Hitler and the Habsburgs

by James Longo

  In the spring of 1943, the Countess of Schaffgotsch joined an elderly cousin for lunch at the Hotel Metropole. Her cousin dined at the hotel every noon with his wife, friends, and family members. It was his habit to ask young officers passing by if they would like to join them for a meal. One day the nearly blind Schaffgotsch cousin failed to recognize the Nazi whose sister-in-law had disappeared. He cheerfully asked him, “Would you like to share lunch with us?” Everyone at the table was shocked and embarrassed, but no one dared leave.

  The high-ranking Nazi who had been ostracized for so long was delighted at the invitation and happily joined them. By the end of the meal, he extended an offer to help anyone at the table who might ever need his assistance. Only the Countess Schaffgotsch spoke up, asking for his help in freeing Prince Ernst Hohenberg from Berlin’s Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. The Nazi, who was soon leaving for the capital, promised he would do what he could. No one believed him, but the Countess rushed home and urged Maisie to write one more letter.

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Chief of Reich Security, controlled all access to Heinrich Himmler. His name was familiar to Maisie. He was the Nazi who had thrown Elisabeth and her out of his office days after the Anschluss. Maisie boldly wrote him. With the German army in retreat on all fronts, his response was more cordial. Kaltenbrunner told her if she made a direct appeal to Heinrich Himmler, he would pass it on to him.

  Two Gestapo officers soon visited Schaffgotsch Castle. Maisie feared the worst but was told that her husband would soon be freed and returned to Vienna. She was also handed her first uncensored letter from Ernst since his arrest. It ended with the words, “Every day and every hour my thoughts are with you… I embrace you and send you a thousand kisses.”

  Maisie never learned whether it was the shadow of Stalingrad, the influence of Countess Schaffgotsch’s Nazi cousin, infighting within the Nazi bureaucracy, the five-year crusade of the Hohenberg women, or the tightening noose around his own neck that finally convinced Heinrich Himmler to sign the release order.

  She thanked the Count and Countess, quickly packed, and left the sanctuary that had been home for her and her son during most of the war. Within months, the advancing Russian army looted and burned the magnificent castle, Count Schaffgotsch was dead, and his family scattered.

  A letter postmarked from Berlin, 12 April 1943, was waiting for Maisie in Vienna. It read, “I arrive tomorrow morning the 13th, at the Franz Joseph Bahnhof [train station] at 8:45. A thousand hugs, Ernst.” Five dark years after he disappeared into Gestapo hell, a ghostly Ernst slowly emerged from the train. Maisie was stunned by the skeletal appearance of her thirty-nine-year-old husband. Ernst’s health was broken, his heart damaged, his spirit crushed. Only glimpses of his sense of humor revealed his former self. It took time for Ernst and his six-year-old son to know each other and for him to adjust to the bright sights and loud noises of the city. He longed to return to the countryside, but was forbidden from leaving Vienna. There he was required to work long hours in a war factory. The constant Nazi surveillance and stress of the city stole his remaining strength.

  Saturdays he was required to report to the Gestapo Headquarters of Baldur von Schirach, Reich Governor of Greater Vienna. There he was questioned about his weekly activities. His parole forbade him from having contact with anyone who had been a prisoner in a concentration camp, or anyone else the Nazis considered an enemy of the state. Ernst could not see, write, or meet his brother, Max. They had also lost contact with their sister and family in Prague, and she had lost contact with her sons fighting on the eastern front. None of them knew who was alive or dead.

  That February, death came to the Hohenbergs’ eighty-eight-year-old grandmother. Old and new Vienna attended her funeral, even high-ranking Nazis. Max, Ernst, and their wives were there, but the terms of their parole did not allow them to fraternize with each other. Even though their Habsburg grandmother was given a state funeral, most of the mourners, including old friends, ignored them.

