Hitler and the Habsburgs Read online

  Many outside of Austria saw Franz Ferdinand as representing a hopeful, peaceful future. Among them was the Emperor of Germany, the nation Adolf Hitler most admired. Princess Viktoria Luise, daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, wrote that her father could never understand why many Austrians could not see the wisdom of Franz Ferdinand’s religious and political tolerance in meeting “the various nationalities” of his “multinational State” at least “half way.”

  Across the English Channel, William Cavendish Bentick, the Duke of Portland, a member of the British Government’s Privy Council and a cousin of Queen Mary, wrote of his Austrian friend:

  From 1900 to 1910 an incessant struggle continued within the country, during which the Archduke put up a tremendous fight in order to achieve a rejuvenation of the State… gradually these ideas prevailed in Austria, and the Archduke found enthusiastic followers to help him remodel the old State in such ways that every nation within its boundaries be given a “place in the sun”… his one aim in life was peace, his policy eminently constructive, and his greatest joy embellishing everything with which he came into contact. His unalterable determination was to strive for a higher standard of living for all people and to bring about internal peace by dealing with the utmost fairness to all.

  Franz Ferdinand was not an idealist, but a realist who recognized the rising tide of nationalism could unleash ethnic furies and “Rassenkrieg”—an apocalyptic race war pitting ethnic groups against one another. Such a war would destroy not only the Habsburg Empire, but all of Europe.

  Adolf Hitler’s bitter years in Vienna convinced him a race war was not only inevitable, but cleansing and desirable. To him, the sooner the war came the better. Only when Austria was destroyed, Germany free of foreign influences, when those he dismissed as inferior were expelled, enslaved, or destroyed would Germany achieve its full greatness. When Hitler learned of the assassination of the Archduke on June 28, 1914, he fell on his knees, thanked God, and wept out of happiness. Almost no one at the time thought the assassination in Sarajevo would spark a war. But Hitler was certain the war he had prayed for was at hand. He believed that the death of the peacemaker whom he hated above all others made war inevitable. The war came one month to the day, and to the hour, of the assassination.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ARTIST, THE ARCHDUKE,

  AND THE EMPEROR

  “I lived in palaces of the imagination.”

  —ADOLF HITLER

  “Shhhh! Be quiet. The Emperor is dead, but he doesn’t know it.”

  —A POPULAR VIENNESE JOKE

  at the beginning of the twentieth century

  “I have an indomitable affection for Vienna, but I know her abyss.”

  —SIGMUND FREUD

  Adolf Hitler was an eighteen-year-old high school dropout when he boarded a train in 1907 from his hometown of Linz. Despite the speed and efficiency of the Imperial Royal Austrian State Railway, his trip was leisurely. It was a milk train, loading and unloading milk, produce, and people to towns and villages along the meandering Danube River. Hitler was in no hurry. He brought with him suitcases full of books, and dreams of becoming a successful artist or architect. There was no doubt in his mind success waited for him in the capital of the mighty Habsburg Empire.

  Fifty miles short of his destination, the steam engine slowed and stopped at the small village of Pöchlarn. On a nearby hilltop sat Artstetten Castle, the childhood home of forty-three-year-old Archduke Franz Ferdinand d’Este, heir to the Royal and Imperial Habsburg throne. Hitler was unable to see the Archduke or his stunning castle from his third-class compartment window. The frenetic Archduke was seldom there, anyway. He was relentlessly on the move, a man who loved speed in an age of speed, a traditionalist who embraced modernity. Gas, electric, and steam-driven cars all competed to break speed records. It was no coincidence Franz Ferdinand’s onetime chauffeur was Ferdinand Porsche, a winner of speed records across Europe and the designer of the first hybrid petroleum and electric automobile.

  Not everyone embraced the modern times. Like an ancient, finely tuned clock, the legendary Emperor Franz Joseph left Schönbrunn Palace on the outskirts on Vienna at exactly 7:00 a.m. He then rode in a horse-drawn carriage along Mariahilfstrasse, Vienna’s main shopping street, to perform his public duties at the Hofburg Palace. At half past four, he returned to his palace home where he had been born seventy-seven years earlier. There he worked late into the night reading dispatches and signing papers.

