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Hitler’s Vendetta Against the Austrian Royal Family Explored in Riveting New Book

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What does Adolf Hitler and the death of a Habsburg archduke whose assassination triggered the First World War have to do with anti-Semitism in America today? “Everything” says Dr. James Longo, Professor of Education at Washington and Jefferson College. His new book, Hitler and the Habsburgs: The Fuhrer’s Vendetta Against the Austrian Royals, published by Diversion Books, portrays the rise of the Third Reich as Hitler’s hate-filled reaction to the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant Habsburg Empire.

Sue Woolmans, co-author of The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World, writes of Hitler and the Habsburgs, “It is a book that resonates with the politics of today. We need books like this one to remind us of the black hole of terror which we can so easily plunge.”

Professor Longo began the research for Hitler and the Habsburgs when he served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair of the Gender and Women’s Study Program at Alpen Adrian University in Klagenfurt, Austria. Klagenfurt has been called “an El Dorado for former Nazis” supplying “more death camp guards than any other region in Germany or Austria.”

In addition to extensive interviews in Klagenfurt, and with the dead Archduke’s family in Austria, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Longo’s research took him to the Dachau Concentration Camp, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Museum in Vienna, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. He also interviewed former members of the Hitler Youth Movement, and lived with three separate German families in three different regions in Germany in search of clues to Hitler’s rise to power, and his strong appeal to their fears, prejudices, and nationalism prior to the Second World War.

Longo describes Hitler as a “chameleon” who survived five youthful, bitter years in Vienna often through the generosity of Jewish friends, businessmen, and philanthropists. It was also in Vienna, capital of the once mighty Habsburg Empire, that Hitler found anti-Semitic role models who taught him to divide, demonize, and destroy his enemies, methods he used to gain power, start the Holocaust, and march the world into war. Hitler is described in the book as an anti-Semitic “agitator of genius.” His Vienna roommate later wrote, “All that he later became was born in this dying imperial city.” Hitler declared his Viennese years as giving him, “a world picture and philosophy that became the granite foundation of all my acts.”

Adolf Hitler came to Vienna to get an education, but his anti-Semitism was blinding. In a city full of immigrants, he seethed that “there were more Czechs in Vienna than Prague, more Croats than in Zagreb, and more Jews than in Jerusalem.” The failed art student especially resented the tolerance and legal protection afforded Jews by the Habsburg Emperor. Many Viennese Jews proudly claimed Emperor Franz Joseph as their “guardian angel, custodian, and patron saint.” Cracow, Budapest, and Prague had larger concentrations of Jews, but Vienna was the city where Jewish immigrants found the greatest political freedom, economic opportunities, and upward mobility. No Jews were responsible for Hitler’s rejection from the city’s Academy of Fine Arts, but he blamed Jews nonetheless.

Yet Hitler could be selective in terms of directing his hate and his fury. He wrote affectionate postcards from Vienna to Dr. Eduard Bloch the Jewish doctor who cared for his dying mother. Hitler sent him gifts, and when he became Fuhrer, arranged for this “Noble Jew,” as he called Bloch, to safely immigrate to New York and escape the Holocaust. Two Jewish officers who served with him during the First World War were also afforded his protection. Hugo Guttman the battalion commander who awarded Hitler the Iron Cross First Class was helped by the Gestapo to immigrate to St. Louis, Missouri. Ernst Hess, another of his Jewish officers, was allowed to live safely in Dusseldorf, “per the Fuhrer’s wishes.”

In 1914 Hitler rejoiced at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, certain the coming war would destroy the Habsburg’s “mongrel” empire of immigrants. It did, but it did not silence the Habsburgs. As he rose to power Hitler’s hatred fixated on the dead Archduke’s sons, who became outspoken critics of racist Nazi ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. Hitler denounced one son as a “political criminal” and the other as a “terrorist.” It was at Dachau that the Archduke’s oldest son Maximilian risked his own life to save the life of a Jewish prisoner, and later, the life of a young Gypsy boy.

Adolf Hitler promised at war’s end to build a wall around the Reich to keep non-Germans from entering the country. The blind racism that caused Hitler hatred of the Habsburg’s multi-national, multi-cultural, religiously tolerant Empire caused him to underestimate the military power of the United States. He cavalierly dismissed America as a mongrel nation of immigrants. Hitler and the Habsburgs tells the story of the roots of Hitler’s hatred, and how the Habsburgs, and the United States, courageously triumphed over that hatred.

By: Ariella Haviv

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