  Eighteen days later, Maisie gave birth to their second child. He was named Ernst after his father, but there was little time for joy. The next week the American and British air forces began bombing Vienna day and night. On the seventh anniversary of the Anschluss, the largest Austrian air raid of the war took place. Otto Habsburg urged President Roosevelt not to carpet-bomb Austria, but his pleas were ignored. The Hofburg balcony where Adolf Hitler had spoken to 300,000 cheering Viennese was reduced to rubble. Two thousand animals at the Vienna Zoo were killed. Belvedere Palace, the Spanish Riding School, the Imperial Stables, the Art Museum, and the Academy of Fine Arts were all damaged.

  The city’s world-famous State Opera House, the Burgtheatre, and the train station where Hitler had first set foot in Vienna burned to the ground. Twenty percent of Vienna was destroyed, 87,000 homes, including Archduchess Maria-Theresa’s house and entire neighborhood on Favoritenstrasse; but she was not there to see it. Her body rested beneath the city’s simple Capuchin Church alongside her late husband, his two previous wives, eighteen empresses, and twelve Habsburg emperors, including Franz Joseph.

  In Prague, the city’s medieval streets, towers, bridges, and castles remained untouched by the war, but that was about to change. General George Patton’s invading American army approached it from the west. From the east came the avenging Soviet armies of Marshal Ivan Konev. Sophie tried to reassure her young son and daughter they would be safe, but no one knew which army would reach the city, and what would happen when they did. Fritz and his Home Guard were ordered to defend Prague to the last man. Months earlier, 200,000 Polish men, women, and children had been killed in Warsaw when they rebelled against their German occupiers. In revenge, the ancient capital of Poland was razed to the ground.

  For the rest of Sophie’s life, mention of the war always turned her thoughts to February. The war ruined the month for her. People thought it the shortest month of the year. To her, it seemed the longest. The war, February, and death were forever linked in her mind to the passing of her grandmother in February 1944, and twelve months later, to the death of her son Franz. He was killed in February 1945 fighting the Russians in Poland. The tiny village where he died was named Sophienberg.

  The official letter informing her that the most gentle of their four children had been killed on the Russian front stated, “Your son died for the Führer and the Fatherland.” The words brought her no comfort. Franz Assisi Maximilian Nostitz-Rieneck died three weeks after his twenty-second birthday. Her firstborn son, Erwein, was somewhere on the war’s eastern front, but Sophie didn’t know whether he, too, was dead.

  In Berlin, Adolf Hitler’s delusions blocked any attempts to save Germany from destruction. Days after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he had declared war on the United States, dismissing it as “nothing more than a mass of immigrants from many nations and races.” Now German armies in the west were being decimated by an American-led invasion force as diverse as the nation they represented. To his east, armies of Slavs and other ethnic groups dismissed by the Nazis as racially inferior were annihilating soldiers of Hitler’s master race.

  Adolf Hitler promised at war’s end to build a wall around the Reich to keep non-Germans from entering the country. But no walls could save Nazi Germany. Hitler ordered no retreat on any fronts, but retreated to his own childhood fantasies of cowboy-and-Indian dismissing the advancing Russians as “Redskins.” To boost the morale of his soldiers fighting on the collapsing eastern front, he ordered 300,000 copies of Karl May’s western fairy tales sent to them. They were too busy fighting for their lives to read.

  Baldur von Schirach traveled from Vienna to Berlin to tell the Führer the war had to end soon, “one way or the other.” Schirach was promptly rebuffed, but his suggestion brought a wisp of reality to Hitler. After their meeting, Adolf Hitler turned to an aide and said, “How does he imagine we do that? He knows exactly as I do there is no way out, unless I drive a bullet through my head.”

  CHAPT
ER NINETEEN

  THE WHOLE COUNTRY WAS

  AS IF UNDER A SPELL

  “I can’t believe how all this could have happened. It is enough to make one lose faith in God.”

  —EVA BRAUN

  in a last letter to a friend

  written from Adolf Hitler’s bunker

  “We may all perish, but we shall take the world with us.”

  —ADOLF HITLER

  On July 20, 1944, Hitler narrowly survived an assassination attempt at Wolf’s Lair, his military headquarters in East Prussia. A bomb hidden in a briefcase wounded twenty people. Three died, Hitler survived. The conspiracy was headed by trusted Prussian aristocrats from his General Staff who planned to kill the Führer, seize power, and end the war. Seven thousand suspected conspirators were arrested. Five thousand military officers, aristocrats, industrialists, educators, government ministers, and religious leaders were shot, hanged, or beheaded.