  Eight perfectly synchronized snow-white Lipizzaner horses pulled his gold-gilded green carriage. Each had a regal, erect gait, much like the Emperor himself. Franz Joseph and his horse-drawn carriage were images from another century. It took England’s King Edward VII to persuade Austria’s Emperor to take his one and only ride in an automobile. Franz Joseph declared of his 1908 adventure, “It stank, and one couldn’t see anything.” If the words were truly his, it was one of the few times Franz Joseph revealed honest thoughts from the man behind the public mask.

  The monarch—surrounded by the dazzling pomp, ceremony, and etiquette of his court—projected a grandfatherly image of stability, permanence, and continuity. The image was carefully orchestrated by a palace public relations apparatus second to none. It may have been the only modern thing about him. Franz Joseph’s royal façade allowed the aging monarch to cling stubbornly to his routine and to maintain power after nearly sixty years on the throne. Adolf Hitler, no fan of the Habsburgs, begrudgingly recognized, “Monarchy instituted something extremely useful. It artificially created the idol. All that fuss, the whole shebang, did make sense in a way.” Liberal social reformer Joseph Maria Baernreither, a member of Franz Ferdinand’s inner circle, might have been speaking for the frustrated Archduke when he wrote, “The powerfully surging life of our times scarcely reached the ear of the Emperor as distant rustling. … He no longer understands the times and the times pass on regardless.”

  Franz Joseph’s pace stood in stark contrast to that of his restless nephew and heir. When Franz Ferdinand was in Vienna, his large Austrian-built Graf & Stift automobile raced and careened in and out of Schönbrunn’s gravel driveway from his nearby home and office at Belvedere Palace. The contrast between the Emperor and Archduke was available for all to see. One seemed to have ice water in his veins, the other burning oil. The resulting steam made it impossible to clearly see and understand each other.

  Once Hitler arrived in Vienna, money inherited from his father allowed him to rent a tiny back room in a crowded tenement in the heart of the city. It provided him privacy, but proximity to the great Ringstrasse Boulevard and Franz Joseph’s 2,600-room Hofburg Palace to the north, Schönbrunn Palace and gardens to the south, and Franz Ferdinand’s Belvedere Palace to the east. Museums, parks, theatres, and magnificent architecture and monuments were within easy walking distance.

  There was no escaping the Habsburgs in Vienna. The first postcard Hitler sent home to his one and only friend, August Kubizek, pictured the city’s Karlsplatz and Karlskirche, a famous plaza and church named after a long-dead Habsburg Emperor. On it he scribbled, “I find everything very beautiful.’’ Later he told him in person, “For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the parliament; the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of The Thousand and One Nights.”

  He was initially captivated by the cosmopolitan city. Hitler later reminisced about Habsburg Vienna to his Nazi inner circle:

  Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply. In the center and in the inner districts you could really feel the pulse of this realm of fifty-two million, with all the dubious magic of the national melting pot. The Court with its dazzling glamour attracted wealth and intelligence from the rest of the country like a magnet. Added to this was the strong centralization of the Habsburg monarchy itself. It offered the sole possibility of holding this medley of nations together in any set form.

  Perhaps more than any other European metropolis at th
e dawn of the twentieth century, Vienna was a magnet for thinkers, dreamers, artists, and schemers. Pioneering psychologists Sigmund Freud and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, best-selling author Stefan Zweig, painter Gustav Klimt, philanthropist Adele Bloch-Bauer, composer Gustav Mahler, cigar-smoking aristocratic confidante Anna Sacher, and the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Bertha von Suttner, claimed the city as their home. Father of Zionism Theodor Herzl, director-filmmaker Fritz Lang, singer-actress Lotte Lenya, inventor-movie star Hedy Lamarr, revolutionaries Joseph Tito, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin also lived there at one time. Austrians liked to brag the modern world was born in Vienna.

