by James Longo
For fourteen days, Ernst and Maisie ran, hid, fled, and ran again until they found shelter in a basement crowded with other refugees. There was no light and almost no air, but the cramped cellar offered safety from the violence above them until a fire broke out. People panicked. The heavy door that kept them safe also trapped them.
Ernst found an exit through a collapsed wall into an adjoining basement. Once again they became fugitives. Embers and burning ash rained down on them. Smoke burned their eyes and choked their lungs. Finally, they returned to their ransacked apartment where they were harassed and threatened by soldiers and drunken deserters taking what they wanted at the point of a gun. Maisie later said they were terrified the entire time, never knowing from moment to moment if they would be killed.
Once they were able to escape Vienna, they traveled as far away from the Soviet army as possible. First by train, then by truck, and finally over steep mountain passes by foot, weeks of stops and starts ended with a joyful reunion with their two children. With the help of British soldiers, Ernst, Maisie, and their sons crossed the Austrian border into the tiny neutral country of Lichtenstein. The Hohenbergs’ cousin Prince Franz Joseph II was the ruler there. Only then did Ernst receive the medical attention he needed.
The spring of 1945 was unusually beautiful in Prague, but the threat of violence continued in the skies over the city. Konopiste Castle witnessed one of the last air battles of the Second World War. A fleet of American B17 bombers was attacked by Messerschmitt jets, one of the Nazis’ final wonder weapons. Nine crewmembers of a B17 bomber were captured and taken to Konopiste for interrogation after crashing their plane. Everyone knew the war would be over in days, but on April 19 Gestapo officers shot and killed each airman with single bullets to the head. The nine Americans were buried in a common grave two miles from Konopiste.
Four days later in the burning ruins of Berlin, Heinrich Himmler met Swedish Diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. With bitter resignation he told him, “I admit Germany is beaten,” but then his dark mood lifted. The defeat, he assured Bernadotte, would be blamed on traitors who stabbed Hitler in the back, much as the Kaiser had been in the First World War. Himmler was confident that the Führer’s legend would grow. The Swedish diplomat listened in grim silence as the Nazi predicted someday history would remember Adolf Hitler as the greatest German of them all.
Himmler was not alone in believing Hitler’s reputation would survive Germany’s defeat. In a final meeting with his military commanders, the failed artist from Linz continued blaming others for the disaster. “If the German people lose the war; it will have proved itself unworthy of me!” Hitler didn’t specify whether he was referring to the nearly seven million German soldiers and civilians who died in the war, or those who survived to face the consequences of the defeat. Like Count Bernadotte to Himmler, the Führer’s listeners said nothing. Privately Hitler confided to his personal pilot that his tombstone should read, “He was the victim of his generals.” Everyone was blamed for Hitler’s downfall, for the war, for the defeat, for the destruction, and for the deaths, except Hitler himself.
Hitler’s order of the day on the 15th of April to his dwindling army revealed his obsessions and delusions:
Anyone ordering you to retreat… is to be taken prisoner at once, and if necessary killed on the spot, no matter what his rank may be. If every soldier at the eastern front does his duty in the coming days and weeks, the last onrush of Asia will be broken, exactly as in the end the penetration of our enemy in the west will fail in spite of everything. Berlin will remain German. Vienna will be German once more, and Europe will never be Russian.
On the following day, the Battle of Berlin began. Soviet troops encircled the city. Hitler continued ordering German armies that no long existed to fight them. He climbed the stairs of his bunker one last time on April 20, his fifty-sixth birthday, to present Iron Crosses to child soldiers defending the city. That night Soviet artillery unmercifully bombarded the city that would soon be theirs. Sometime in the early morning hours of April 29, Hitler learned Benito Mussolini and his mistress had been captured and assassinated. Their mutilated bodies, beaten, kicked, and repeatedly shot, were publicly hanged in a Milan square for the entire world to vilify. Hours later, Hitler decided to put his own affairs in order. He married his mistress, Eva Braun, and dictated his will, blaming the Jews for starting the war, and declaring Herman Goering and Heinrich Himmler traitors for secretly negotiating an end to it behind his back. Both men were angrily dismissed from all positions in the government and the Nazi Party.
Even in the depths of defeat, his optimism survived. Hitler’s testament declared, “A seed has been sown in German history that will one-day grow to usher in the rebirth of the National Socialist movement in a truly united nation.” In his last hours, Hitler continued searching for an audience worthy of him and his racist ideology. His final words were dedicated to followers who survived him along with generations to come:
I hope my spirit will continue to dwell among them and accompany them always. … Let them never, above all, allow fear to preside over their actions, placing the honor of the nation above everything that exists on earth. May they always remember that our task, the consolidation of a National Socialist state, represents the work of centuries to come. … Above all, I enjoin the government and the people to uphold the race laws to the limit and to resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30, 1945, sitting next to a photograph of his mother. In parts of Germany and northern Europe, it was the eve of Witches Night, an ancient pagan holiday commemorating the vanquishing of demons, witches, and ghosts before the coming of spring. On the Christian calendar it was the Feast of St. Walpurga, who was famous for exorcising demons from those possessed by the devil.
