by James Longo
No Nazi mind-game could have been more devastating. To leave his younger brother behind was worse than a death sentence. Max did not believe he would have survived his ordeal without Ernst by his side. His brother assured him he, too, would soon be released, but his words lacked conviction. Ernst had been labeled a terrorist. The label worked its sinister dark magic. It made him a non-person.
Maximilian Hohenberg may have never felt more alone than on the train ride from Munich to Vienna. When he arrived unannounced at Artstetten, his family did not recognize him. Elisabeth asked about Ernst. After a long pause, her husband whispered, “He was alive when I left him.” Max’s young sons joyfully greeted him, wearing mandated haircuts combed to the left to better resemble the Führer, and dressed in the handsome uniforms of the Hitler Youth movement. It was a bittersweet homecoming.
Depression overwhelmed him. His house arrest confined him to a few crowded rooms at Artstetten, but his mind remained imprisoned with Ernst at Dachau. Once a week he was required to leave Artstetten and report to the local Gestapo Headquarters. There he had to document anyone he had seen or spoken with, and what had been discussed. He complained to Elisabeth that he was expected to spy on himself. Each headquarters visit triggered flashbacks to Dachau and Flossenbürg. With his brother in Dachau, Czech brother-in-law serving in the Wehrmacht Home Guard, two sons living in Germany, and his younger sons forced to join the Hitler Youth movement, there seemed no escape from the Nazis.
Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France all fell to Hitler’s armies. In November 1941, Hungary, which had once made up half of the Habsburg Empire, allied itself to Germany. The treaty was signed by Hitler at the Vienna’s Belvedere Palace. Weeks earlier, Bulgaria had signed its own German military alliance there. Vienna’s Neues Wiener Tagblatt celebrated the beginnings of a new “intercontinental order.”
When Belgium was invaded, Nazi paratroopers landed within miles of the home of exiled Empress Zita and her eight children. The Habsburgs were warned of the approaching paratroopers by their cousins, the Belgian royal family. Zita, with her six youngest children, fled to Portugal. Her two oldest sons, Otto and Charles, headed to Brussels, then Paris. There they helped nearly twelve thousand Austrian Jewish exiles, the entire Belgian cabinet, and the Luxembourg royal family get exit visas to Spain and Portugal to escape the invading Nazis. The Luftwaffe bombed the castle where the exiled Habsburgs had lived, but they missed their targets. The Habsburgs reunited in Portugal and received asylum in the United States. President Roosevelt befriended Otto, who urged him to recognize Austria as Hitler’s first victim, not his willing collaborator.
According to Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, the Führer briefly visited Paris, France, on June 28, 1940. By fate, design, or synchronistic coincidence, the date was the anniversary of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination, and the signing of the 1918 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler toured the Paris Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, and other landmarks. Speer remembered Hitler telling him, “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.” The architect wrote in his memoirs:
For a moment I felt something like pity for him: three hours in Paris, the one and only time he was to see it, made him happy when he stood at the height of his triumphs. … In the course of the tour Hitler raised the question of a Paris victory parade. But after discussing the matter with his adjutants… he decided against it… [saying], “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren’t done yet.”
Hitler told Speer the parade should be scheduled for 1950, when the wars were over. The day he visited Paris, the Luftwaffe bombed England’s Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey. The islands were quickly occupied by German troops. Within weeks, Greece and Yugoslavia were invaded.
Yugoslavia surrendered after only fourteen days of fighting. When German troops entered Sarajevo, they discovered the perfect gift for Hitler’s fifty-second birthday. In an elaborate ceremony recorded for posterity, they removed the commemorative plaque marking the site of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The event was shown in movie newsreels across occupied Europe. At its conclusion the Führer himself was shown happily receiving the gift. He recognized, perhaps more than anyone else, that the assassination had made possible his rise to power and his wars of racial terror.