  Vienna in 1907 was a dramatically different city than the one Hitler’s father had found fifty years earlier as a thirteen-year-old runaway. Different, too, than the one Hitler’s mother, twenty-three years younger than his father, experienced during her visit as a girl. Only the Emperor remained the same. Immigration had expanded Vienna’s population fourfold to nearly two million people, bringing with them a living tapestry of languages, religions, foods, music, dress, and traditions. At its center was Franz Joseph, the linchpin holding it all together. The immigrants did not come for the Emperor, but for the upward mobility his Empire offered.

  That upward mobility eluded Adolf Hitler. He was stunned when he failed to pass the Academy of Fine Arts’ entrance exam. Years later he wrote that the rejection struck him “like a bolt from the blue. … Downcast, I left [the] magnificent building in the Schillerplatz, for the first time in my young life, at odds with myself.”

  A second blow brought him back to Linz. His beloved mother was dying of cancer. He returned home to care for her, but she died five days before Christmas. The holiday was forever ruined for him. Within months the world he had known and the world he had imagined were shattered. Eduard Bloch, the Jewish doctor who cared for Hitler’s mother during her last illness, later wrote of him:

  He was tall and pale and looked older than his age. His eyes, which he inherited from his mother, were large, melancholic and thoughtful. To a very large extent, this boy lived within himself. What dreams he dreamt, I do not know.

  With his father already dead, Hitler returned in February 1908 to wintry Vienna as an orphan. The small inheritance from his father and an orphan’s pension from his mother provided him enough income to stay in Vienna one year. He was certain he would pass the Academy entrance exam on his next try. Until then he often slept in his room until noon. Waking hours were spent in warming rooms and coffeehouses where he could read and draw before exploring the city’s museums. Evenings were reserved for the opera. Hunger became part of his life, but he would rather feed his dreams with music than his body with food.

  The young Hitler made no friends in Vienna and had only one in Linz. Two years earlier, he had met August Kubizek in the standing room gallery of the Linz regional theatre. They discovered a shared love of music and poetry, had similarly poor grades in school, and had no other friends. Their mothers had each lost three other children. Both boys were survivors.

  Kubizek had never lived anywhere but Linz. Meanwhile, following Hitler’s birth in the Austrian-German border town of Braunau am Inn, his restless father moved the family seven times. After attending five different schools and flunking twice, Hitler quit school without graduating at the age of fifteen. Perhaps what attracted him most to Kubizek was that his solitary friend was a listener. Hitler was a talker without a regular audience, a leader in search of followers. In Kubizek and Linz he found his first disciple whom he quickly tried to persuade to attend Vienna’s famous Music Conservatory. He wrote him from his tiny rented room, “The whole of Vienna is waiting for you!” Whether he believed that of his friend or not, he certainly believed it for himself.

  August’s parents were fiercely opposed to having their only son leave Linz. When Hitler returned to care for his dying mother, he took the opportunity to change their minds. His surprising victory was early proof of his persuasive verbal skills. August Kubizek soon arrived at the same train station that had brought Hitler to Vienna. The crush of people and the sights, sounds, and smells of the city nearly overwhelmed him. But he quickly recognized Adolf in the teaming crowds wearing a handsome dark overcoat, a matching hat, clasping an ivory-tipped ebony walking stick.

  The illusionary magic Hitler momentarily spun quickly disappeared when August saw the “wretched shabby” room where his friend lived. A quick fifteen-minute walk to the magnificent Opera House, the Ringstrasse, and St. Stephen’s Cathedral revived his spirits. Unable to find a place of his own, he and Adolf agreed to split the rent and moved into a slightly larger room offered by Hitler’s landlady. August applied and was quickly admitted into Vienna’s Conservatory of Music. Hitler did not tell his friend about his own rejection and talked as if he were taking art classes. Once winter retreated, Hitler spent his days not in school, but in hiking the city and sitting in the gardens of nearby Schönbrunn Palace. It was there on a favorite bench and table he drew and sketched buildings he had seen, and dreamed of rebuilding Linz and Vienna.

