James Longo Hitler and the Habsburgs

Annotation

';A detailed and moving picture of how the Habsburgs suffered under the Nazi regimescrupulously sourced, well-written, and accessible.'Publishers Weekly (starred review) It was during five youthful years in Vienna that Adolf Hitlers 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 Hitlers rise to power and led directly to the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinandoffspring of an upstairs-downstairs marriage that scandalized the tradition-bound Habsburg Empirecame 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 Hitlers hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinands 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 Archdukes 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 Hitlers determination to destroy the family of the dead Archdukeand uncovers the family members courageous fight against the Fuhrer.