Hitler and the Habsburgs Read online

  This mummy of a state allied itself with Germany, not in order to fight a war to its end, but for the preservation of an eternal peace which could astutely be used for the slow but certain extermination of Germanism in the monarchy. This alliance was an impossibility for another reason; because we could not expect a state to take the offensive in championing national German interest as long as it did not possess the power and determination to put an end to the process of de-Germanization on its own immediate borders. If Germany did not possess enough national awareness and ruthless determination to snatch power over the destinies of ten million national comrades from the hands of the impossible Habsburg state, then truly we had not the right to expect that she would ever lend her hand to such farseeing and bold plans. The attitude of the old Reich on the Austrian question was the touchstone of the conduct in the struggle for the destiny of the whole nation.

  In June of 1908, twelve thousand marchers, four thousand horses, and thousands of colorfully dressed soldiers, singers, dancers, and musicians gathered on the Ringstrasse to honor Franz Joseph’s Diamond Jubilee. The three-hour procession under a scorching sun saluted the historic multi-ethnic, multicultural rainbow of the Habsburg Empire. The Emperor was addressed by the honorary parade marshal who declared, “All of Austria’s nationalities thank you, Your Majesty, that they may pass loudly cheering in a parade, conscious to form a united Austrian people and to be the loyal subjects of an exhaustingly kind ruler and emperor.” Newspapers reported the cheering of dozens of nationalities “in their own mother tongues.”

  Among the most fervent celebrants were the city’s Jewish population. Publicly and privately they praised Franz Joseph’s religious tolerance and the legal protections he afforded them. Many affectionately saluted him as their “guardian angel, custodian, and patron saint.” The loyalty of Vienna’s Jews was not shared by everyone. Many Hungarian, Czech, Croat, and Italian nationalists refused to participate in the parade for political reasons. But thousands of others from across the Empire happily watched the spectacle wearing their distinctive hats, colors, and regional folk costumes. Hitler was horrified by the “exotic dress and appearance” of the revelers. Patriotic demonstrations by any group celebrating the Habsburg Emperor triggered his anger and ethnic paranoia.

  Even hearing foreign languages or dialects on the street ignited his short fuse. His roommate remembered Hitler tightly grabbing his arm when he heard other languages, especially Czech. He complained bitterly, “There you have your German Vienna!… Was Vienna, into which streamed from all sides Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and above all Galician Jews still a German city?” August Kubizek wrote of that time:

  In the state of affairs in Vienna, my friend saw a symbol of the struggle of the Germans in the Habsburg Empire. He hated the Babel in the streets of Vienna, this “incest incarnate” as he called it. … He hated this state which ruined Germanism and the pillars which supported this state; the reigning house, the nobility, the capitalist and the Jews.

  Hitler himself later wrote, “The view of life in the streets of Vienna provided me with invaluable insights. The time came eventually when I no longer wandered like a blind man through the city, but with open eyes saw not only the buildings but also the people.”

  Franz Ferdinand served as host of many of the Diamond Jubilee events due to the Emperors’ advanced age. His wife, Sophie, who had been given the title the Countess of Hohenberg, was nowhere to be seen. Her fourth pregnancy provided a convenient excuse for her absence. Aside from Adolf Hitler, perhaps the only people more repelled by the Archduke’s Czech marriage were his Habsburg relatives.

  Sophie Chotek, Countess of Hohenberg, was not of royal blood. Her name was nowhere to be found on the approved list of brides supplied by the Habsburgs to the Catholic courts of Europe. She descended from a distinguished family of Czech nobility, but her blood was not blue enough for them. What was worse for the caste-conscious Habsburgs was Sophie’s former station in life. When the Archduke met his future bride, genteel poverty had forced her to take a position as a female companion, a lady-in-waiting to his cousin, a Habsburg Archduchess.

  For Franz Ferdinand to remain heir to the throne, his uncle the Emperor had to formally approve his choice of a marriage partner; but His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, His government, and the Archduke’s own family did not approve. To them, Sophie Chotek could never be accepted as a royal wife after being a mere servant. Romantics found their upstairs-downstairs romance a fairy tale. The Habsburgs did not. To them it was a nightmare, an affront to their own miserable dynastic marriages. The famously overdressed, over-jeweled, overweight Archduchess Isabella Hedwig Habsburg, Sophie’s former employer, bitterly complained, “That’s how this scheming girl rewards us, with her Slav deceit, for our kindness!”

  Crown Prince Rudolph’s widow, Princess Stephanie of Belgium, wrote of the sad reality that most royals were unhappily married to their own cousins and detested any semblance of a normal family life. She confided to her friend Countess Bertha von Suttner, “The Emperor has no heart. He can’t help the fact that he is stupid, but he has no feelings.”

  Dynastic marriages were traditionally based on pedigree, politics, and money. Stephanie was an expert on the subject. After her husband passed his syphilis onto her, he died next to his seventeen-year-old mistress in a public scandal that shook the Empire to its core. Emperor Franz Joseph also reportedly passed syphilis onto his own wife, Empress Elisabeth, who then suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown. Their marriage never completely recovered. Elisabeth, perhaps for her own sanity, selected a new mistress for the Emperor. The actress Katharina Schratt remained his companion for the rest of his life.

  Franz Ferdinand needed to look no further than his younger brother Otto to see the tragic end of court-arranged marriages. Once considered the handsomest Habsburg of them all, his public and private debauchery resulted in a slow, painful, syphilitic death. After deserting the wife he loathed—his nose, larynx, and reputation gone—only his mistress, his confessor, and his loyal stepmother remained at his side when he died.

  After three years of threats, turmoil, struggle, and endless maneuvering, the Archduke finally won the right to marry the woman he loved, but he and Sophie were made to feel the full wrath of the Emperor’s disapproval. On June 28, 1900, he was forced to swear an Oath of Renunciation deeming the marriage morganatic. It was an ancient term allowing Sophie Chotek to legally be his wife, but to never be accepted as his equal in any public ceremonies connected with the Imperial court. She and children born of the marriage would never be Habsburgs. They were given the last name of Hohenberg, a name taken from an extinct branch of the Habsburg family tree. Franz Ferdinand could still become Emperor, but his wife would never be an Empress or a Queen, and their children could never inherit the throne. The Archduke’s family were condemned to remain outsiders in the greatest family of royal insiders in Europe.

  The humiliating “Oath of Renunciation” that legally permitted the marriage took place in the ornate red, white, and gold Privy Council Room in the innermost chambers of the Hofburg Palace. Franz Ferdinand made his “irrevocable” verbal and written pledge standing alone before the frozen faces of Emperor Franz Joseph and fifteen stiff and scowling Habsburg Archdukes. Among the blue-blooded Archdukes were murderers, pederasts, philanderers, wife beaters, sexual predators, and the Emperor’s recently exiled, infamous cross-dressing youngest brother. The highest echelons of the Empire, one hundred carefully selected civic, government, and religious leaders, also served as witnesses. No attempt was made to spare the Archduke’s feelings. The palace released every demeaning detail of the elaborately orchestrated ceremony to the press.

  Three days later, the happy but embittered heir married the impoverished Czech Countess he loved. The entire Imperial family boycotted his wedding, except for his loyal stepmother, Archduchess Maria-Theresa, and two younger stepsisters. The fearless Archduchess hosted the wedding at he
r summer castle miles from Franz Joseph’s Vienna. Her stepson proved himself to be a formidable opponent of the establishment. He had forced his will on the rigid Emperor and his calcified court. But he had made powerful enemies in the process.

  The past, present, and future personal problems, feuds, and scandals of Franz Joseph’s quarreling family did not interest Adolf Hitler, except in this Habsburg marriage. He came to see it as an attempt on Franz Ferdinand’s part to forge a “strong Catholic–Slav bloc” that would erode German influence in Austria, and eventually dominate Europe. To Hitler, the marriage between an Austrian and a Slav was a racial abomination. It combined his hatred of the Habsburgs with his deep-seated bigotry against Czechs.