  Following his near murder, Hitler’s paranoia increased and his physical and mental health deteriorated. He increasingly raged at those unable or unwilling to follow his orders. With military disaster looming, Heinrich Himmler sought answers in astrology, numerology, and religion. He told a friend, “I know that I am generally regarded as a heedless pagan, but in the depths of my heart I am a believer; I believe in God and providence. In the course of the last year I have learnt to believe in miracles again. The Führer’s escape on the twentieth of July was a miracle.” Herman Goering did not believe in miracles. He turned to morphine.

  On March 19, 1945, Hitler had the official Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, publish an order for all German military personnel and civilians to destroy anything and everything that could be useful to the enemy. This included infrastructure, factories, housing, and food. It was in effect a demand that Germany commit suicide. “Not a German stalk of wheat is to feed the enemy, not a German mouth to give him information, not a German hand to offer him help. He is to find every footbridge destroyed, every road blocked—nothing but death, annihilation and hatred will meet him.”

  Two months earlier, Hitler had retreated fifty feet below ground to a three-thousand-square-foot bunker in Berlin. Reality was not allowed to enter the bunker with him. He told those who followed him there, “In the future anyone who tells anyone else the war is lost will be treated as a traitor, with all the consequences for him and his family. I will take action without regard to rank and prestige.”

  The only exemption to his mandate was to Hitler himself. He spent hours blaming the Jews for starting the war, and hours more denouncing his generals and allies for losing it. Eventually his audience was reduced to sycophants, true believers who shared his delusions. He ranted, “We shall never capitulate. Never. We may all perish, but we shall take the world with us.” His mistress, Eva Braun, wrote a final letter from the bunker to her best friend, “I can’t believe how all this could have happened. It is enough to make one lose faith in God.”

  Hitler who as a child had dreamed of being an architect and rebuilding his hometown of Linz had instead become an architect of death, destroying everyone and everything he touched. Linz still held his imagination. He ordered an architectural scale model of the city carried from his Chancellery office to the bunker. An eyewitness said, “No matter at what time, whether during the day or night, whenever he had the opportunity during those weeks, he was sitting in front of this model [as if it were] a promised land into which we would gain entrance.”

  At the end of his life, Hitler’s mind also returned again and again to the Vienna of his youth. Following a final meeting with Baldur von Schirach, his anger and anti-Semitism quickly overcame momentary nostalgia for the city. He told his weary listeners:

  After 1918 the average Viennese found himself reduced to extreme poverty. But before the war it was wonderful: never shall I forget the gracious spectacle of the Vienna Opera, the women sparkling with diadems and fine clothes. In 1922 I was again at the opera, and what a difference! In the places of the cultured society of old there now sat the Jewish riff-raff; the women stretched out their hands to show off their jewelry, a heart rending site! I never once saw the Imperial box occupied. I suppose the Emperor Franz Joseph was not musical. I am an implacable enemy of the Habsburgs, but the sight of this mob sprawling to the very edge of the Imperial box was disgusting, and it angered me immensely.

  As von Schirach had earlier predicted, one way or another, the war would soon end. With aerial bombing destroying larger and larger parts of Germany, Max and Elisabeth brought their two older sons home from Württemberg. To escape the prying eyes of local Nazis, Franz, Georg, and their next-oldest son, Albrecht, were sent to Vienna’s Stubenbastel secondary school. Franz soon returned to Württemberg to avoid the draft. Georg, who was fifteen at the time, later remembered:

  We knew exactly who was a Nazi and who was not, but we still had to be very careful with the other students and the teachers. You felt like you knew who you could trust, but you were never completely sure. By 1945 we had to keep changing schools because they kept getting bombed. We were just happy to be alive with so much destruction and death around us. My father taught us about the importance of laughter. He used to say, “To be able to laugh is to be able to stay sane.” To us laughter was like oxygen. The only problem was you couldn’t laugh when you were too frightened, so we tried very hard not to be too frightened.