Belvedere Palace was once again in the news. Yugoslavia’s defeated government was summoned to Vienna to sign a treaty with their Nazi conquerors. Rumanian diplomat Raoul Bossy noted that Hitler entered the Palace’s circular Chinese room preceded by three loud knocks. It was the same signal once used by the Habsburg court to announce the entrance of the Emperor. He wrote of the banquet that followed, “The shades of Archduke Franz Ferdinand d’Este, last owner of the palace, and his ancestors must have shuddered then in indignation and then must have done so again seeing Hitler, who never ate meat, attentively dice with his knife the vegetables served to him… the silence was oppressive. … It was truly a funereal meal.”
That spring, Maximilian Hohenberg was called to the local Gestapo Headquarters and notified that one of his sons had been skipping his mandated Hitler Youth meetings. Max was warned to control the boy, or the Gestapo would do it for him. Word also came from Vienna that his Habsburg grandmother, Maria-Theresa, was in failing health. After repeated requests to Gestapo officers, he was granted permission to visit her. The visit may have saved his sanity and his soul.
Max did not travel alone. His four-year-old son, Peter, was his traveling companion. The Hohenbergs’ youngest child had been reminded by his mother to be a good boy, sit still, be quiet, and say nothing. Two images remained in Peter’s mind years after their journey. The first was the castle-like turrets on the front of the impressive house on Favoritenstrasse. The second was a tea cozy. It sat on a writing desk between his father and great-grandmother, but no tea was ever served.
As the adults whispered back and forth, Peter became fixated on the cozy. He could hear nothing of their soft-spoken words. Everything was said in quiet whispers. When the visit came to a close, his great-grandmother asked if there was anything he wanted. He told her he would very much like to ask why she had a tea cozy on the table without serving them tea. She gently lifted up the cozy and revealed a telephone. Then she gingerly placed the cover back over the phone and whispered, “It is so they cannot listen to our conversation.” Maria-Theresa Braganza Habsburg refused to surrender her sense of humor to the Nazis.
The Archduchess was nicknamed the melancholy beauty of the Habsburg court by those who knew her life story but not her dry wit. Her handsome father had once been King of Portugal, yet died in penniless exile. She was the third unhappy wife of Emperor Franz Joseph’s younger brother Karl Ludwig. Court watchers claimed Karl Ludwig’s chief recreations were mistreating the three women he married. Despite years of marital neglect and verbal abuse, her faith, resilience, and sense of humor remained intact.
Peter never forgot the visit with his great-grandmother, a great lady from another time and place. She taught him to find humor in life’s absurdities, even under a tea cozy. The visit helped Maximilian regain control over his life. Maria-Theresa’s parting words were to remember the eleventh commandment, “Trust God. But never try to understand God.” She told him if he wished to keep his sanity and outlast his enemies, nothing else was more important. Following the visit to the house on Favoritenstrasse, Max’s spirit rose. During his weekly meetings at the local Gestapo Headquarters, he surprised his interrogators by presenting them with an ever-growing list of missing, stolen, and looted items taken from Artstetten. Using his skills as a lawyer and diplomat, he turned the tables on the Nazi bureaucrats and employed legalistic jargon to politely, but persistently, inquire about restitution.
That Christmas he and Elisabeth celebrated the birth of their sixth child, a boy they named Gerhard. In recognition of delivering another member of the master race to the Reich, Elisabeth was presented the
“Mother’s Silver Cross Medal” by the Nazi Party. The shining blue and white medallion featured a mounted swastika over a cross, and a facsimile signature of Adolf Hitler. She refused to wear it.
In Württemberg, her mother—who had borne twelve children—was also belatedly recognized for her maternal service to the Fatherland. Nazi officials delivered to her the Mother’s Gold Cross, First Class Medal. Elisabeth’s father, Maximilian Prince of Waldburg, defiantly returned it, telling authorities, “My wife is not a cow the Nazis can decorate!” Few people had such courage.
One week before the twenty-third anniversary of the Sarajevo assassinations, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Months earlier, Adolf Hitler had sent Joseph Stalin a Christmas message reading, “Best Wishes for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future of the people of the friendly Soviet Union.” Stalin replied, “The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented in blood, had every reason to be lasting and firm.”
The surprise invasion and quick implosion of Joseph Stalin’s armies caused millions to despair. Among them was Austria’s best-selling author Stefan Zweig. He had fled to England, then to the United States, and finally to Brazil. There the homesick writer took up residence in Petropolis, a mountain city with strong Austrian roots. It was named for Archduchess Maria-Theresa’s Brazilian uncle whose mother, a Habsburg princess, was born in Vienna. The city’s German architecture, gothic cathedral, and mountain location reminded Zweig of Austria.
Twenty-two nations in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East had fallen to the Nazis. Only England to the west and the Soviet Union in the east had not surrendered. The Nazis seemed on the threshold of total victory. The thought of a united Europe under the heel of Adolf Hitler caused Stefan Zweig and his wife to commit suicide. Two days earlier, he finished writing his final book, The World of Yesterday. In many ways, it was a four-hundred-page suicide note. Among his final words, he wrote:
I myself have lived at the time of the two greatest wars known to mankind… the first on the German side and the second among Germany’s enemies. Before those wars I saw individual freedom at its zenith, and then I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years; I have been acclaimed and despised, free and not free, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life; revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes, and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. I have been a defenseless, helpless witness of the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long forgotten barbarism.
Zweig’s capitulation to pessimism expressed the depression and resignation felt by many; but exiled German author Thomas Mann wrote, “He should have never granted the Nazis this triumph.” The Hohenbergs’ response to the Russian invasion was markedly different. To Max, the invasion brought hope. He believed Hitler was repeating Napoleon’s blunder of trying to conquer an unconquerable country. The night terrors tormenting him since Dachau began to fade away. Ernst refused to believe the initial optimistic reports from the Nazis about the invasion, but feared he would not be alive long enough to see the invasion fail. For their sister, Sophie, the invasion made her worst nightmare a reality. Czechoslovakian colleges and universities were closed and students of “German” descent drafted into Hitler’s army. Within days of the news, Sophie and Fritz’s twenty-year-old son, Erwein, and eighteen-year-old son, Franz, were drafted into Adolf Hitler’s army. Her eldest children went from being schoolboys to soldiers, sacrificed as cannon fodder to the Nazi war machine.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
APOCALYPSE
“To live in fear every hour of every day is terrible. To never know what would happen next. To want to speak out against evil which was the right thing to do, but to know to speak out was to jeopardize everything and everyone you loved. I don’t know how they did it. It was a time of endless fear.”
—MAXIMILIAN AND ELISABETH HOHENBERG’S YOUNGEST SON, GERHARD
“There is no way out unless I drive a bullet through my brain.”
—ADOLF HITLER
Following twelve weeks of military training, and eight weeks at the German War College, Erwein and Franz Nostitz-Rieneck were sent to Münster in lower Saxony to be taught the intricacies of tank warfare. Thirty years after Franz Ferdinand’s death, his first two grandsons became lieutenants leading panzer divisions against Russia, the country the Archduke warned Austria to never fight.
On June 28, 1942, another anniversary of the Sarajevo assassinations, Hitler ordered German panzers invading Russia to turn south toward the city of Stalingrad. It was a fatal mistake. Six months later, German and Russian armies were locked in a death struggle over a thousand-mile battlefront from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The 164-day Battle of Stalingrad changed the destiny of Adolf Hitler, his war, the Hohenbergs, and the world. Winter and the Russian army stopped then annihilated Germany’s armies. Max Hohenberg’s son Georg, fifteen at the time, later remembered:
In the beginning of the war when the Germans were winning, almost everyone in Austria seemed to think the war was wonderful. Most believed Hitler’s victories were glorious acts of revenge for 1918. After Stalingrad, almost overnight, many discovered they had been anti-Nazi all along. Suddenly they remembered they were Austrians, not Germans.
