Editor's note: This giveaway is now closed.
A fascinating take on Hitler and the hatred that fueled him arrived in paperback this week—and we’re thrilled to be giving away five copies! In Hitler and the Habsburgs, Professor James Longo explores a key period in Hitler’s life, and one that has gone under-scrutinized.
Although Hitler’s attempt to become an artist has become a macabre laugh line in modern times, less attention is paid to the facts of his time in Vienna, where Hitler was twice rejected from an art academy.
After his second rejection in 1908, Hitler became homeless. He spent five destitute years on the streets and in homeless shelters. Meanwhile, the children of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who Hitler regarded as mongrels who symbolized the depravity of the modern era, were living a life of ease.
Even well after the assassination of the Archduke and after Hitler’s rise to power, the leader of the Third Reich maintained his feelings of personal maltreatment. In this enthralling book, Longo investigates how Hitler’s youth led him to dedicating himself to the eradication of all those who infuriated him—from Jewish people to the Habsburg children.
Enter now for your chance to win one of five copies of Hitler and the Habsburgs!
About the Book
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A stunning work of narrative history revealing how and why Adolf Hitler targeted the children of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, making the Archduke's sons the first two Austrians deported to the Dachau concentration camp, and how the family fought back
Five youthful years in Vienna. It was then and there that Adolf Hitler's 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 Hitler's rise to power and led directly to the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand-offspring of an upstairs-downstairs marriage that scandalized the tradition-bound Habsburg Empire-came to personify to Adolf Hitler, and others, all that was wrong about modernity, the twentieth century, and the Habsburg's 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 Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's 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 Archduke's 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 royal Habsburgs, scholar James Longo explores the roots of Hitler's determination to destroy the family of the dead Archduke. And he uncovers the family members' courageous fight against the Führer.
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Note: The sweepstakes is open to all legal residents of the 50 United States and Washington, D.C. who are 18 years of age and older by February 14, 2020.
Feature photo: Wikimedia Commons
