Chapter I	Tragedy at Mayerling
	Chapter II	Death of a Princess
	Chapter III	Malediction
	Chapter IV	The First Casualty of War
	Chapter V	Credibility of Foreign Informants
	Chapter VI	Confabulations of Nurse Nayirah
	Chapter VII	Jumana Hanna and Sara Solovitch
	Chapter VIII	Origins of the First World War
	Chapter IX	Ritual Slaughter
	Chapter X	Search for Implausible Narratives

Mayerling tragedy

Crown Prince Rudolf was the son of the Emperor of the Austrian Empire, Francis Joseph, and his beautiful wife, Empress Elizabeth. Rudolf’s death at the Mayerling was not only a personal tragedy, but a tragedy of the Empire and its people. The dramatis personae of this tragedy were the Emperor Francis Joseph, the Empress Elizabeth, the Crown Prince Rudolf, his girlfriend Mary Vetsera, his wife Stephanie of Belgium, and his daughter Elizabeth.

Crown Prince Rudolf was educated by the best tutors his father could find, over 50 of them. He was a personal friend of Alfred Brehm with whom he shared passion for natural sciences and whose monumental Thierleben he admired as a child. He wrote scientific articles to leading journals on life sciences. His views were farsighted and were partially realized a century after his death. In personal letters dated July 26, 1882 and December 12, 1886, Crown Prince Rudolf Habsburg describes his view of the Austrian Empire:

The principle of nationalism rests on the most base of human instincts. It is a victory of primitivism over the noble ideals of equality. The national and racial animosities are a step backward. It is characteristic that these principles are most often used by the most divisive elements of our society. As the science is cosmopolitan, so should be the just societies.

and

The Empire of Hapsburgs, in a miniature, already realized the dream of Victor Hugo about the United States of Europe. Austria is a conglomerate of various nations, united. This is the guiding idea of our monarchy, not without significance for the world civilization. Even though at the present time the realization of this idea is less than perfect, it does not mean that the idea itself is incorrect.

The death of the Crown Prince Rudolf at Mayerling was not only a personal tragedy. It was a tragedy of the Empire and its people. As told by Winston Churchill in his (1948) book The Gathering Storm,

One can only guess what could have been if Rudolf succeeded the aging Emperor before that fateful Summer of 1914.

Princess Stephanie In 1880 the Crown Prince Rudolf became engaged to the Princess Stephanie, the daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium. They were married in Vienna on the 10th May, 1881 when Rudolf was 22 years old. It was rumored that shortly after the wedding, Rudolf's mother Empress Elizabeth called her new daughter-in-law

Rudolf and Stephanie grew apart and not even the birth of their daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, on September 2, 1883, brought them together. Rudolf became increasingly irritable, drank too much, experimented with drugs, and sought consolation with Vienna's girls. 

Mary Vetsera  One month after her seventeenth birthday, in April 1888, Mary Vetsera met the Crown Prince Rudolf in the Prater, Vienna's large amusement park. They returned to the Prater on many of their dates, holding hands and exchanging kisses. Mary was a vivacious girl and after she and Rudolf fell in love, her whole world turned around him. She adored him, would do anything for him, and Rudolf was touched by her love and devotion.

One winter evening, toward the end of the 1888, Countess Marie Larisch (1856-1940), the daughter of the Empress Elisabeth's brother Ludwig, helped Mary to get to Rudolf's room at Hofburg.
 
In the middle of January, 1889, Rudolf had a serious argument with his father, likely concerning his love affair with Mary Vetsera. On January 29, 1889 Rudolf and Mary left Vienna for the hunting lodge at Mayerling. On the next morning both were found dead.
 
Initially, the death of Mary and Rudolf appeared to be a classic love-suicide pact. After the bodies of Mary and Rudolf were found, the local police chief cabled the minister of police who ordered the lodge to be sealed off and immediately departed for Mayerling. After he examined the bodies and the room where Mary and Rudolf were found, he told the details of their death to the Emperor.

The Emperor After hearing the report of the minister of police, the Emperor decided that

swore the minister of police into secrecy, and offered the lackey who drove Rudolf and Mary to the Mayerling's hunting lodge and discovered their dead bodies a life-time pension if he'll keep silent. The official version of Rudolf's death was that the crown prince had died from heart failure. Many years later some details were disclosed. The forensic examination of the bodies confirmed that Mary had died several hours before Rudolf, indicating that he spent last hours of his life sitting next to her dead body until he finally shot himself.

Rumors, insinuations, and character assassination  Among the dozens of conspiracy theories that emerged after the Rudolf's and Mary's death, perhaps most damning was the penis amputation theory that goes as follows:

Francis Joseph, after learning about the extramarital affair of Rudolf and Mary pressured Rudolf to end their relationship. After Mary found out, she begged Rudolf to make love to her one last time. Finding retreat at the Mayerling hunting lodge, Mary and Rudolf spent a night together. During that night, Mary, desperate at the prospect of parting, found a razor knife and mumbling if I cannot have it, nobody else will cut off Rudolf’s penis. Rudolf, screaming with pain, pulled out a revolver and shot Mary through the head. After writing a letter to his wife apologizing for his infidelity, he decided that only blood could erase his shame and shot himself.

The Secret of Heiligenkreuz Gerd Holler in his (1980) book Mayerling: Die Losung des Ratsels, tells another story. In the late spring of 1945, the Soviet artillery began shelling the Cistercian monastery in Heiligenkreuz where Mary Vetsera had been buried. A projectile from the Soviet long-range gun dislodged the granite plate covering the Mary Vetsera's grave. As a young physician stationed in Heiligenkreuz, Holler was called to examine Mary Vetsera's remains and to witness their reinterment. Dr. Holler carefully scrutinized Mary Vetsera's skull and other bones for traces of a penetration hole or other marks that could have been caused by a projectile, but there was no apparent damage to the skeleton. His curiosity aroused, Dr. Holler waited for the Vatican archives to open. The Habsburgs, being a Catholic family, had to ask the Pope for dispensation in order to secure a Catholic funeral for their son who committed suicide. Upon the receipt of the request, the Pope dispatched his nuncio to Mayerling. After his return, the papal nuncio filed a detailed report about the incident that was filed in the Vatican archives. The main finding of the Pope's nuncio, kept secret for 90 years, was that only one shot was fired. 

Emperor's secret drawer  After the Empire, in 1918, lost the war, the Habsburgs lost their Empire, and the imperial family was banned from the Republic of Austria. The last Austrian Empress Zita, toward the end of her life, asked the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky for permission to visit Austria. One of the Chancellor’s conditions for granting her request was that she tells the truth about the Mayerling affair. During the interview that took place in a remote monastery in the Swiss Alps, the Empress told the following to the Chancellor's emissary, Kindermann:

My husband asked the Emperor, at his deathbed, what really happened at Mayerling. The Emperor replied that the truth about the Mayerling tragedy was in a secret drawer of his desk, to be opened only upon his death. After the Emperor's funeral, Charles and I returned to Hofburg, entered the Emperor’s study, looked for, located, and opened the secret drawer. What we found inside was a stack of blank sheets of paper.  

Mary, Rudolph, and their unborn baby  There is another story of Rudolf and Mary. Mary Vetsera was pregnant by Rudolf and had an abortion. Afterwards, Rudolf accompanied Mary to the hunting lodge at Mayerling where she was supposed to rest. Exhausted after a journey of about 17 miles in a coach traveling unpaved roads, Mary started to bleed and toward the morning died. Rather than being found with a dead girlfriend at a lonely hunting lodge, the desperate crown prince, heir to the throne of the Austrian Empire, rested the barrel of his gun on his temple and pulled the trigger. Dozens of books were written about this event providing many different explanations of the Mayerling's tragedy. Is this story the true story of Mary and Rudolf? Compared to other stories, it provides credible motivation, probable circumstances, and is consistent with the human condition.

The Prince and the Princess  What happened to the other actors of the Mayerling tragedy? Rudolf's daughter, the Princess Elizabeth (1883-1963) and her mother, Princess Stephanie (1864-1945), continued to live at the Emperor's court where Elizabeth felt in love with Prince Windisch-Graetz (1873-1952). However, the Prince loved another girl and did not pay attention to Elizabeth whom he still viewed as a child. Elizabeth told about her crush on the Prince to the aging Emperor. She cried on his lap, and told him she might kill herself as her father did. Emperor confronted the Prince with this situation. Prince Windisch-Graetz replied that he already promised marriage to another girl he loved dearly for a long time. The Emperor said that, as his commander in chief, gives him the order to marry Elizabeth. The Prince stood in attention and replied Yes Sir, as the story goes. The Prince and Elizabeth were married in 1902, had four children, Rudolf, Stephanie, Ernst and Francis Joseph, divorced, and Elizabeth remarried, this time to a politician, and joined the socialist party. At that time people called her the Red Princess. Her eventful life was described by Ghislaine Windisch-Graetz in her (1988) book Kaiseradler und rote Nelke (Emperor’s Eagle and the Red Carnation). Elizabeth died in 1963; she was 80 years old.

Toward the end of the Second World War, Prince Windisch-Graetz moved to a castle, high in the mountains, above the village where the author's father was a general practitioner of medicine, making house calls, among them to the castle where Prince Windisch-Graetz lived with two close relatives. At that time I was six years old, but I still remember his face and a wonderful model of a sailing ship I used to play with in his study. 

References
Brehm, A. E. (1864–1869) Illustrirtes Thierleben. Eine allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs. 6 vols. Hildburghausen, Bibliographisches Institut.
Churchill, W. (1948) The Gathering Storm. Mariner Books.
Corti, C. (1936) Elisabeth, Die Seltsame Frau. Salzburg: Anton Pustet.
Hamann, B. (1978) Rudolf, Kronprinz und Rebell. Wien: Amalthea Verlag.
Haslip, J. (1965) The Lonely Empress, A biography of Elisabeth of Austria. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Holler, G. (1980) Mayerling: Die Losung des Ratsels. Wien.
Windisch-Graetz, G. (1988) Kaiseradler und Rote Nelke. Wien: Amalthea Verlag.

See Also
The end of the Austrian Empire