Schuschnigg to demand that local authorities suppress Nazi activities there. The pro-Nazi sympathies of some of Ernst’s closest neighbors persuaded him to become the leader of the region’s anti-Nazi Home Guard. Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck, who lived in the heart of Czechoslovakia’s ethnic quilt of Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, and Germans, also recognized the danger behind Hitler’s rhetoric.
Others did not. In October 1937, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain encouraged Edward Halifax, his Foreign Secretary, to begin “relaxed and informal face to face meetings with the Nazi leadership.”
While Maximilian wrote Sophie of his concerns about the Nazi menace, that fall Chamberlain wrote his own sister regarding “the far reaching plans I have for the appeasement of Europe and Asia and for the ultimate check to the mad armaments race.” When Lord Halifax returned to London from Berlin, he wrote, “Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force, but I can’t feel that either is unnatural or immoral.”
Sophie’s recollections of the years before World War II were memories of praying for a miracle. Prague is a city of churches, and she visited many of them. The Carmelite church of Our Lady of Victories, a short walk from her Maltese Square home, became her prayer sanctuary. Within its walls was the legendary statue of the Infant of Prague. Many Catholics prayed there for miracles. Sophie was one of them.
The famous statue had special ties to her family. Pope Leo XIII had been instrumental in persuading Franz Joseph to approve her parents’ marriage. He designated it and the church a Catholic pilgrimage site. Three centuries earlier, the small wooden statue of the Christ child was donated to the church by the Lobkowitz family, friends of the Hohenbergs, and the onetime owners of Konopiste.
Sophie prayed for all her family there, but especially for Ernst. The youngest Hohenberg inherited their father’s short fuse, not their mother’s diplomatic skills. She worried that the increasing boldness of the Austrian Nazis would trigger an explosion. The outburst she feared happened on a rare visit he made to Vienna in January 1938.
The tariff on German citizens vacationing in Austria continued crippling tourism there. A large illuminated swastika in the showcase window of the German Tourism Office caught Ernst’s attention. Within seconds his umbrella shattered the window. In the confrontation that followed, the swastika and pictures of Hitler in the showcase were destroyed. Police were called. To avoid arrest for vandalism and disorderly conduct, the Hohenberg Prince was required to offer a personal apology to German Ambassador Franz von Papen. The incident was promptly reported to Berlin.
The following month, February 1938, Hitler invited Chancellor Schuschnigg to his Bavarian Eagle’s Nest retreat overlooking Austria. The Chancellor was promised “whatever the course of the negotiations in no case would they alter Austro-German relations to the disadvantage of Austria, nor lead to any aggravation of the Austrian situation.” A histrionic ten-hour verbal assault on Schuschnigg and his country followed. Hitler’s insults, screaming, and bullying were calculated to shock and demoralize the soft-spoken, gentlemanly Austrian Chancellor. Hitler ranted:
I, an Austrian by birth, have been sent by Providence to create the Greater German State! And you stand in the way! I will crush you! The whole history of Austria is just one uninterrupted act of high treason… I am absolutely determined to make an end of all this. The German Reich is one of the great powers and nobody will raise his voice if it settles its border problems… I have achieved everything I have set out to do, and thus become perhaps the greatest German in history.
He demanded Schuschnigg allow the Nazi Party to operate legally and openly, grant amnesty to imprisoned Nazi terrorists, appoint a leading Nazi to his cabinet, and establish closer economic and political ties with Germany. If his demands were not immediately accepted, he shouted that Austria would forcibly be incorporated into the German Reich. Britain’s Ambassador in Vienna reported that during the meeting Hitler “raved like a madman.”
Schuschnigg, shaken to his core, returned to Vienna determined to resign, but was unable to find anyone willing and able to stand up to the Nazi leader. He approached the monarchist mayor of Vienna, the city’s former police chief, the country’s secretary of state for public safety, and other outspoken opponents of Hitler. They all refused. He then offered the chancellorship to Maximilian Hohenberg, the Habsburg who was not a Habsburg. Family loyalty dictated his answer.
The Duke of Hohenberg told Schuschnigg that the man to lead Austria was Otto, then living in Belgium exile. His cousin was only twenty-five years old, but by that age Franz Joseph had sat on the throne for seven years. The Chancellor believed in the restoration of the monarchy but seemed paralyzed by the rush of events. Otto sent Schuschnigg a letter urging him to make no further concessions. He also made him a remarkable offer:
In this critical
hour of acute danger should you feel unable to withstand further pressure… I ask you then, whatever the situation may be, to hand over to me the office of Chancellor. I am not demanding a restoration of the monarchy… I call on you to only give me the Chancellorship so that we could gain the same advantages achievable through a formal restoration of the monarchy, but without any change in the constitution or any new recognition… I am acting as I do because I see it as my duty that, when Austria is in peril, I… should stand or fall with my country.
His offer stood in dramatic contrast to the damning silence emanating from the Duke of Windsor living in French exile. The Duke’s complete lack of response as Austrian friends feared for their lives did nothing to restore his tattered reputation.
The bold proposal by the Hohenberg’s cousin seemed to give Schuschnigg the voice and courage he never had before and would never have again. Even as Nazi terrorists created chaos with bombs and bomb threats, he rejected Otto’s offer. Instead he called for a national election to allow Austrians to decide for themselves if their country would remain free and independent or be absorbed into Nazi Germany. The date for the plebiscite was scheduled for March 13, 1938, the eve of the Ides of March.
Adolf Hitler was determined the vote would never take place. Two corps of Germany’s Eighth Army mobilized on Austria’s northern borders waiting for orders to advance. The secret code name Hitler gave for his Austrian invasion was Operation Otto, named for the man he feared might thwart his lifelong ambition.
Many in Czechoslovakia fantasized that the death watch taking place at their doorstep would stop at their border. Sophie and Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck were not among them. As the date for the plebiscite approached, she and her brothers spoke daily over the telephone. If Chancellor Schuschnigg’s government surrendered and Hitler’s army entered Austria, no Hohenberg would be safe.
Two days before the election, Schuschnigg announced he would make a radio address to the nation. America’s Ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, cabled President Franklin Roosevelt, “In talking with the various Government officials of foreign countries… they regard the situation as acute in Central Europe, but in the words of the French Ambassador this morning, nothing is likely to happen except to have Schuschnigg eventually give in.” Kennedy’s assessment proved correct. Schuschnigg secretly decided at 2:45 that afternoon to give in to Hitler’s demands even as loudspeakers throughout Vienna played the national anthem throughout the city.