Otto von Habsburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Otto von Habsburg was born on the 20th of November 1912 at Villa Wartholz in Reichenau an der Rax, at a moment when Austria-Hungary still stood as one of the great empires of Europe. His full baptismal name ran to twenty-two words: Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius. It was chosen so he might one day reign as Franz Joseph II. His godfather was the reigning emperor himself, Franz Joseph I, represented in person by Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Four years later, Otto became Crown Prince. Two years after that, the empire collapsed. He would spend nearly half a century in exile, stateless, carrying a passport from the Order of Malta, before he could legally set foot in Austria again. What drove a man born to rule an empire to become instead one of the architects of a united Europe? How did a Habsburg crown prince end up punching a Protestant pastor out of the European Parliament? And what does it mean to be heir to a throne that no longer exists?

• 2. A Dynasty in Collapse

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  November 1918 arrived like a sentence. Across two weeks, the republics of Austria and Hungary replaced the monarchies, and the Habsburg family was forced out. Otto was six years old. He had been inside Gödöllő Palace during the Aster Revolution and was quickly evacuated from Hungary as republican sentiment rose. The family moved first to Switzerland, then to the Portuguese island of Madeira. There, in 1922, Otto's father Charles died at thirty-four, leaving a nine-year-old boy as the pretender to thrones that no longer existed. On his father's deathbed, Empress Dowager Zita turned to Otto and told him: "your father is now sleeping the eternal sleep - you are now Emperor and King."

  The Austrian parliament had already made that title legally worthless at home. The Habsburg Law of the 3rd of April 1919 expelled the dynasty, confiscated all official property, and barred male members from returning unless they renounced their claims and accepted the status of private citizens. For the family, this was not merely a political inconvenience. It was a permanent condition. They eventually resettled in the Basque town of Lequeitio, where forty Spanish grandees purchased a villa for them.

  Otto's mother, Empress Zita, threw herself into his education. She drilled him in the old curriculum of Austria-Hungary, preparing him as a Catholic monarch for lands she believed he might still rule. She insisted he learn languages: he came to speak German, Hungarian, Croatian, English, Spanish, French, and Latin fluently. In later life he would write roughly forty books across four of those languages. From 1931 to 1938, 1,603 Austrian municipalities named Otto an honorary citizen, a signal that his popular base in his homeland had not entirely evaporated.

• 3. Exile and the Nazi Threat

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  In 1935, Otto received a doctorate in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Louvain in Belgium. His thesis examined the right of indivisibility of rural land ownership in Austria under peasant law. By 1937 he was writing openly that the Austrian people had never voted for their republic, that they had been overtaken by the "audacity of the revolutionaries of 1918 and 1919", and that he stood ready to accept their trust when the moment came.

  That moment never arrived in the way he imagined. Instead, in 1938, he asked Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to resist the Nazi annexation and offered to return from exile to take over the government and repel the Germans. The offer was rejected. After the Anschluss, the Nazi regime sentenced Otto to death. Rudolf Hess ordered that he was to be executed immediately if caught. Adolf Hitler personally revoked the citizenship of Otto, his mother, and his siblings, rendering the entire imperial-royal family stateless.

  Otto's network of supporters suffered worse. The leaders of the Austrian legitimist movement were arrested and largely executed. Stefan Zweig's novella The Royal Game drew directly on their experiences. Otto's cousins Max and Ernst of Hohenberg were arrested by the Gestapo in Vienna and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where they remained throughout Nazi rule. The underground resistance groups that looked to the Habsburgs championed what they described as the centuries-old principle of "live and let live" among ethnic groups, minorities, religions, and cultures. By current estimates, between 4,000 and 4,500 of these imperial resistance fighters were sent to concentration camps without trial, and over 800 were executed. Among them was Dr. Heinrich Maier, who passed plans and production facilities for V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, and Messerschmitt airplanes to the Allies. The Maier group had learned early about the mass murder of Jews through contacts at a Semperit factory near Auschwitz.

  When Germany invaded France in 1940, Otto and his family fled Paris for Portugal. On the 12th of June, António Salazar issued instructions to Portuguese consulates in France to issue passports that would allow Empress Zita and Otto to reach Cascais without Portugal violating its neutrality. When German authorities pressed Salazar for Otto's extradition, Salazar offered protection but privately asked him, as a friend, to leave. Otto departed and lived in Washington, D.C., from 1940 to 1944.

• 4. Washington Years

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  In the United States, Otto was known simply as "Otto of Austria". He worked to keep Austria and its neighbors in the American public eye, and he lobbied the U.S. Post Office to issue a stamp series known as the Overrun Countries stamps, which depicted the German-occupied nations of Europe. He was in direct contact with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the federal government throughout the war.

  His wartime efforts ranged widely. He lobbied for the recognition of an Austrian government-in-exile. He argued against the deportation of German-speaking inhabitants of Bohemia and eastern Europe. He campaigned for the rights of the German-speaking population of South Tyrol. He tried, ultimately without success, to create an Austrian Battalion within the United States Army. His most concrete military achievement was persuading the U.S. to limit or delay the bombardment of Austrian cities; as a result, bombing raids on Vienna were held back until 1943.

  Otto also convinced Winston Churchill to support what he called a conservative "Danube Federation" - a restoration of Austria-Hungary in effect if not in name. Joseph Stalin blocked the plan. Otto was equally clear-eyed about the postwar danger: he worried openly that Austria would become a Soviet satellite state after the German defeat, and he lobbied against allowing Stalin to dominate Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, he involved himself in helping roughly 15,000 Austrians, including thousands of Austrian Jews, flee the country at the outbreak of the war - a number that speaks to the reach of his networks even in exile.

• 5. The Long Road to Austria

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  After the war ended, Otto returned to Europe but spent years without a valid passport. Charles de Gaulle intervened in 1946 to secure him a Monegasque passport. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, of which he was a knight, issued him a diplomatic passport. Spain did the same. Statelessness, at least in practice, was resolved through personal connections.

  The harder problem was Austria itself. On the 8th of May 1956, the provincial government of Lower Austria recognized him as an Austrian citizen. The Interior Ministry accepted this, but only on condition that he take the name Dr. Otto Habsburg-Lothringen, formalized on the 8th of February 1957. Even then, his passport was valid everywhere but Austria. A written statement submitted on the 21st of February 1958 renouncing the personal privileges of the House of Habsburg did not satisfy the Habsburg Law, which required him to renounce all royal claims and accept the status of a private citizen.

  He made that renunciation formal in a declaration dated the 31st of May 1961, proclaiming himself "a loyal citizen of the republic" - but he added, pointedly, that he did so "for purely practical reasons". In a 2007 interview, looking back on the episode, he said: "This was such an infamy, I'd rather never have signed it. They demanded that I abstain from politics. I would not have dreamed of complying. Once you have tasted the opium of politics, you never get rid of it."

  The administrative court did not find his statement legally sufficient until the 24th of May 1963. He and his wife received certified proof of Austrian citizenship on the 20th of July 1965. Political resistance, particularly from the Socialist Party, dragged out the crisis until the event known in Austria as the "Habsburg Crisis". It was only after the People's Party won an outright majority on the 1st of June 1966 that Otto finally received an Austrian passport. On the 31st of October 1966, nearly half a century after his exile began, he crossed back into Austria for the first time. He went to Innsbruck to visit the grave of Archduke Eugen of Austria.

• 6. European Parliament and the Picnic

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  From 1973 to 2004, Otto served as president of the International Paneuropean Union movement. From 1979 to 1999, he held a seat in the European Parliament as a member of Germany's Christian Social Union of Bavaria, the CSU, eventually becoming the parliament's most senior member. He was a founding voice for expanding the European Union to include Central and Eastern European countries, and he was a strong champion specifically for Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia.

