Otto von Habsburg

Biography

Otto von Habsburg was born in 1912 at Villa Wartholz in Reichenau an der Rax, the eldest son of the future Emperor Charles I of Austria and Zita of Bourbon-Parma. He became crown prince when his father took the throne in November 1916, but the monarchy fell in 1918 and the family went into exile, first in Switzerland and Madeira and later in Spain and Belgium. When his father died in 1922 he became head of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and the dynasty's claimant to the former thrones. He took a doctorate in political and social sciences at the University of Louvain in 1935.

In the 1930s he campaigned for a Habsburg restoration and against Nazism, urging Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to resist Germany in 1938. After the Anschluss the Nazi regime sentenced him to death and seized the family's property, and he helped thousands of Austrians, many of them Jews, to escape. He spent 1940 to 1944 in Washington, lobbying the Roosevelt administration on behalf of Austria and its neighbours. After the war he lived in France and Spain, holding Monegasque and Spanish passports, and settled in Bavaria in 1954.

In 1961 he renounced his claim to the Austrian throne, and after a long political dispute he was allowed to visit Austria again in 1966. A committed advocate of European unity, he was vice-president and then, from 1973 to 2004, president of the International Paneuropean Union, and sat in the European Parliament for the Christian Social Union of Bavaria from 1979 to 1999. He championed the countries behind the Iron Curtain and was one of the organisers of the Pan-European Picnic on the Austro-Hungarian border in August 1989.

He handed the headship of the family to his son Karl in 2007 and died at Pöcking in July 2011. He was buried in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, and his heart was placed in Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary.