Hitler and the Habsburgs
The Führer's Vendetta Against the Austrian Royals
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Through interviews with descendants of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Longo (Isabel Orleans-Bragan a: 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.
Customer Reviews
Hitler and the Habsburg’s
Brings history to life. Players become real. I had never understood why the killing of Duke Ferdinand and his wife was one of the causes of WW1. Now it is more clear.