  Four Habsburg Archduchesses had more personal reasons for resenting the marriage. Archduchess Isabella Hedwig never forgave the Archduke for marrying her lady-in-waiting rather than one of her eight less than attractive unmarried daughters. He had also repeatedly rejected the Archduchess Maria Josepha as a marriage partner before she unhappily married Otto, his philandering brother. Archduchess Marie Valerie, the Emperor’s youngest and favorite daughter, fiercely took her father’s side in all family disputes. She, more than anyone, knew how bitterly the Emperor opposed, resented, and fought the Archduke’s choice of a marriage partner. Crown Prince Rudolph’s only child, Archduchess Elisabeth Marie, resented the man who took her father’s place as heir to the throne. If the Habsburgs permitted a woman to inherit the throne, she would have been Empress. The four angry women bonded. Individually and collectively, they did everything within their powers to undermine and destroy Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

  Perhaps the only people unaware of the scandal that preceded their births were the three young children born of the Archduke’s marriage. At the time of the Emperor’s Diamond Jubilee, their age and invisible status allowed them to participate in the celebrations blissfully unaware of the court intrigues surrounding them. On May 21, 1908, eight-year-old Princess Sophie, six-year-old Prince Maximilian, and four-year-old Prince Ernst joined the eighty-two thousand schoolchildren on the lawn of Schönbrunn Palace to see, serenade, and salute their Emperor. Franz Joseph seemed deeply moved. He addressed his youthful audience, telling them, “The older I get the more I like children.”

  The comment must have pained Franz Ferdinand. Although he had been heir to the throne for two decades, his own children had never met the Emperor. Later in the year, the younger members of the Habsburg family were invited to present a tableau at the private theatre in Schönbrunn Palace for Franz Joseph. To the Archduke’s surprise and pleasure, his children were included. Poems were to be read, songs sung, and flowers presented. Sophie, Max, and Ernst rehearsed for weeks. Special costumes were created for them. Franz Ferdinand was so pleased he commissioned a portrait of his children to commemorate the event. The afternoon activities went off smoothly, but his sons and daughter were not introduced to Franz Joseph before, during, or after their performance.

  The Archduke was not the only one disappointed during the celebrations. Much to Hitler’s annoyance, the Diamond Jubilee kept him from visiting his favorite bench in Schönbrunn’s public gardens. As the day approached when August Kubizek would leave Vienna, the two spent weekends exploring the countryside outside the city. There they could avoid the crowds of invading “foreign” tourists and Hitler could crystallize his thoughts and vent his rage. Kubizek later wrote:

  This Habsburg state, Hitler felt, must fall, and the sooner the better, for every moment of its continued existence cost the Germans honor, property, and their very life. He saw in the fanatical internecine strife of its races the decisive symptoms of its coming downfall. He visited parliament to feel, so to speak, the pulse of the patient, whose early demise was expected by all. He looked forward to that hour full with impatience, for only the collapse of the Habsburg Empire could open the road to those schemes of which he dreamed in his lonely hours.

  Shortly before his roommate left for military training, Hitler came across a Hasidic Jew selling ribbons, thread, and buttons on the street. Some street merchants skirted the Viennese law against begging by aggressively selling small trinkets easily hidden from the police. The panhandler wore the distinctive heavy boots, long dark robes, thick beard, and braided dreadlocks of eastern European Jews. Hitler was horrified. He never forgot his initial repulsion:

  “Can this be a Jew?” was my first thought. They don’t look like this in Linz. I threw the man a few sidelong glances but the more I stared at his foreign face and examined his features one by one, the more my first question took on another aspect. “Is this a German?”

  The Jews in Hitler’s hometown of Linz, including Dr. Bloch who cared for his dying mother, looked like every other citizen. They seemed fully assimilated into Austrian society. In Hitler’s mind, his encounter with the poor Hasidic panhandler unmasked the truth behind the Jewish veneer. A police officer arrested the man for begging. Hitler quickly agreed to act as a witness against him. When the “poor” beggar was searched, three thousand Kronen, a considerable sum of money then, was discovered underneath his caftan. With his own funds increasingly depleted, the evidence of the duplicity of Jews was reinforced in Hitler’s mind. This proved to be one of the major turning points in his life. He told and retold the story to his roommate for hours on end.