May 1, 1945, Hamburg Radio reported the news of Hitler’s heroic death defending the Fatherland from Bolshevik invaders. Newspapers across the globe followed their lead. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s banner headline read, HITLER IS DEAD NAZI RADIO REPORTS FüHRER KILLED FIGHTING RUSSIANS. One week later, Germany unconditionally surrendered.
Journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler before the war, was in the ancient city of Jerusalem when she learned of his death. On May 7, 1945, she wrote in the St. Louis Post Dispatch,
By insisting that Germany fight on for months after the war definitely was lost, he brought about the utter ruin of Germany itself, leaving the country a wilderness of rubble without government, communications or food. … The evil that he did lives after him… Jewry’s worst enemy has been defeated and his country literally brought to dust, but the seeds of hatred he sowed throughout the world will flourish still. … Throughout the root of Nazism is unabridged nationalism which elevates a nation into a god, there is no sign that such nationalism is abating, and though Nazism is also the embodiment of a reign of terror, terrorism is not extirpated with Hitler’s fall. Our civilization therefore confronts in victory an undiminished crisis.
Another article from the same newspaper reported the destruction of Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s famous mountain retreat facing Austria. A neighbor from the nearby village was quoted as emphatically declaring, “Nobody believes Hitler is dead.” For the rest of their lives, many Germans and Austrians refused to believe the truth about his suicide, his military blunders, or the Holocaust.
Brunhilde Pomsel was a typical German woman of her time, except for her work during the war. She was secretary to Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. She was also in the Hitler bunker at the time of his suicide. Pomsel took Goebbels’s dictation and transcribed his correspondence, including personal, political, and military observations, for his private diary. Some days, a single diary entry numbered eighty-five typewritten pages.
Frau Pomsel knew Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer, and the entire leadership of Nazi Germany. At the time
of her death at the age of 106 in 2017, she looked back on her life and reflected:
I wouldn’t see myself as being guilty unless you blame the entire German population for ultimately enabling that government to take control. That was all of us; including me. … The whole country was as if under a spell. … I wasn’t interested in politics… I know no one believes us today—everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing. It was all a well-kept secret. We believed it. We swallowed it. It all seemed entirely plausible… I didn’t do anything but type in Goebbels’s office. And I had no idea of what was behind all that. Well, very little anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY
PHANTOMS AND PATRIOTS
“I shudder to visualize what is actually happening in this period to millions now and what is going to happen in this period when famine stalks the earth. … From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lies all the ancient capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe, Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia… mass expulsions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of are taking place.”
—WINSTON CHURCHILL,
Iron Curtain Speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri
“The Lord said vengeance is mine. They held to that belief. They taught us there is only one judge above all of us, above the Nazis, and we were not that judge.”
—GEORG HOHENBERG
Sophie and Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck’s former Sudetenland estate of Falkenau was the location of the last European battle of the Second World War. The date was May 8, 1945. General George S. Patton’s soldiers found themselves in a firefight with German soldiers guarding a slave labor camp built there. None of the Americans wanted to die in the closing hours of the war; but some Germans chose death rather than a world without Hitler. Patton’s battle-hardened veterans had seen action in North Africa and Sicily; landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day; and survived the Battle of the Bulge. American casualties of this final battle included the sons and grandsons of the American immigrants scorned by Adolf Hitler. They died five thousand miles from their homes freeing one thousand sick and dying women prisoners in the Sudetenland countryside of Czechoslovakia.
Four days earlier, Czech partisans in Prague had attacked retreating German military units in the city. The Germans decided they would rather surrender to the American army in the west than fight the approaching Soviet troops from the east. Hours of chaotic street fighting slowed their withdrawal, but they finally joined forty thousand other German troops and laid down their weapons to the Americans. Days later the captives were repatriated to the Russians. The Allies had agreed to return German soldiers who fought on the Russian front to Joseph Stalin’s Red Army. He wanted revenge for the millions killed by the Nazis.
In Prague, Fritz took off his Wehrmacht Home Guard uniform for the last time. Czechoslovakia—occupied by the Nazis for six years—a country betrayed by its friends and allies, its own president, government, and army, survived by becoming a nation of collaborators. Fritz faced no retribution or allegations from Czechs who had endured the occupation with him. Still there was little sense of relief. He and Sophie had heard nothing from their son serving in the German army. Erwein, in fact, was closer to home than they could have imagined. On the 8th of May, the day American and German troops were fighting to the death at Falkenau, the day the war in Europe ended, Erwein surrendered his panzer division to the Americans seventy miles north of Prague. He was then quickly transferred to the nearby Soviet army and sent east to a Russian slave labor camp.
To have lost one son in the war, and to have another survive only to disappear into the vastness of the Soviet Union, was almost too much to bear. When Sophie and Fritz learned that Max, Ernst, and their families had survived, they prayed God had one more miracle for their family, Erwein’s safe return.
Eduard Beneš, Czechoslovakia’s former president who had abandoned the country seven years earlier, returned with vengeance rather than prayers in his heart. Perhaps hoping to deflect from his own failed leadership, Beneš declared an intention to “liquidate… the German problem in our republic once and for all.”
