by James Longo
Otto Habsburg traveled from his Belgium exile to London to ask the General Consul of the British Diplomatic Corps, “How is it possible that the sons of Franz Ferdinand are being detained in a German Concentration Camp and the English government does nothing?” The diplomat had no answer Otto then contacted England’s Queen Mary, widow of King George V, the mother of the Duke of Windsor. The Dowager Queen asked that British diplomats in Berlin speak directly to Herman Goering. The British Ambassador asked Goering, “Who ordered Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg to be delivered to Dachau?” His question was rebuffed, but Goering told him, “The Princes need to stay there as long as possible. They are sadists like their father. If you had the knowledge we do, you would know there is nothing we can do for these people.” To Queen Mary, who knew and personally liked Franz Ferdinand, it seemed as if the world had gone mad.
The Hohenberg homes at Artstetten and Radmer were looted by the Nazis. Neighbors were encouraged to join in the pillaging, and they did. Their extensive landholdings and properties were confiscated, and their bank accounts and financial assets seized. Sophie tried to convince her sisters-in-law to come to Prague; but Czechoslovakia itself was no longer safe. Thousands of Jews were fleeing the country. Martial law had been declared. Pro-Nazi demonstrations and anti-Semitism rocked nearly every village, town, and city.
Lifelong friends of the Hohenberg family joined the Nazi Party or became silent collaborators. Most people were too frightened to speak out; but Elisabeth and Maisie continued campaigning for the release of their husbands. Finally, Elisabeth was informed that a Nazi official from Berlin would meet with her at the Hotel Imperial on his next trip to Vienna. The man Hitler selected to discuss the Hohenberg case with Max’s wife was Herman Goering.
Only the Führer himself had more power, prestige, and influence in Nazi Germany. Shortly after the arrests of the Hohenberg brothers, the elderly Archduke, Joseph Ferdinand, a Habsburg, was also arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to Dachau. Goering’s brother and sister, living in Austria, asked him to release the retired non-political World War I veteran as a favor to them. He was promptly released, but the shock and trauma of the experience shattered his health. Joseph Ferdinand’s story brought both hope, and fear, to Elisabeth Hohenberg.
As she did for all appointments, she arrived early for her morning meeting with Goering. He kept her waiting. As the hours ticked away, she sat alone in the bustling lobby beneath brilliantly lit crystal chandeliers, carved marble statues, and the hotel’s imposing grand staircase. In the midafternoon, a very polite, very respectful Luftwaffe officer invited her to wait upstairs. She followed him to a private elevator, up two floors, down a long corridor, and then sat on a chair outside Goering’s suite for the rest of the afternoon. She’d had nothing to eat or drink since she arrived hours earlier. Finally, she was invited to enter the salon where the meeting would take place.
The large ornate room was dominated by an oversized desk that sat empty. Goering’s assistant walked throughout the apartment opening and closing doors seemingly to search for him, but he was not found. Then, as if on cue, the forty-five-year-old Goering stepped gingerly into the room from an outside balcony. He was not wearing his usual military uniform, but was flamboyantly dressed head to toe in a dazzling white business suit. Even his hat, shoes, and socks were white.
Perhaps to present the appearance of distinction, he wore a monocle and a signet ring, props she had never seen him wear in any of his newsreel or newspaper photographs. He looked to her like a supernumerary from a Viennese operetta. If he was known for having a sense of humor, she might have smiled.
Addressing her as the Duchess of Hohenberg, he asked her to be seated. Then he sat at the desk, spun the chair away from her so she found herself facing his back, and quietly played with his monocle. She stared at the back of his chair waiting for him to break the silence. Goering finally said, “I know you have come to ask for two people. I have thought about your request a great deal, but I am undecided. Would it be better to draw it out, leave these men in jail for years where they belong, and then kill them, or send them to the gallows immediately?”
