WilliamASchlegel

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Did you know that Archduke Franz Ferdinand two sons were sent to Dachau concentration camp in WWII?  

In 1938 after the Anschluss they were arrested and deported to Dachau concentration camp where they spent the next seven years of their lives. The reason for their imprisonment was that Max was one of the principal public opponents to the Anschluss. It remained for the Nazi SS to jeer the brothers as "Highness," to call them Habsburgs- and to prove the point. It has been said that the Hasburgs would rise to greatness only in tragedy, as Marie Antoinette on the guillotine and Maximilian of Mexico before the firing squad of Queretaro.

At Dachau, the Hohenbergs were put on latrine duty. From dawn to dusk they cleaned out latrines and carted the contents about on wheelbarrows. More than anything the brothers frustrated their tormentors. They had a calm, cheerful, majestic dignity about them, an unshakable sense of humor, an unbreakable solidarity. If the system set group against group by encouraging one to look down on another, the Hohenbergs made it clear they were not looking down on anyone.

The SS had its little games. Many things were punishable by death, things like crossing a line or failing to wear your cap-to dispose of you " legally" a guard had only to throw your cap over the line. Whatever you did then, under the rules you were done for. Once this game was played with an old Jewish comedian. A Jew was low man on the Dachau totem pole, and any "Aryan" helping a Jew marked himself for treatment as a Jew. But Ernst reached, caught the cap in mid-air returned it to the old man with a courteous smile-and no shot rang out. The comedian was spared, too, for the time being.

Max von Hohenberg was released in 1940, while Ernst was sent on to Buchenwald, the giant melting pot of Gestapo victims all over Europe. There Austrians found themselves abused and starving together with Czechs and Poles, Yugoslavs and Rumanians, with men from all the successor states to the Habsburg monarchy.

At the end of 1943- apparently owing to some Nazi bigwig's desire for credits redeemable on a day of reckoning, Ernst von Hohenberg was released. The two brothers had been strong, strapping men, yet neither one recovered from such an ordeal. Ernst brought home a heart ailment and died of a stroke in 1954.

Max lived eight years longer: in 1945, the year of Austria's liberation, the villagers of Arstetten, elected him mayor by a unanimous vote of all parties, an the Soviet occupying power promptly confirmed him in office. A duke in his teens, an SS prisoner in his thirties, he turned in his forties into a public servant wrestling with the postwar problems of a village under military rule.

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628 days ago

Did you know that Archduke Franz Ferdinand two sons were sent to Dachau concentration camp in WWII?

In 1938 after the Anschluss they were arrested and deported to Dachau concentration camp where they spent the next seven years of their lives. The reason for their imprisonment was that Max was one of the principal public opponents to the Anschluss. It remained for the Nazi SS to jeer the brothers as "Highness," to call them Habsburgs- and to prove the point. It has been said that the Hasburgs would rise to greatness only in tragedy, as Marie Antoinette on the guillotine and Maximilian of Mexico before the firing squad of Queretaro.

At Dachau, the Hohenbergs were put on latrine duty. From dawn to dusk they cleaned out latrines and carted the contents about on wheelbarrows. More than anything the brothers frustrated their tormentors. They had a calm, cheerful, majestic dignity about them, an unshakable sense of humor, an unbreakable solidarity. If the system set group against group by encouraging one to look down on another, the Hohenbergs made it clear they were not looking down on anyone.

The SS had its little games. Many things were punishable by death, things like crossing a line or failing to wear your cap-to dispose of you " legally" a guard had only to throw your cap over the line. Whatever you did then, under the rules you were done for. Once this game was played with an old Jewish comedian. A Jew was low man on the Dachau totem pole, and any "Aryan" helping a Jew marked himself for treatment as a Jew. But Ernst reached, caught the cap in mid-air returned it to the old man with a courteous smile-and no shot rang out. The comedian was spared, too, for the time being.

Max von Hohenberg was released in 1940, while Ernst was sent on to Buchenwald, the giant melting pot of Gestapo victims all over Europe. There Austrians found themselves abused and starving together with Czechs and Poles, Yugoslavs and Rumanians, with men from all the successor states to the Habsburg monarchy.

At the end of 1943- apparently owing to some Nazi bigwig's desire for credits redeemable on a day of reckoning, Ernst von Hohenberg was released. The two brothers had been strong, strapping men, yet neither one recovered from such an ordeal. Ernst brought home a heart ailment and died of a stroke in 1954.

Max lived eight years longer: in 1945, the year of Austria's liberation, the villagers of Arstetten, elected him mayor by a unanimous vote of all parties, an the Soviet occupying power promptly confirmed him in office. A duke in his teens, an SS prisoner in his thirties, he turned in his forties into a public servant wrestling with the postwar problems of a village under military rule.

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