  The two friends agreed to continue as roommates when August returned from his eight weeks of military service. Hitler walked him to the train station repeating “for the hundredth time how little he wanted to be alone.” The rejected art student took the hands of the successful music student, squeezed them, spun around, and vanished into the crowd. August received several postcards from Hitler complaining of his “hermit”-like existence. Then on October 7, 1908, Franz-Joseph’s government made an announcement that stunned Adolf Hitler, Franz Ferdinand, and most of Europe.

  As a Jubilee gift to the Emperor, with his approval, his own Foreign Minister announced that the Balkan territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina would be annexed by Austria into the Habsburg Empire. Vienna had administered the two former provinces of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire for thirty years. Recent revolution in Turkey seemed to offer an opportunity to keep them forever. The annexation brought nearly two million Slavs into what was already the most diverse multicultural nation in Europe. Hitler saw the move as a concrete example of the “Slavization of Austria.” He believed the “anti-German ruling house” had once again sold out its German citizens. Franz Ferdinand was also angry, but for other reasons. He had courted the friendship of Nicholas II, the Czar of Russia, for over a decade and feared the annexation would antagonize Russia. Austria’s colossal neighbor to the east was home to the largest concentration of ethnic Slavs and Eastern Orthodox Christians in Europe. Nicholas viewed himself as the champion and natural protector of Balkan Slavs. Expansion by the Catholic Habsburg Empire, his centuries-old political and religious rival in the region, threatened war. The Archduke wrote to one of his military aides:

  What would be the point of fighting Russia? Not even Napoleon could succeed. And even if we beat Russia—which to my mind is totally out of the question—a victory like that would still be the greatest tragedy for the Austrian monarchy.

  Franz Ferdinand was the public face of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s military might. Friend and foe alike recognized him as the man who brought the Emperor’s army into the twentieth century, and almost single-handedly created its modern navy. Few outside the Habsburg inner circle knew he was also the leader of the government’s peace party. The Archduke fiercely opposed the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, prophetically writing, “A war with Russia will finish us! Are the Emperor of Austria and the Czar to knock each other off their throne to pave the way for revolution?”

  Hitler imagined Franz Ferdinand the mastermind and evil catalyst behind the annexation. But, in fact, the Empire’s ambitious Foreign Minister, Baron Alois von Aehrenthal, and his own former protégé, Army Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, prevaile
d against his vehement arguments. In response, the Archduke angrily left Vienna, taking his family to St. Moritz, but he remained livid and sleepless until weeks of delicate diplomacy prevented war. The immediate crisis passed, but mistrust, fear, and poisonous political fallout from the event lingered in the capitals of Europe. Germany’s Emperor, Wilhelm II, felt personally compelled to offer an explanation and reassurances to his cousin Nicholas II, the Russian Czar. Addressing him as “Dearest Nicky,” he wrote:

  The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was a genuine surprise for everybody, but particularly for us as we were informed about Austria’s intentions even later than you. … Of course… these small states are an awful nuisance. … The slightest encouragement from any quarter makes them frantic… I do hope with all my heart that notwithstanding the numerous and serious difficulties that have to be surmounted a peaceful solution will be arrived at; anything I can do in that direction will certainly be done. Take my word for it! …Ever your true and devoted cousin and friend, Willy.

  This was the tense political atmosphere August Kubizek found when he returned from his reservist training to Vienna on November 20, 1908. Hitler had agreed to meet him at the train station, but never appeared. August walked to their apartment at No. 29 Stumpergasse, but found it had been rented to someone else. Their landlady, Frau Zakreys, told him Hitler had moved with no forwarding address. August rented another room, returned to complete his studies at the Conservatory, and continued searching for his friend. Hitler had not left Vienna, but carefully avoided any of their former haunts.

  It would be years before August discovered what became of him. In thinking back to their time together, Kubizek later wrote, “The old imperial city with its atmosphere of false glamour and spurious romance, and its now evident decay was the ground on which his social and political opinions grew. All that he later became was born of this dying imperial Vienna.”