He waited a long time for her response. She said nothing. Goering then swung around, faced her, and began asking questions as if he were a prosecutor, and she a defendant. Later she could barely remember his rapid-fire questions until he asked, “How can you defend Ernst Hohenberg who as a leader of the Home Guard tortured and burned patriotic pro-German Austrians? Your brother-in-law has been roasting good National Socialists in his castle!” Elisabeth Hohenberg told him, “Surely, even you cannot believe such things.” Her cool response momentarily silenced him.
At some point during the meeting, she became the interrogator. The Duchess asked Goering how she was to care for five children—all sons, all born to a German mother, their father arrested with no charges filed, and their home and all their assets taken? They argued for over an hour, but neither backed down. When the duel ended, he told her, “Heads up German woman. Write your letters and all will be well.”
Elisabeth Hohenberg felt she had stared the devil in the face and not blinked. Her husband and brother-in-law remained at Dachau. But following the meeting, she was notified that she could return to Artstetten Castle. With her father’s financial support, the Duchess and her five children took up residence as a renter in a small corner of her own home.
When she determined the teacher at the local school was an ardent Nazi, she sent her two oldest sons, eleven-year-old Franz and ten-year-old Georg, to live with her parents in Württemberg. Elisabeth felt they would be safer in Germany, under less suspicion and surveillance. Nazi racist propaganda was more virulent in Austrian schools than in rural Germany. In the Württemberg village school, Nazi teachers, students, and propaganda were in less evidence. Two fewer mouths to feed in a crowded household with no regular income was also a benefit; but mostly she wanted her sons under the positive influence of her father.
No one in Württemberg was more respected than Elisabeth Hohenberg’s father—Prince Maximilian IV of Waldburg, who made no attempt to hide his contempt for Adolf Hitler. From his castle on the town’s highest hill he was able to easily receive uncensored news from Radio Switzerland about what was happening in Germany. Since he was hard of hearing, he turned the radio up as loud as possible so everyone in the nearby village could also hear the broadcast. The Prince was so loved in the region that not even the Gestapo dared tell him to turn his radio down.
Elisabeth carefully chose which battles to fight. Once she returned to Artstetten, she was continually harassed to join the local Nazi Women’s Auxiliary. She refused, but fund-raisers relentlessly pressured her to buy busts of Hitler and Goering to prove her loyalty to the German Reich. In an attempt to stop future visits, Max’s wife finally agreed to purchase two small busts. Prior to placing them out of sight, she noticed the busts of both men were hollow, and Goering’s did not include the monocle he had twirled throughout their visit at the Hotel Imperial. When the Nazi solicitors continued their visits, she traveled to Vienna and filed a harassment complaint against them. The Duchess of Hohenberg may have been the lone Austrian man or woman bold enough to file such a complaint, but it worked. They never returned.
Originally she explained to her younger children their father was traveling. Later she told them he and their uncle were staying at a camp in Germany. Dachau’s prisoners were allowed to send a postcard home every two weeks. They were so heavily censored that her young sons had no idea they were being written from prison.
Twenty thousand Austrians were taken into custody following the Nazi Anschluss. Only those labeled the most “dangerous” were deported to Dachau. Max and Ernst had the infamous distinction of being the first Austrian “criminals” sent there. Four days later, they were joined by 153 of their countrymen. In May, another 120 detainees arrived. The Austrians were segregated from other prisoners but suffered the same cruel treatment.
A journalist who survived later
wrote: “Amongst them were two ambassadors, three ministers, a state secretary, a senior judge, a state prosecutor, the mayor of Vienna, a general, a colonel, three majors, two university professors, some senior police officers, two prominent Viennese lawyers and a number of well-known journalists and authors.” Another survivor wrote, “Looking at them, you would almost be ashamed to be free.”
It wasn’t until years later that Maximilian and Ernst’s family came to understand the horror that was Dachau, not from them, but from others. Guards wielding bull whips and wearing skull-and-crossbone insignias on their uniforms mockingly addressed them as “Your Imperial Majesties.” The brothers were photographed, stripped of their clothes, marched naked to the barber, their heads and mustaches shaved, given a cold shower, and issued striped uniforms and wooden shoes. They were also required to fill out forms that asked their age, date of birth, religion, occupation, and whether or not their parents were living. Guards delighted in asking details about when, where, and how their parents had died.
Neither was ever officially charged with a crime. But the Duke of Hohenberg, prison number 13742, wore the green triangular badge of a “protective custody prisoner.” Prince Ernst, prison number 13741, was designated a “political criminal” for his attack on Vienna’s German Tourism office. His “anti-German behavior” earned him the red badge of a terrorist. During the winter, Ernst was also required to remove the snow from the front of the SS headquarters, and scatter sand and ashes on the paths where Gestapo officers walked. The task eerily mocked Hitler’s winter memories of shoveling snow in front of the Hotel Imperial for the Royal and Imperial Habsburg family.
The brothers were assigned latrine duty, the endless job of emptying and cleaning the camp’s overflowing toilets. They were only given a spoon to assist them in their task. A witness later wrote of their treatment, “They were harnessed to the sewage cart like roped animals. Their slave driver, a professional criminal, beat them mercilessly as they were chased from one latrine to another where they had to shovel excrement into buckets and cart them away.” Another eyewitness remembered:
Soon word got around that they were the two sons of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, assassinated at Sarajevo. On the cart was a ton of muck. The SS-men stopped them and made fun of them. They took a flat stone, had the two prisoners put their heads close to the pile of muck and then threw the stone into the pile so that the brothers’ faces were splattered with excrement.
After the war, Leonard Figl, a fellow “political criminal” at Dachau, wrote of seeing the Hohenberg brothers filling, pulling, and emptying their two-wheeled cart of human waste:
Stripped of all titles and offices and with death before their eyes every hour of every day, they endured the most excruciating humiliation, not with the stoic pride of the “master race,” but with the unwavering, serene dignity of descendants from an ancient family meant to serve and to rule. … They shared with us their last bite and their last sip, and were the most charming of companions.
One other survivor later wrote:
They had a calm, cheerful, majestic dignity about them, an unshakable sense of humor, and unbreakable solidarity. If the system set group against group by encouraging one to look down on another, the Hohenbergs made it clear they were not looking down on anyone.
The brothers followed all the orders demanded by their Gestapo guards. That is, all but one. They refused to hate any of their fellow inmates, including Jews. On November 10, 1938, Jewish synagogues, homes, and businesses across Germany and Austria were attacked, looted, and burned. The infamous event became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, but the violence continued throughout the following day. Police officers, firefighters, and neighbors stood by and did nothing as sixty-two Austrian synagogues were burned to the ground, Jewish cemeteries vandalized, and Jewish men, women, and children attacked, beaten, and robbed.
Six thousand Austrian Jews were then deported to Dachau. The guards took special pleasure in tormenting, humiliating, and killing them. Crossing lines drawn in the dirt or not wearing a prison cap were offenses immediately punishable by death. Sometimes guards grabbed the cap of a Jewish inmate and tossed it into a restricted area, a game that meant quick death for the bareheaded man. In an episode that became legendary among the prisoners, a guard grabbed the hat of an elderly Jew, a once famous comedian, and attempted to throw it into a prohibited area. Ernst instantly jumped high in the air, caught it, and returned it to the head of the stunned man. The guard aimed his gun but did not fire.
Maximilian came to respect many of his fellow prisoners, Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses for their sincere faith, foreign Legionnaires for their stoic physical courage, and communists and republicans for the strength of their political beliefs. Each person, including Max, found ways of quietly resisting the Nazi merchants of fear. At the end of a long workday as Max returned tools to a large wooden storage box, he heard heavy footsteps running toward him. A terrified Gypsy boy ran around the corner. They made eye contact. Max opened the box, the boy jumped in, and he closed and latched the heavy lid. The guard came sprinting around the corner like a hunting dog that had just lost its tracer scent. When Maximilian walked past the furious Nazi, he heard him curse that he would find and kill the Gypsy in the morning.
