~ My Little Old World ~ has already dealt with this topic some years ago (click HERE to read the post published on January 30, 2014), but new developments prompt me to retract it. Let's look at what happened in order. At 6:30 that morning, the prince's personal valet, Johann Loschek, hears a shot coming from the room where Rudolf was sleeping. He had spent merrily the previous evening with his usual companions: the inseparable Josef Bratfisch, his personal coachman, a good-natured, singing man with a quick wit; Count Joseph Theodor von Hoyos, his aide-de-camp; and Johann Loschek, of course. Before retiring to his room at about midnight, Rudolf had bidden farewell, asking the latter to wake him at 7:00 a.m. He had to have breakfast and then meet up with the friends who accompanied him whenever a hunting trip was planned: Count Hoyos, already in Mayerling, and his friend and brother-in-law, Prince Philip of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who would be joining them from Vienna that early morning. Hearing the shot, Loschek rushes to the door of his room but finds it bolted from the inside. A first question arises here: why would Rudolf have locked the door from the inside with the latch, thus making it unopenable from the outside, when the night before he had instructed Loscheck to be woken at a very specific time? But let's return to the story of the events of that fateful morning: Loscheck is unable to open the door of Rudolf’s room by himself. It takes the strength of two men and the aid of a lever. He then turns to Hoyos for his help. Once the door is open, the scene that unfolds before their eyes is nothing short of horrifying, so much so that they cannot explain it, much less comprehend it: the small window bangs forcefully in time with the gusts of the icy north breeze caressing the snow that has continued to fall throughout the night; someone has entered through that very window, forcing the handle, and, from there, quickly escaped, leaving the ladder he used to go up and down leaning against the windowsill. The table that was against the wall now appears torn down in the center of the room, in a pool of blood; the other furniture has also been moved and stained with blood. In all honesty, blood is everywhere. Generous splashes distressingly paint the walls, especially the one supporting the bed on which lie the lifeless bodies of Rudolf and his very young lover, the seventeen-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera, who had followed him there and joined him the night before. There were traces left by large men near the window, and footprints and blood were also visible on the ladder, demonstrating that the prince had not only resisted for a long time before surrendering to death, but had also wounded one of his attackers. But above all, it is on the floor, in the center of the room, that there is a huge pool of it...
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«According to the great
Hungarian-born French historian François Fejtö, author of Requiem per un impero defunto (Mondadori), it was actually the German Kaiser Wilhelm II
who hatched the plot. Rudolf's sworn enemy was reciprocated: ‘At most, I would
gladly meet Wilhelm on a hunting trip to rid the world of him in an elegant
manner,’ Rudolf had stated. In short, a state crime, disguised as suicide, in
which poor Vetsera was implicated as an inconvenient witness to be eliminated.»
François Fejtö's simple but acute intuition will be
confirmed by Count Hoyos's descendant. As we have seen and will see as we read
further, Count Hoyos was not only informed of the detailed course of the
Mayerling conspiracy, because he was supposed to be part of it; he also knew
the details of the entire plot hatched by Bismarck, of which Mayerling was
merely an "episodic moment." But how did events really unfold at
the hunting lodge located in the Vienna Woods of Niederösterreich (Lower
Austria)?
A few days before the tragedy, some witnesses noted, in a chalet near Rudolf's castle in Mayerling, the presence of two men they had never seen before. They spoke with a remarkable Prussian accent and claimed to be hunters, but they were not carrying hunting rifles: they were two of Bismarck's snipers, tasked with eliminating the crown prince of the Danubian Dual Monarchy, one of the pawns Bismarck had placed on his chessboard. Obviously, Rudolf did not surrender to death that fateful morning. This is why the scene that originally presented itself to the first four witnesses was not that of a suicide, but rather that of a fight; and this is why Hoyos himself offered to carry news of the tragedy to the imperial palace: he had been chosen as the Prussian snipers' accomplice. He was the other pawn. At this point, it's easy to understand why he chose the longest route to Vienna: he had to stall. As soon as he left Mayerling, he passed through the neighboring village of Alland. Here he contacted the carpenter and the blacksmith, who had their workshops there, and tasked them with restoring the room where the bodies of Rudolf and the young Marie lay lifeless, prematurely stiffened by the cold that entered through the broken window. They needed time to repair it by replacing the broken handle from the outside and the shattered glass; replace the floorboards in the central part of the room, which were irreparably stained with blood; repair the furniture and put it back in its place.
The author goes so far as to compare the story to a Greek
tragedy in which the king sacrifices his own son in the name of the unity of
the kingdom (see François Varay, Mayerling, la vérite révélée: Un secret de
famille dévoilé, op. cit. p. 183.). Indeed, enriched with these final
details, Mayerling's tragedy possesses all the elements of a Greek tragedy.
«The truth is far worse than one
can imagine!»
After the funeral, he insisted that from then on no one
would ever mention Rudolf's name again: it was as if his son had never existed,
although I believe not a day went by in his life when he didn't think about
what he had allowed to happen. In the 1980s, the former Empress Zita, née
Bourbon-Parma, consort of the last Austrian Emperor, Karl I, returned to Vienna
several times after some sixty years of exile and widowhood. Determined to shed
light on the "Mayerling Events," she gave a series of interviews to
the Kronen Zeitung and made statements to Austrian television: she was
the only one to know what had happened, both through family lineage and
marriage, as Nerio De Carlo also argued in his 2013 essay, Non desiderare la
patria d'altri, published by the Trieste-based publishing house Holzwege.
She maintained that Rudolf had not committed suicide, but had been the victim
of a conspiracy and assassinated. She was the first to speak of a conspiracy,
and so far her words correspond to the reality we now know. But going further,
she claimed that the perpetrators were Austrian and French secret agents, and
that the motive, in the first case, was Rudolf's sympathy for Hungary, in the
second the friction that had arisen with Clemenceau's France. Zita likely knew
the whole truth, but fearing not to be authorized to make it public, revealed
only a part of it. The fact remains that she deserves credit for rehabilitating
the crown prince, who had been debased first by the theory of suicide and then by
the subsequent theory of a mental illness "invented" by the emperor
to obtain permission from the Holy Father to celebrate the funeral rite in
church. Indeed, history portrayed him as violent towards himself, depressed by
the abuse of narcotics, which he took as painkillers, and alcohol, discouraged
by his father's exclusion from political affairs, and bored with life. And that
night, De Carlo writes in his essay, according to the former empress,
«As a precaution, the window
shutters had to remain closed, and not even the telegraph was allowed to work.
There was to be no contact, not even telegraphic, with anyone [...] Baroness
Mary Vetsera was staying in another part of the building so as not to be
compromised. The Prince's room was carefully locked from the inside.» (Nerio de Carlo, Non desiderare la patria
d’altri, Holzwege, Trieste, 2016, p. 50.).
Poor Marie was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she
was useful in giving substance to the double suicide hypothesis: murdered
elsewhere and many hours before Rudolf, she was then laid next to him. The former
Empress Zita knew that Rudolf did not abandon himself to death and fought long
before being impeccably struck by his assassins:
«During this struggle, the fingers
of the hand that was spasmodically holding the table, which had become his only
protection, were severed. When it fell from his hand, he was brutally killed.» (Ibid.)
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In the photograph taken of Rudolf's death body and released
to the press, we see him not only with his skull wrapped in bandages, but also
with his hands bandaged, so that his fingers are
not visible. This explains the reason for this bandage, which even Gisella, the deceased's younger sister, could not explain herself. And it also explains why the
table lay immersed in a pool of blood: it was the blood that had seeped from
his brutally severed fingers, and likely from the blow that took his life. It
is likely that Rudolf was mortally wounded there, and then laid on the bed,
already lifeless. Even the former Emperor Karl I, while he was alive, worked to
shed light on this affair, which, after decades, continued to be shrouded in
mystery, and sought concrete evidence. Therefore, Zita also felt compelled to
declare that:
«Karl I knew that there must be a
telegram in the Vatican explaining the true causes of the heir to the throne's
death. The religious authorities had, in fact, prohibited a religious burial as
soon as news of the alleged suicide leaked. From his Swiss exile, Karl I
attempted to obtain a copy of that clarifying telegram sent to the Holy Father.
The response was that the document had indeed existed, but that the newly
formed Austrian Republican Government had requested the original be returned
immediately after the proclamation of the Republic. The original was returned
without a copy being made.» (Nerio de Carlo, Non desiderare la patria d'altri, op.
cit., p. 56.).
Hard to believe when the evidence of all the secrets that history has handed down to us are jealously guarded within the walls of the Vatican palaces…
SOURCES:
Fabio Amodeo, Mario José Cereghino, Mayerling, Anatomia di un Omicidio, Mgs Press, Trieste, 2019.
François Varay, Mayerling, la vérite révélée. Un secret de famille dévoilé, Michel de Maule, Paris, 2022.
Daniela Lasagnini, Il figlio americano di Rodolfo D'Asburgo, Mgs Press, Trieste, 2021.
Nerio de Carlo, Non desiderare la patria d’altri, Holzwege, Trieste, 2013.
Dearest Readers,
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