One year earlier, Harold Nicolson—a British member of parliament—learned of Beneš’s plans for a postwar Czechoslovakia and summarized them in his diary. It was an ethnic cleansing policy borrowed from Adolf Hitler, and a land collectivization program inspired by Joseph Stalin. Jan Masaryk, son of the country’s first president and Beneš’s future Foreign Secretary, told Nicolson:
Czechoslovakia will become a neighbor of Russia and must get on good terms with her. This will entail some switch of home policy in the direction of State Socialism and the nationalization of mines and forests. … They must expel most of the nasty Germans, but are quite prepared to keep the nice ones provided that they become good Czech citizens.
When the war ended, Beneš’s position hardened. Czechoslovakia’s new Justice Minister declared, “There are no good Germans, only bad, and even worse ones. They are a foreign ulcer in our body.” The bitterness of the times was reflected in the words of a leading Czech Catholic cleric who pontificated, “Once in a thousand years the time has come to settle accounts with the Germans, who are evil and to whom the commandment, ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ does not apply.”
Adolf Hitler’s ethnic cleansing policies were turned against his “master race.” In a speech on October 28, 1945, Beneš presented his “final solution to the German Question” announcing all “Sudetenland” Germans were to be banished from Czechoslovakia. His “reslovakinization” program revoked the citizenship of Czechs with German ancestry, confiscated their homes, farms, and assets, and ordered them out of the country. For identification, ethnic Germans were forced to wear a large N for “Nemec” sewn into their clothes. The Czech slur meant “German mute.” Nearly one out of every three Czechs, more than three million citizens, were expelled from their homeland.
Beneš may have created the largest forced dislocation of any population during the twentieth century. Among his targeted Sudetenland deportees was the Nazi “collaborator” Oskar Schindler, who rescued over 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, and Sophie and Fritz Nostitz-Rieneck with their children.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, Fritz had placed all his assets in his wife’s name, hoping something might be saved for his family. It made no difference. Everything they owned was confiscated. Hitler had revoked their Czech citizenship against their will, making them citizens of the German Reich. Beneš refused to return it. With Beneš’s help, Hitler’s vendetta continued to curse them.
Fritz was despondent that his collaboration with the Nazis condemned his family to exile, but the new Czech government made him a surprise offer. He was promised that if he divorced his “Habsburg” wife he could retain his citizenship, keep any seized assets, and resume the life he and his ancestors had enjoyed in Czechoslovakia for centuries. The Count was also assured that the courts would grant him full custody of their underage children.
Government agents repeatedly referred to his wife of thirty-five years as the “Habsburg princess,” much like Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Fritz told Sophie it was clear Beneš’s bureaucrats were incapable of knowing who he or his wife were, or the difference between a Habsburg and a Hohenberg. He informed the government that the entire Nostitz-Rieneck family would leave Czechoslovakia together.
The official expulsion paperwork detailed the date and time of their departure, as if the family had been staying at a hotel now waiting for the next guests to arrive. Bed sheets, linens, towels, and other household items had to be purchased anew, beds made up, dishes, pots, and pans washed and scrubbed. Even new soap had to be left in soap dishes. Once government inspectors approved the house for its new occupants, the family would be provided a safe conduct pass during their deportation. Thousands without safe conduct passes were being attacked, beaten, raped, and killed by mobs as Czech police looked the other way.
Each member of the family was allowed to pack a suitcase the size of an overnight bag, the same order given to Sophie decades earlier when she was expelled from Konopiste. For the second time in her life, she lost her home, and her homeland. Sophie packed few clothes. She filled her single suitcase with family photos and treasured mementos of her absent sons. The most difficult part of leaving the house, church, neighborhood, city, and country she loved was leaving without Erwein and Franz.
Sophie’s family, like millions of other Czechs of German ancestry, was not told their destination. Many held in former prisons and concentration camps were brutalized, murdered, or committed suicide there. The rumors never stopped. At one point Sophie was told they were going to Dachau, then that they would be held at the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, the same prison where the assassin of her parents had died. Finally, they joined thousands of other deportees in a long convoy of military trucks and were taken to a detention camp outside of Karlsbad—today Karlovy Vary.
The Czech city, eighty miles northwest of Prague, was named for a fourteenth-century Habsburg Emperor. Hot springs and its Art Nouveau architecture once made it a favorite holiday destination for Beethoven, Chopin, Goethe, Gogol, and even Sigmund Freud and Emperor Franz Joseph. In happier times Sophie’s family had passed through the city on their way to their country estates; but it had become a city of ghosts. Nearly its entire population had been deported due to their German roots. In Brno, the country’s third-largest city, twenty-three thousand were expelled. Six thousand died during the “evacuation.”
The trip from Prague to Karlsbad usually took three hours. War-ravaged roads, breakdowns, and harassment caused the journey—one without food, water, or bathroom breaks—to last two days. Sophie’s family arrived hungry, dehydrated, and exhausted. They didn’t know it at the time, but Erwein had been imprisoned in the city before being sent as a prisoner of war to Russia.