  When he again failed his entrance exam, Hitler’s personality darkened. August knew his friend was troubled but had no idea why. In Linz, the slim, deathly pale Hitler had always been somber. August remembered, “He was capable of loving and admiring, hating and despising, all with the greatest seriousness.” But in Vienna he suddenly seemed “unbalanced.” Hitler’s gaunt appearance, sleepless pacing back and forth, and hour-long rants made an already gloomy room a claustrophobic prison cell. Finally, late one night, Hitler angrily offered August his own raging version of the truth. “The Academy is a lot of old fashioned civil servants, bureaucrats, devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials. The whole Academy ought to be blown up.” Then, and only then, did he share his secret. “They rejected me. They twice turned me down.”

  August was stunned; but his friend’s dismissal of the Academy faculty was telling. Hitler bitterly associated “civil servants” with his father, who proudly, some would say arrogantly, served as a customs official for the Habsburg government. Hitler projected his father’s martinet personality on any annoying bureaucrat he felt disrespectful to him. Following the outburst, Kubizek wrote that his roommate seemed “at odds with the world. Wherever he looked he saw injustice, hate, and enmity. Nothing was free from his criticism. Nothing found favor in his eyes.” Everyone around him seemed to be getting ahead, even the shy roommate he had brought from Linz.

  In April 1909, Hitler received another shock. A letter informed August he was being called into military service. If possible, he was more upset than Kubizek, protesting that his friend was a musician, not a soldier. Franz Joseph’s government expected all young men in the Empire to serve in his army. Hitler, one year younger, was scheduled to be inducted the following year. He insisted August not serve, telling him the “moribund Habsburg Empire did not deserve a single soldier.” The army motto, “Inseparable and Indivisible,” reflected the Habsburg philosophy of having all ethnic groups of the Empire serve side by side in the army. Personal loyalty to the Habsburg Emperor through shared military service, not religion, not language, and not nationality, united the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire. To the Habsburgs, the army was the foundation of the Empire, but to Hitler the thought of mixing different “races” together was an abomination. He urged August to flee to Germany.

  August wavered, but a trip home to Linz, his father’s words, his mother’s tears, and the advice of his Viennese music instructors convinced him to join the army reserves. His decision disappointed Hitler, but it shortened August’s military obligation, kept him from becoming a fugitive, and allowed him to finish the semester at the Conservatory. It was the first time Hitler had not bent his friend to his will. Kubizek did not realize it at the time, but the days of their friendship were numbered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CAN THIS BE A JEW?

  “The vitriol of hate began to creep through his body. The grim realities of the life he lived en
couraged him to hate the government, the labor unions, the very men he lived with. But he had not yet begun to hate the Jews.”

  —DR. EDUARD BLOCH,

  the Hitler family’s Jewish doctor

  “I no longer wandered like a blind man through the city.”

  —ADOLF HITLER

  “All that he later became was born of this dying imperial Vienna.”

  —AUGUST KUBIZEK,

  Hitler’s childhood friend and Viennese roommate

  That spring Emperor Franz Joseph’s Diamond Jubilee, celebrating six decades on the throne, briefly distracted Hitler from his unhappiness. Emperor Wilhelm II and other German royalty from Württemberg, Saxony, and Bavaria traveled to Vienna to celebrate the anniversary. Hitler loved all things German. The visit of Wilhelm II allowed him a fleeting respite from his frustrations and growing anger.

  Along with thousands of others, Hitler cheered as the German Emperor and his royal delegation drove in open carriages to Schönbrunn Palace. Newspapers reported that the royals gathered in the palace’s Marie Antoinette room just as a horrendous thunderstorm broke over the city. The room took its name from a large tapestry of Marie Antoinette and her children, a gift from France’s Napoleon III. No royal personage had the temerity to mention the tragic fate of the French queen born a Habsburg Archduchess, or the misfortune that befell her children.

  Wilhelm II used the occasion to salute Franz Joseph as the living embodiment of “three generations of German princes.” Austria’s Emperor, sensitive to cooling the flames of Pan-Germanism among his subjects, praised the peaceful goals and high ideals of “monarchial principles.” Franz Joseph’s refusal to embrace his German heritage revealed the tensions beneath their military alliance. Hitler hated the alliance. This peace and the Habsburg’s multi-ethnic empire were threats to German nationalism, unification, and expansion. Looking back years later with bitterness regarding the alliance and Germany’s defeat in the First World War, he wrote: