by James Longo
On the afternoon of September 21, 1938, loudspeakers set up in Prague announced that France and England had agreed to allow the Czech Republic to be partitioned. The Soviet Union remained silent. Much of the country’s military installations, most of its industrial base, and one-third of its citizens and land mass would disappear into Hitler’s Germany. The announcement ended with the words, “This case is unique in history. Our friends and allies have imposed on us such terms as are dictated to a defeated enemy.”
Prague’s dazed citizens filled the streets in disbelief. Traffic stopped. Most were silent. Some cried. Others sang patriotic songs, but with a melancholy dirge-like cadence. Czech flags were everywhere. The streets and Wenceslas Square remained filled for two days. German newspapers reported, “Red Riot in Prague.” There was no riot, just a national funeral attended by half a million mourners. Hitler’s troops entered Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region on October 1, 1938. Franklin Roosevelt privately denounced the move as “armed banditry.” Publicly he said nothing.
George Kennan reported that once Germany entered the country, “No trains were running. No planes were flying. No frontier stations existed.” Falkenau and Heinrichgrun, the Nostitz-Rieneck country homes northwest of Prague, disappeared deep inside Sudetenland territory. A kind of paralysis settled over the country. German-Czechs loyal to the republic had nowhere to go. One observer lamented:
Germans who hated Nazism were forced to remain in the area. … Many of those who fled and sought visas for England had their requests denied. The British, though claiming the power to guarantee the truncated state, could offer its threatened inhabitants neither refuge nor security.
Telephone, telegraph, and mail delivery stopped; so, too, did Sophie’s visits to Berlin. Contact with her family in Austria became nearly impossible. Everyone believed the rest of Czechoslovakia was doomed. German-Czechs were not alone in being trapped. A Jewish refugee from Vienna wrote that people fled Prague as if the plague itself were approaching; but the unwelcome emigrants had nowhere to go.
In London, American Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy wrote Secretary of State Cordell Hull, “Lord Halifax reiterated that they are instructing everybody not to make any more speeches on the Czech-German situation… all has been said that should be said. Halifax and Chamberlain feel strongly that silence on their part and hoping on our part will get the best results.” Ambassador Kennedy, a fierce isolationist opposed to war, agreed. His college-age son John, the future president of the United States, traveled to Prague and interviewed dozens of Czechs. He predicted that what was left of the gutted, traumatized country would fall to the Nazis without a fight.
One month after the Sudetenland’s annexation, Hungary demanded a return of its own territories taken by Czechoslovakia following the First World War. Hitler convened a meeting with Mussolini to arbitrate the dispute. The site he chose was Belvedere Palace. The city had hundreds of available palaces, the German Reich and Fascist Italy thousands more, but Belvedere—the former home of Franz Ferdinand and Maximilian’s birthplace—held special significance to him. He confided to Henrietta von Schirach that it was the only Habsburg Palace he painted as a young artist in Vienna. Hitler selected it as his palace of choice for signing treaties and military alliances.
As rumors of war again threatened Europe, Franz Ferdinand’s old friend the Duke of Portland published his memoirs. Portland looked back on the Sarajevo assassination and wrote:
It was criminal and tragic in its senselessness. How desperately sad it is that England would never witness the ascension to the throne of this great Habsburg prince. Would it not have been an immense advantage today if there was an entire strong and peaceful power in the Danubian basin? This noble prince was also a true European and what we see now when it is too late—he saw at the time. In justice to his memory—one must admit how much would have been different had he lived.
Five months after seizing the Sudetenland, one year after the Anschluss, Hitler’s armies swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Nazis, a blizzard, and the Ides of March arrived in Prague simultaneously. As John F. Kennedy predicted, the country, government, and military surrendered without firing a shot. Hitler again triumphantly followed his army into a conquered European capital, but Prague was no Vienna. He was greeted with no cheers, no Nazi salutes, only empty streets and cold silence.
After declaring that the state of Czechoslovakia no longer existed, Hitler surveyed the city from the thousand-year-old Prague Castle. He proclaimed the ancient kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia German protectorates. That night he slept in Tomas Masaryk’s bed. Two days later, he flew to Vienna where he once again stayed at the Hotel Imperial. The disappearance of central Europe’s only genuine democracy was met in official circles by nearly universal silence. Leaders in England, France, and the Soviet Union hoped that by sacrificing Czechoslovakia, war with Germany would be averted. Otto Habsburg refused to be silent. His denunciation was published in Time magazine. “I condemn with the utmost energy the violence with which Germany subjugated Bohemia and Moravia. I condemn also the military occupation of Slovakia by a German army.” Central Europe knew peace was not at hand. Churches in neighboring Poland and Rumania filled to overflowing as their governments prepared for war.
Four days after the invasion of the Sudetenland, President Eduard Beneš resigned. As Czechoslovakia faced its worst crisis in its twenty-year history, he announced, “I remain what I have always been, a convinced democrat, and therefore I am leaving the field. I feel it is for the best not to disturb the new European constellation that is arising.” Beneš asked his government ministers to do their duty and remain at their posts. His successor, Emil Hácha, was in failing health, even before suffering a heart attack after meeting Herman Goering. With his ashen face resembling a death mask, he pleaded with his fellow citizens to accept their fate. Public address systems in Prague urged citizens to go about their business and be both “good Czechs and good Germans.”
Sophie Hohenberg Nostitz-Rieneck had been an Austrian and a Czech, but Adolf Hitler dictated she and her family were German. In an instant her past and future were taken from her. Twice she felt orphaned, once in 1914 with the assassination of her parents, and again in 1938 with the theft of her nationality and country.
Hitler’s Gestapo wasted no time in making their way to the home of Franz Ferdinand’s daughter. The Nostitz-Rieneck mansion was searched from top to bottom, and the four children placed under house arrest. Sophie and Fritz were taken to a formidable bank building on the far side of Prague that had been transformed into Gestapo headquarters. During hours of interrogation, Fritz, the robust forty-five-year-old former officer in the Austrian Imperial Army, proved unflappable. Sophie also refused to be frightened. She had not flinched at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, and she refused to be intimidated by Himmler’s minions in Prague. The couple was finally released, but the Gestapo had not finished with them.
American diplomat George Kennan wrote that the Czechs had two choices, collaborating with evil or committing heroic suicide. The Gestapo returned to the Nostitz-Rieneck home to make Sophie and her husband a similar offer. Fritz was summoned to his own library and offered a commission in either the Wehrmacht Home Guard, or the Gestapo. Imprisonment for him and his family was the alternative.
Fritz’s late father had been a loyal Czech, but also a leader of Sudetenland Czechs of German ancestry. Recruiting his son to work with the Nazis would be popular in the Sudetenland, and allow him to be kept under close supervision, and even closer surveillance. It was a bitter surrender. Once Fritz joined the Wehrmacht Home Guard, he, Sophie, and their family became prize hostages.
Czechs who fled, bribed their way out of the country, or attempted to escape through snow-covered woods or mountain passes condemned family and friends left behind to imprisonment and death. Josef Korbel, a Czech diplomat who fled with his wife and daughter, had twenty-five members of his family arrested and die in concentration camps. Korbel’s dau
ghter Madeline Albright became the first female secretary of state of the United States.
Sophie supported her husband’s bargain with the devil, hoping it might save Max and Ernst. She immediately wrote Heinrich Himmler requesting they be released from Dachau into the custody of her husband. After a long delay, she was informed Hitler and Goering vetoed her request. Ernst in particular was singled out as a “desecrator of Nazi iconography.”
Prague became a city in purgatory. Fear, numbness, harassment, and suicides became a part of everyday life. Jews and Gypsies were declared non-citizens and joined thousands of deportees sent to Theresienstadt, an ancient Sudetenland fortress named for a Habsburg Empress. Franz Ferdinand’s imprisoned assassin had died there. Ten thousand children would pass through its gates never to be seen again.
The Nazis quickly declared war on Czech culture. Books were burned; radio broadcasts censored; newspapers, theatres, and even Prague’s National Opera House were closed. Museums and university libraries were emptied of paintings, tapestries, manuscripts, and books. The crown jewels of Bohemia’s ancient kings were shipped to Berlin, and the ancestral homes of the Lobkowitz, Starhemberg, Kinsky, and other ancient families were systematically plundered.
Konopiste, Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck’s birthplace and the former home of the man the Nazis referred to as the “decadent Franz Ferdinand,” was an early target. The castle had been scrupulously maintained as a museum by the Czech government. With the exception of the pilfering by President Masaryk’s family and other Czech officials, its interior looked much the way it had the day Sophie and her brothers were expelled. That quickly changed. Konopiste was emptied of its art, oriental rugs, Meissen china, priceless antiques, dozens of family portraits of Habsburg and Chotek ancestors, and hundreds of silver-framed family photographs. The Duchess of Hohenberg’s entire library was packed into forty-two large wooden crates and transported out of the country. The castle’s cutlery was melted down to extract its high gold and silver content, but its great dining hall and dining service was left intact to entertain distinguished visitors.
Franz Ferdinand’s famous collection of medieval armor was sent to the newly created Wehrmacht Museum of Military History located in Prague. The museum was not open to the public. It was only a temporary home until Adolf Hitler could build a museum in Linz to house it. The Archduke’s historic firearm collection was sent to the Imperial Hunting Museum in Berlin. Military paintings and other artifacts from the Archduke’s army career were made available on “permanent loan” to the clubs, offices, dormitories, and private homes of Gestapo officials. Konopiste’s furniture was reserved to furnish the home of the newly appointed Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. The castle and grounds where Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck had been born were turned into a training school for the Gestapo.
Adolf Hitler proudly called Heydrich “the man with an iron heart.” Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, he became the architect of Hitler’s final solution, a Nazi god of death responsible for the genocide of millions of Jews. Heydrich promised Hitler, “We will Germanize the Czech vermin.” His own deputy described him as having “an ice cold intellect untouched by pangs of conscience. … Torture and killing were his daily occupations.”
