Hitler and the Habsburgs: The Führer's Vendetta Against the Austrian Royals

by James Longo

Overview

“A detailed and moving picture of how the Habsburgs suffered under the Nazi regime…scrupulously sourced, well-written, and accessible.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
It was during five youthful years in Vienna that Adolf Hitler's obsession with the Habsburg Imperial family became the catalyst for his vendetta against a vanished empire, a dead archduke, and his royal orphans. That hatred drove Hitler's rise to power and led directly to the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—offspring of an upstairs-downstairs marriage that scandalized the tradition-bound Habsburg Empire—came to personify to Adolf Hitler, and others, all that was wrong about modernity, the twentieth century, and the Habsburgs’ multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were outsiders in the greatest family of royal insiders in Europe, which put them on a collision course with Adolf Hitler.

As he rose to power Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's sons, who became outspoken critics and opponents of the Nazi party and its racist ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Germany, and sent to Dachau. Within hours they went from palace to prison. The women in the family, including the Archduke's only daughter, Princess Sophie Hohenberg, declared their own war on Hitler. Their tenacity and personal courage in the face of betrayal, treachery, torture, and starvation sustained the family during the war and in the traumatic years that followed.

Through a decade of research and interviews with the descendants of the Habsburgs, scholar James Longo explores the roots of Hitler's determination to destroy the family of the dead Archduke—and uncovers the family members' courageous fight against the Führer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635764758
Publisher:	Diversion Books
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	330
Sales rank:	225,219
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

James Longo is Professor of Education and Education Department Chair at Washington & Jefferson College. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, Distinguished Chair of the Gender and Womens Study Program at Alpen-Adrian University in Austria, and has lectured throughout Europe and America. His 2008 book, Isabel Orleans-Braganza: The Brazilian Princess Who Freed the Slaves was nominated for the Yale University Gilda Lehman Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the most outstanding non-fiction book in English on the subject of slavery and abolition.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Hitler at the Hotel Imperial, 1938 1

Chapter 2 The Artist, the Archduke, and the Emperor 11

Chapter 3 Can This Be a Jew? 19

Chapter 4 The Lion and the Lamb 31

Chapter 5 The Granite Foundation 43

Chapter 6 The Spy, the Draft Dodger, and the Peacemaker 54

Chapter 7 Fate 64

Chapter 8 Inscrutable Destiny 75

Chapter 9 A Kind of Dull Cataleptic State 88

Chapter 10 Exiles 102

Chapter 11 The Most Golden Tongued of Demagogues 112

Chapter 12 Impending Horrors 123

Chapter 13 One Blood Demands One Reich 133

Chapter 14 Witches Sabbath 144

Chapter 15 Duel 155

Chapter 16 Bargain with the Devil 168

Chapter 17 The Eleventh Commandment 179

Chapter 18 Apocalypse 188

Chapter 19 The Whole Country Was As If Under a Spell 196

Chapter 20 Phantoms and Patriots 207

Chapter 21 Answered and Unanswered Prayers 218

Chapter 22 The Good Fight 228

Chapter 23 The Destiny of One Family 235

Acknowledgments 243

Notes 245

Bibliography 287

Index 303

About the Author 315

Editorial Reviews

11/01/2018
Longo (education, Washington & Jefferson Coll.; Isabel Orleans-Braganza) describes the tragedy and horror that encompassed the first half of the 20th century through the story of the orphaned children of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Hohenberg. Their children embodied the ideals taught to them by their parents, leading them to become fierce and bold critics against the Third Reich. The future Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, nurtured a hatred of everything the Habsburgs represented during the five years he lived in Vienna. Once in power, Hitler exacted revenge by placing the Archduke's sons in a concentration camp, even as their nephews served in the German armed forces and the Third Reich honored their aunts as mothers. Longo interviewed a number of Habsburg descendants, telling the heartbreaking story of the orphaned royals but also the bravery and courage of conviction it took for them to uphold their beliefs and resist in the face of evil. VERDICT The author's in-depth research paints a vivid picture of this family, producing a richly detailed portrait that will appeal to readers interested in the origins of both world wars and European royal history.—Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH

Library Journal

★ 12/03/2018
Through interviews with descendants of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Longo (Isabel Orleans-Bragança: The Brazilian Princess Who Freed the Slaves), chair of education at Washington & Jefferson College, paints a detailed and moving picture of how the Habsburgs suffered under the Nazi regime. While Hitler was living in Vienna, he came to abhor the leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who ruled over “central Europe’s greatest multicultural empire.” Hitler felt that “escalating mongrelization, miscegenation, and assimilation threatening Austria’s Germans,” a trend personified for him in Franz Ferdinand’s choice of a Slav countess as his wife. Hitler, therefore, regarded the murders of the two in Sarajevo in 1914 as a cause for celebration. In the 1930s, Franz Ferdinand’s sons, Maximilian and Ernst Hohenberg, were among Hitler’s most prominent vocal opponents, and within hours of uniting “his adopted country of Germany with his Austrian birthplace,” he ordered their arrest. Maximilian and Ernst were sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where they were forced to dispose of human waste with their bare hands and a spoon. Despite the verbal and physical abuse to which they were subjected, the pair tended to the sick and risked their lives for others, and eventually returned to their families. This look at a lesser-known aspect of WWII is scrupulously sourced, well-written, and accessible. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Hitler and the Habsburgs offers a new perspective on Hitler that contrasts him with one family’s bravery, Christian faith, and utter heroism. It is also a book that resonates with the politics of today. We need books like this one to remind us of the black hole of terror into which we can so easily plunge.” —Sue Woolmans, co-author of The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder That Changed the World

“Longo’s account does good service in tracing the long enmity Hitler felt for the Habsburgs and the extraordinary measures he took to erase the royal family.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Longo interviewed a number of Habsburg descendants, telling the heartbreaking story of the orphaned royals but also the bravery and courage of conviction it took for them to uphold their beliefs and resist in the face of evil. The author’s in-depth research paints a vivid picture of this family, producing a richly detailed portrait that will appeal to readers interested in the origins of both world wars and European royal history." —Library Journal

“Professor Longo’s offer to help has transformed into a book I have very much enjoyed reading, and I am sure you the reader, will as well. Reading the stories of my family always makes me proud, but I also feel somewhat intimidated by their courage, their strength and the admirable way they just went on living their lives as if tomorrow the sun would always shine again, all would be forgotten and everything would be all right. It is awe inspiring! Many have lived such admirable lives. They have become role models and sometimes even heroes. Their stories must be told if only because, after all they have been through, they deserve it. . . . It also gave another perspective into a misrepresented historic figure.” —Princess Sophie de Potesta Hohenberg, Great-granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

From the Publisher

2018-08-10

Linking Hitler's "Faustian rags-to-riches story" to his consuming hatred for the nobles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Most students of history know that Hitler's nationalism was born well before World War I. Longo (Chair, Education/Washington & Jefferson Coll.; Isabel Orleans-Braganza: The Brazilian Princess Who Freed the Slaves, 2008) finds an early manifestation in a moment when a homeless, starving Hitler, shoveling snow, spotted Archduke Franz Ferdinand's nephew and wife, the future Habsburg emperor and empress, entering the lobby. "We were about as important to them, or for that matter to Vienna, as the snow that kept coming down all night, and this hotel did not even have the decency to send a cup of hot coffee to us," Hitler would later complain. He got grim satisfaction, even weeping tears of relief, when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, but the damage had been done: Franz Ferdinand and his Habsburg kin had annexed Slavic lands and turned the hated Slavs into the most ethnically and religiously diverse polity in Europe. Pledging a program of ethnic purification and nationalism, Hitler took further revenge by arresting the archduke's sons and sending them to Dachau not only for having spoken out against him, but for the mere crime of having been born into the family. Longo's account does good service in tracing the long enmity Hitler felt for the Habsburgs and the extraordinary measures he took to erase the royal family, which in the end outlasted him; the author interviewed descendants in writing his book. Interestingly, Longo also notes that well before mounting his anti-Semitic race war, Hitler was obsessively scornful of his Czech schoolmates, their presence the product of Franz Ferdinand's marriage to a Czech, and their roles as, Hitler believed, "the architects behind the Slavization, marginalization, and destruction of German Austria." Unfortunately, the book is overlong and full of clichés ("It was the winter of his discontent") and set pieces out of proportion to the news it brings.

A middling account that may interest students of the Third Reich and the psychology of nationalism.

Kirkus Reviews