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

289 Pages·2018·2.42 MB·English

by  James Longo

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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New York, New York 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2018 by James M. Longo All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition November 2018.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-63576-476-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-475-8
Printed in the U.S.A.
SDB/1811
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For my wife, Mary Jo Harwood, and
HSH Princess Sophie de Potesta of Hohenberg
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 Hitler at the Hotel Imperial, 1938
CHAPTER 2 The Artist, the Archduke, and the Emperor
CHAPTER 3 Can This Be a Jew?
CHAPTER 4 The Lion and the Lamb
CHAPTER 5 The Granite Foundation
CHAPTER 6 The Spy, the Draft Dodger, and the Peacemaker
CHAPTER 7 Fate
CHAPTER 8 Inscrutable Destiny
CHAPTER 9 A Kind of Dull Cataleptic State
CHAPTER 10 Exiles
CHAPTER 11 The Most Golden Tongued of Demagogues
CHAPTER 12 Impending Horrors
CHAPTER 13 One Blood Demands One Reich
CHAPTER 14 Witches Sabbath
CHAPTER 15 Duel
CHAPTER 16 Bargain with the Devil
CHAPTER 17 The Eleventh Commandment
CHAPTER 18 Apocalypse
CHAPTER 19 The Whole Country Was As If Under a Spell
CHAPTER 20 Phantoms and Patriots
CHAPTER 21 Answered and Unanswered Prayers
CHAPTER 22 The Good Fight
CHAPTER 23 The Destiny of One Family
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE
HITLER AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL, 1938
“I resolved that night that someday I would come back to the
Imperial Hotel and walk over the red carpet in that glittering interior
where the Habsburgs danced.”
—ADOLF HITLER
At five thirty on the evening of March 14, 1938, Adolf Hitler’s gray and black
Mercedes-Benz limousine slowly drove past Schönbrunn Palace to the Hotel
Imperial in the heart of Vienna. The forty-eight-year-old native son was
returning to conquer the city, and the country, that once conquered him. Twenty-
five years earlier, Hitler had been a homeless vagrant on Vienna’s streets, a
hungry dreamer sitting on a park bench in Schönbrunn’s public gardens. Ten
years later, he was sent to a German prison for treason. By the spring of 1938, he
was the undisputed dictator of both nations.
Schönbrunn Palace and Vienna had once been home to the Royal and
Imperial Habsburg family, rulers of an empire stretching across Europe and
around the globe. The seeds of Hitler’s remarkable rise to power, his Faustian
rags-to-riches story, could be traced to his hatred of the Habsburgs and their
multinational vision for the future of Europe.
Hitler’s sleek, heavily armored convertible needed no bulletproof windows
or armor that day. Hours earlier his army of one hundred thousand German
soldiers had seized his Austrian homeland without a shot fired. Thunderous
cheers greeted him as he stood erect and unsmiling for all of Austria and the
world to see. Many unbelievable political and military victories would soon be
his, but none was sweeter than this one. His greatest dreams since childhood
were to unite Austria with Germany, and to destroy everything the Habsburg
Empire represented to him. Everything else grew from these dual ambitions. On
that deceptively mild March afternoon, he had achieved half of his goals. The
second half would kill millions and destroy much of Europe.
Adolf Hitler could have stayed in any of Vienna’s magnificent palaces but
insisted on staying at the Hotel Imperial. It held a powerful attraction for him.
Two decades earlier when he was a failed art student reduced to earning money