In private, Heydrich was a devoted family man to his wife, Lina, who had recruited him to join the Nazi Party, and their three young children. They lived on the outskirts of Prague in a beautiful chateau stolen from Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer. Adele was the famous “woman in gold” in Gustav Klimt’s painting. Frau Heydrich proudly filled her home with furniture and treasures stolen from Konopiste. Waited on by slave laborers from the nearby Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps, Lina bragged to friends she lived like a princess in a magical fairy tale. Her fairy tale began unraveling when her husband, the “Butcher of Prague,” was assassinated by Czech exiles flown into the country by Edvard Beneš and his government in exile.
Heinrich Himmler shed tears when he learned of the death of his favorite killer; Hitler lamented he was “irreplaceable.” The Führer threatened to deport the entire non-German population from the country, but settled for the arrest, torture, and murder of five thousand Czechs. The village of Lidice near Prague was leveled to the ground, its men shot, and its women and children sent to concentration camps. Himmler gave his favorite deputy a flowery eulogy at a massive state funeral in Berlin. In the reign of terror that followed, Prague’s time in purgatory ended, replaced by a Nazi hell. Sophie, Fritz, and their fellow Czechs tried to survive by being invisible.
Hitler celebrated his fiftieth birthday reviewing a four-hour military parade in Berlin. The cadaverous Czech President Hácha grimly stood at his side. Later that day, Hitler confided to intimates, “Gentlemen, the first half century of my life is now over… 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.” One week later in a broadcast beamed across Germany, the dreamer from Linz immodestly reflected on his life and achievements. Cynics labeled it Hitler’s peace speech.
I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919. I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and in deep misery. I have re-established the thousand-year-old historic unity of the German Lebensraum… I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood and without bringing my people, and consequently to others, the misery of wars. I who twenty-one years ago was an unknown worker and soldier of my people, have attained this… by my own energy, and can, therefore claim to be included amongst the greatest achievers the world has ever known.
Four months later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on the Reich. When Hitler realized a Second World War had begun, he surprised his subordinates by growing uncharacteristically quiet. A long period of uncomfortable silence followed, unnerving those around him. Finally, Hitler turned to his Foreign Minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, and asked, “What now?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT
“All the pale horses of the Apocalypse have stormed through my life; revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration.”
—STEFAN ZWEIG
“Trust God. But never try to understand God.”
—ARCHDUCHESS MARIA-THERESA HABSBURG
The month the Second World War began, nearly one thousand prisoners, including Max and Ernst Hohenberg, were transferred to the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp located in the Bavarian mountains. Dachau was needed temporarily for the training of military personnel. Flossenbürg was almost directly across the mountains from Falkenau, one of Fritz’s Sudetenland estates. Its inmates, primarily career criminals, brutalized the political prisoners, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other conscientious objectors brought from Dachau.
Flossenbürg’s inmates worked at a nearby aircraft manufacturing plant or in deep granite quarries. Hitler’s massive building projects required a steady supply of cut stones and masonry. Ernst and Max were again assigned latrine duty, minus tools or handcart. The human waste from the overflowing toilets was to be removed with their hands. No humiliation was to be spared Franz Ferdinand’s sons.
Winter came early that year with freezing rain, record snowfall, and temperatures dropping to forty degrees below zero. Europe’s winter of 1940 was the coldest and longest on record. Dysentery and typhoid fever broke out at Flossenbürg. The contagious diseases spread so rapidly that guards retreated to a barbed-wire perimeter outside the camp. There, warmed by large fires, they waited for everyone inside to die.
Ernst, Max, and a seventy-year-old Viennese political prisoner named Dr. Friedrich Mittmeyer cared for the sick and dying. Almost no food or medical supplies remained in the camp. Burned charcoal was used as a disinfectant. Prisoners too weak to feed themselves were spoon-fed broth heated from frozen grass one mouthful at a time.
The dead were buried in mass graves using pitchforks. When guards reentered the camp that spring, they were disgusted to find anyone alive. Casualties had been in the thousands; but newspapers and Time magazine reported the death of only one prisoner, Prince Ernst Hohenberg.
Ernst had not died, but his family did not learn he was alive for several months.
Flossenbürg’s few surviving political prisoners returned to Dachau. To Max’s surprise, he was ordered by his guards to write his autobiography. He imagined the only possible purpose for such a document was to use it against him in an upcoming trial. No other Dachau prisoner was asked to write such a document. At the end of his exhausting workdays, with almost no light to write, he carefully reconstructed his life on paper as his fellow prisoners slept around him.
Weighing and parsing each word, he used all his training as a lawyer to fill the pages with accurate nothingness so that no content could come back to haunt him. The exercise became a calculated game of chess, something to have fun with and discipline his mind. He wrote about his visits to Germany, the healthy animals he saw there, the well-kept farms, the polite people, the clean streets. Everything was painted in the most positive terms. Politics were never mentioned, nor were his thoughts and feelings about anything of substance. It became an act of passive revenge against his captors. He decided to bore them to death.
Sometime after completing his sanitized memoir, he was summoned to a meeting with the camp’s commandant. Max was informed that if he signed a document agreeing to never discuss what he had seen, heard, or experienced at Dachau or Flossenbürg, he would serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest at Artstetten. Ernst was to remain at Dachau.