  During his parliamentary years he kept an empty chair in the chamber to symbolize the absence of countries locked behind the Iron Curtain. That gesture was an emblem of a long campaign: in 1989, Otto was one of the co-initiators of the Pan-European Picnic, held at the Hungary-Austria border on the 19th of August of that year. The event, at which the border was briefly opened, is counted as a milestone in the fall of Communist dictatorships across Europe.

  The European Parliament also produced one of the more unusual moments in Otto's public life. In 1988, Pope John Paul II had just begun addressing the chamber when MEP Ian Paisley, a unionist Protestant pastor from Northern Ireland and a vehement anti-Catholic, stood up, shouted, and raised a poster reading "Pope John Paul II Antichrist". Other members threw papers and objects at Paisley. Otto took a more direct approach: he grabbed Paisley's banner, joined other MEPs and security staff in roughing him up, tore his shirt, pulled his tie, and ejected him head-first through the doors of the chamber while the Pope looked on.

  In 2002, Otto became the first-ever honorary member of the European People's Party group, and he was described alongside Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide De Gasperi as one of the architects of European integration.

• 7. Controversies and Complexity

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  Otto's long public career was not without serious criticism. At the end of 1998, he compared criticism of his son Karl von Habsburg over the World Vision donation affair to the Nazi persecution of Jews, saying: "Karl is attacked because he bears the certain yellow star, the name Habsburg.... The poor Jews went through terrible things. I often think of them in this context." The remark drew the attention of the Munich public prosecutor's office. The donation affair itself involved Karl's EU election campaign for the Austrian People's Party in 1996, which had been partly financed, according to Otto, without his knowledge, through embezzled funds from the aid organization World Vision Austria channeled to the Paneuropean Union.

  In 2002, Otto gave an interview to the weekly Junge Freiheit in which he described the U.S. Department of Defense as "a Jewish institution" and characterized the State Department as occupied by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. He was the first signatory on two petitions supporting Junge Freiheit in 2002 and 2006, a publication associated with the far-right Neue Rechte movement that had been categorized as right-wing extremist under German constitutional protection review.

  In November 2007, Otto stated that he respected Engelbert Dollfuss "infinitely" and had no problem with Dollfuss's dissolution of parliament and ban on political parties and trade unions: "When it comes to the country, I'm ready for anything." On the 2008 anniversary of the Anschluss, he told the Austrian Parliament that "there is no country in Europe that has a better claim to be a victim of the Nazis than Austria". Social Democratic Party Defence Minister Norbert Darabos called the remarks "unacceptable" and "a veritable democratic-political scandal". Otto responded that "a discussion as to whether Austria was an accomplice or a victim is an outrage".

• 8. Death and Legacy

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  After his wife Regina died in Pöcking on the 3rd of February 2010 at the age of 85, Otto withdrew from public life. He died at his home in Pöcking, Germany, on the 4th of July 2011, at the age of 98. His spokeswoman said he passed "peacefully and without pain in his sleep". The following day, his body was laid in repose in the Church of St. Ulrich near his home, and a thirteen-day period of mourning began across several countries that had once been part of Austria-Hungary.

  His coffin was draped with the Habsburg flag bearing the imperial-royal coats of arms of Austria and Hungary alongside the Habsburg family arms. In keeping with family tradition, he was entombed in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, while his heart was buried separately at Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary. His funeral was held at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna on the 16th of July 2011.

  Otto had married Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen on the 10th of May 1951 at the Church of Saint-Francois-des-Cordeliers. The couple returned there for their golden jubilee in 2001. At his death, they had seven children, twenty-two grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He had lived since 1954 at Villa Austria in Pöcking near Starnberg. The man who was born as Crown Prince of an empire spanning a dozen kingdoms, who was sentenced to death by the Nazis, who lobbied Roosevelt from a Washington apartment, and who physically ejected a Protestant preacher from the European Parliament, left behind a Croatian citizenship granted in 1990, an Honorary Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and honorary doctorates from universities across three continents.