  Georg and Albrecht never knew from day to day whether their school would be standing, bombed, or closed forever. Then on March 29, 1945, the oldest Nazi they had ever seen entered their classroom to make an announcement. The Russians had reached the outskirts of Vienna. Students were told the time had come for them to defend the Fatherland. They were ordered to enlist in either the Wehrmacht or the Gestapo. In the final days of the war, Max and Elisabeth’s sons were presented with the same choice their Uncle Fritz had been given at its beginning.

  It was three days before Easter—Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, or in the Austrian Christian calendar Mourning Thursday, the day set aside to commemorate Christ’s last supper. Georg and Albrecht both wondered if they would be alive by Easter. The brothers signed up for the Wehrmacht, were given shovels, and told to begin digging ditches in the streets. At day’s end they laid their shovels down and began the long walk home to Artstetten. They made up their mind they would survive, or die together, as a family.

  The village of Artstetten was filled with rumors that the Nazis were carrying out executions and massacres. Maximilian received an order to report to the Commandant of the Gestapo—alone. Elisabeth went to Gestapo Headquarters in his place demanding to know the purpose of the meeting. A ferocious argument followed with the Commandant refusing to discuss the matter, and Elisabeth refusing to leave his office.

  A compromise was finally reached. Max met with the Commandant’s wife in a public place away from Gestapo Headquarters. She informed him that he and a number of other prominent Austrians were about to be killed. He immediately went into hiding. Years after the events, Elisabeth wondered whether the Commandant was trying to warn Maximilian or planned to assassinate him, and whether his wife was working with or against her husband. Fear, heroism, and treachery were everywhere.

  The advance guard for Joseph Stalin’s troops was known for their reputation for savagery. Princess Ileana of Rumania, whose castle stood in the path of the Russian invaders, later wrote:

  The Soviet army was not like anything which had been seen since the days of Genghis Khan’s Tartar hordes… with frightening and unhuman simplicity they took what they wanted at the point of a gun, and they shot at people with that complete lack of feeling which a normal man has when he shoots at a cardboard target… not even old women were spared. The terrifying part was the methodical brutality in which everything was done. … They robbed rich and poor alike. They had no standards by which to distinguish between one individual and another.

  Once German troops retreated, Max returned to his home. There he waited with his w
ife and children for the Soviet army to appear. Despite the Soviets’ barbarous reputation, he and Elisabeth greeted them as liberators. His view of communists had been tempered by the political prisoners he came to know and admire at Dachau and Flossenburg. Max believed everything depended on the character of the man, not his political beliefs. His reputation may have preceded him.

  The few pieces of their belongings remaining at Artstetten were quickly looted by Soviet troops, but he and his family were treated with gruff respect. The Hohenbergs had been born in palaces. Most of their new overseers had been born as peasants, but they shared a common enemy—Adolf Hitler. Max’s son Georg later said his father may have been the only Duke in the history of the Soviet Union the communists regarded with respect.

  Soviet troops arrived in Vienna the day after Easter to a very different reception. Some German units fought in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Others fled. Even as thousands died, Stalin’s soldiers made time to take anything of value they could find, but they discovered a city with no water, no gas, no electricity, and almost no food.

  Incredibly Ernst Hohenberg, like his young nephews, had been inducted into the Wehrmacht Home Guard and ordered to defend Vienna. Like them, he quickly deserted. The day the Red Army moved into the city, he and Maisie waited in their apartment to be killed or liberated. They managed to send their sons to the safety of Upper Austria, but Ernst was unable to travel. His heart condition required medicine only available on Vienna’s black market. Even that collapsed in the chaos of the Russian advance.

  When fighting in their neighborhood became too intense, they fled their apartment with only the clothes on their backs. Gunfire and looting seemed everywhere. Russian and German troops, deserters, marauders, and rapists fought each other and anyone else they could prey upon. A building porter recognized Maisie and agreed to hide them, but they were found by Russian troops and were again forced to run.