Late that night, Max sneaked out of his barracks, an offense punishable by immediate execution, crossed the camp, and unlatched the bulky lid. The boy jumped from the box and disappeared into the darkness. He wondered if the next day the guard made good on his threat and killed him. Maximilian might have given the young Gypsy only a few more hours of life, but that was enough for him. It was a small victory, but small victories made Dachau bearable.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BARGAIN WITH THE DEVIL
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country of whom we know nothing.”
—BRITISH PRIME MINISTER NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN
on Czechoslovakia
“I am now at the very peak of my vitality and vigor, and no other German will possess the strength or authority to complete what I have set out to achieve.”
—ADOLF HITLER
Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck did not lack confidence in herself, or her cause. When she learned her brothers had been sent to Dachau, she took it upon herself to negotiate their release with Heinrich Himmler. Like her Habsburg grandmother, she believed in direct personal diplomacy. Czechoslovakian, Austrian, and German friends were horrified. Nearly everyone refused to help her, fearful of the long arms of the Nazis.
The only person offering assistance was her longtime personal maid. Through a friend in service with the Himmler family, she tried to arrange a meeting between the Czech Countess and the German Nazi; but no time or place was ever found. The Countess decided to travel to the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin. She went alone.
It was a dangerous time for someone from Czechoslovakia to visit the Nazi capital, especially someone whose brothers were imprisoned at Dachau. Hitler was escalating his threats against the Prague government on an almost daily basis and Sophie’s destination, No 8 Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, was Berlin’s most feared address.
The block-long building housed the Reich’s Main Security Office. Torture and executions regularly took place in its basement. On its middle floors were the bureaucratic departments in charge of Dachau and other concentration camps. On the top floor of the former Museum and Art School sat Heinrich Himmler’s office, grimly overlooking the city. His henchman Reinhard Heydrich was at his side.
Most people in 1938 Nazi Germany tried to be invisible. The Countess of Nostitz-Rieneck did not. She repeatedly returned to No 8 Prinz-Albrecht Strasse in attempts to meet Himmler, Heydrich, or any of their deputies. The immaculately dressed, always punctual Czech Countess became a familiar fixture in the building’s lobby. Secretaries, guards, and even low-ranking Gestapo officers respectfully whispered to her, “Well, per
haps tomorrow,” or “Maybe the day after tomorrow.” Himmler and his immediate subordinates avoided her.
The days when a citizen of Czechoslovakia could freely travel to Nazi Germany were drawing to an end. In September, Adolf Hitler granted an interview to the London Daily Mail bluntly stating his views on race and the Czech Republic:
This Czech trouble has got to be ended once and for all, and ended now. It is a tumor which is poisoning the whole European organism. … The creation of this heterogeneous Czechoslovakian Republic after the war was lunacy. … To set an intellectually inferior handful of Czechs to rule over minorities belonging to races like the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, with a thousand years of culture behind them, was a work of folly and ignorance.
That autumn, American diplomat George Kennan arrived in Prague and wrote:
Prague could not have been more beautiful than during the September days when its security hung by so slender a thread. Baroque towers—themselves unreal and ethereal—floated peacefully against the skies in which the bright blue Autumn made way for isolated drifting clouds. … Yet rarely, if ever, has the quaint garb of this old city seemed more museum-like, more detached from the realities of the moment, than it did these strange days.
Czechoslovakia’s President Eduard Beneš trusted his country’s fate to a military alliance with France, childlike faith in England, and a belief that Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would not desert his nation. He was wrong on all counts. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden to decide the future of a country that was not invited to the negotiations. His desire for peace at any price was as naked as the reclining nude woman in the Italian Renaissance painting on the wall behind them. An eyewitness later wrote of the meeting, “There was a somewhat macabre tea party at the round table in a room with the great window looking out over Austria.” With the Italian nude painting on one side, and Austria on the other, Czechoslovakia was betrayed. One response to the Berchtesgaden meeting was an editorial cartoon in the Washington Post. It showed a skeletal finger turn back the clock from 1938 to 1914.