Sophie’s two sons survived the debacle that was Stalingrad. Cousins, friends, schoolmates, and eight hundred thousand of their fellow soldiers did not. The Soviet Union suffered one million casualties. Joseph Stalin’s massive armies wasted no time in pushing Hitler’s shattered forces west. Erwein and Franz and millions of others were caught between the opposing furies of two of history’s greatest mass murderers.
The winter chill of Stalingrad was felt quickly in German Silesia, today northwestern Poland. That was where Maisie Hohenberg and her young son were staying. Silesia stood directly in the path of the advancing Russian armies as they smashed, burned, and raped their way to Berlin.
Days before the war had begun, Maisie’s parents were recalled to London. Her mother pleaded with her to join them, but she refused to leave without Ernst. Her family was in more danger than she realized. Her father, Captain George Jervis Wood, was an undercover agent for MI-6, British Military Intelligence. Attempts by his wife and daughter to free Ernst had unwittingly endangered his own covert activities.
Once Captain and Mrs. Wood left Austria, Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck traveled to Vienna. He brought Maisie and her young son Ferdinand to Prague, then to a country estate in the Sudetenland, and finally to the north German countryside of Silesia to stay in the care of distant Hohenberg cousins.
Count and Countess Friedrich Schaffgotsch were among Germany’s wealthiest industrialists and largest land owners. Like the Duchess of Hohenberg’s father in Württemberg, some Germans were untouchable, even in Hitler’s Third Reich. Their magnificent castle was protected by an ancient moat on one side, a private lake on the other, and unassailable wealth and privilege. Yet for Maisie Hohenberg it was a lonely, frightening time. She was raising a small son without a father, living with a family she did not know, in a country that had imprisoned her husband, speaking a language she had never mastered, and forced to read lips because of her increasing deafness.
Ernst had been transferred to his third concentration camp, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, twenty-two miles north of Berlin. The camp’s outward appearance was similar to Dachau, but its security tighter. Sachsenhausen was ringed by a higher stone wall, an electrified fence, and ferocious attack dogs. Heavily armed sentries kept watch from tall towers. The prison had no night. Bright lights lit the entire compound twenty-four hours a day inside and out.
Heinrich Himmler ordered the administrative offices of all the Reich’s concentration camps moved there. So, too, were many high-value prisone
rs. Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, the grandson of Otto von Bismarck, the last Crown Princess of Bavaria, the former prime ministers of Spain and France, and captured Polish and Soviet generals were held there in isolation. Joseph Stalin’s oldest son, and many others, died within its walls. Maisie, fearful that Ernst could not survive much longer as a Nazi prisoner, redoubled her efforts to free him. Determined to be independent, and not a burden, she began working in a local nursery earning money to buy stationary and stamps for the countless letters she wrote. At the behest of Count Schaffgotsch, she petitioned Silesian native and Dresden Gestapo Chief Udo Gustav von Woyrsch for assistance. He eventually wrote back apologizing that he was unable to help. Ernst remained imprisoned under orders from “the highest possible German authorities.” Maisie knew his coded language referred to Himmler, Goering, and Hitler himself. Her single hope was that one of them in a moment of sanity or mercy might free Ernst.
As Hitler’s armies retreated more and more, cracks began to appear in German solidarity, and in the Schaffgotsch family itself. Maisie learned that a nephew of Count Schaffgotsch had been an early supporter of Adolf Hitler. His brother was not. Aside from their political differences, the second brother had married the daughter of a prominent Jewish banker in Berlin and moved with her to Silesia. As Hitler rose to power, the Nazi brother told his family that his Jewish sister-in-law was in danger. He offered to transport her to safety through southern Germany and Austria to Switzerland. The two entered the train together, but she was never seen again.
No one ever learned whether she had been turned over to the Gestapo, or whether her own brother-in-law had thrown her from the train. Silesia’s ancient aristocratic families, including his own, stopped speaking to him. He steadily rose in the ranks of the Nazi Party, but became a non-person within his own family.