Archduke Joseph August

Archduke Joseph August was the most Hungarian of the Habsburgs. Hungarians called him simply “Archduke Joseph”. During the First World War he and his corps defended the Karst plateau on the Isonzo for more than a year; he then commanded the front in the Eastern Carpathians and an army on the Piave. In the last days of the monarchy, Emperor and King Charles I made him a field marshal and his plenipotentiary in Hungary. He was supposed to calm the country, but during the Aster Revolution he had to hand power to opponents of the war. A year later, after the fall of the communists, he himself stood at the head of the Hungarian state for two weeks, until the victorious powers forced him to step down. In the interwar period he was one of the pillars of the regime of Regent Miklós Horthy, and in October 1944 he supported the seizure of power by the Hungarian fascists, which has weighed heavily on judgements of him.

A Hungarian Habsburg

He was born on 9 August 1872 at Alcsút near Budapest, into the Hungarian line of the Habsburgs. His grandfather, Archduke Joseph, had for half a century been palatine, the viceroy of Hungary, and his father, Archduke Joseph Karl, was a general of cavalry and commander-in-chief of the Hungarian home defence force, the Honvéd. Joseph August grew up in Hungary, spoke Hungarian as his native language and felt himself above all a Hungarian aristocrat. On 15 November 1893 in Munich he married the Bavarian princess Augusta, a granddaughter of Emperor Franz Joseph I. They had six children, two of whom died in childhood.

He began his military service in 1890 as an infantry lieutenant. In 1902, at his own request, he transferred to the Honvéd and took command of a hussar regiment, while studying law in Budapest at the same time. In 1908 he became a Generalmajor, and in 1911 a Feldmarschalleutnant and commander of the Budapest 31st Infantry Division.

The Great War

At the start of the war his division fought first on the Danube against the Serbs and then in Galicia. In the autumn of 1914 Joseph August took over VII Corps, with which he defended the Carpathian passes into Hungary over the winter. After Italy entered the war in May 1915 the corps was moved to the Isonzo. From July the archduke commanded the defence of the Doberdò plateau, the southern part of the Karst, which barred the Italians’ way to Trieste. Trenches could not be dug in the bare rock, so the soldiers sheltered behind low stone walls which, under fire, shattered into deadly splinters. In successive battles of the Isonzo the corps held the summit of Monte San Michele but lost tens of thousands of men. The archduke was often seen in the trenches, and Hungarian soldiers regarded him as “their” Habsburg. In August 1916 the Italians took San Michele and Gorizia, and VII Corps withdrew from Doberdò.

In December 1916, when Charles assumed supreme command, Joseph August took over from him the army group on the southern wing of the Eastern Front, stretching from Bukovina through the Eastern Carpathians to the Moldavian border. In the summer of 1917 his troops recaptured Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), but together with Field Marshal August von Mackensen’s Germans they failed to break through deep into Moldavia, which was defended by the Romanians and the Russians. In January 1918 he took over the Sixth Army on the Piave, which in the June offensive captured part of the Montello hill, and in July an army group in the Tyrol. In the last weeks of the war he had to watch his army fall apart. On 24 October 1918, the first day of the final Allied offensive, Hungarian battalions behind the Asiago plateau refused to fight and demanded to be sent back to Hungary.

The king’s plenipotentiary

That same day the emperor promoted him to field marshal. He was the last officer to receive that rank in the Austro-Hungarian army. On 26 October – a day later, according to some sources – Charles made him his plenipotentiary, “homo regius”, in Hungary. He hoped that the popular archduke would calm the Hungarian politicians and the street, which were demanding a government led by the leader of the opposition, Count Mihály Károlyi. Joseph August went to Budapest and took up residence in the castle in Buda. On 28 October a crowd marching to him to demand Károlyi’s appointment was dispersed by gunfire on the Chain Bridge. Three people were killed. On 29 October, against the expectations of the street, the archduke entrusted the task of forming a government to a conservative, Count János Hadik.

Hadik lasted seventeen hours. On the night of 30–31 October mutinous soldiers and workers took control of Budapest, and towards dawn Hadik resigned. On the morning of 31 October the archduke received Károlyi and appointed him prime minister, and the king confirmed the appointment by telephone. In the evening the government swore its oath before the archduke, still in the king’s name. The very next day it was released from that oath and swore again, this time to the Hungarian National Council. According to Hungarian sources, on 1 November the archduke himself, together with his son, also declared his loyalty to the Council. His mission lapsed together with the monarchy. On 13 November Charles renounced any part in Hungary’s affairs, and on 16 November the republic was proclaimed.

Two weeks as regent

Joseph August remained in Hungary during Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the communists, mindful of his popularity, did him no harm. The Soviet Republic fell on 1 August 1919, and a few days later the Romanian army, victorious in the Hungarian–Romanian War, entered Budapest. On 6 August a group of right-wing conspirators, with the Romanians standing by, overthrew Gyula Peidl’s Social Democratic government in Budapest. The archduke took power as regent – on 7 August, according to some sources – and appointed István Friedrich prime minister. The Entente powers, however, had no intention of recognising a Habsburg at the head of Hungary, and the country’s neighbours, especially Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, regarded a return of the dynasty as a threat. On 23 August Joseph August had to step down.

He then backed Admiral Miklós Horthy, who in November 1919 rode into Budapest at the head of the National Army and in March 1920 was elected regent.

In Horthy’s Hungary

In the interwar period Joseph August was one of the most respected figures of conservative Hungary. He was the first to be admitted to the Order of Vitéz (Vitézi Rend) founded by Horthy, a fellowship of distinguished soldiers who received land and formed a mainstay of the regime. From 1927 he sat in the restored upper house of parliament, and from 1936 to 1944 he was president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He published seven volumes of memoirs, “A világháború, amilyennek én láttam” (“The World War as I Saw It”). He belonged to the camp that refused to accept the Treaty of Trianon and welcomed the border revisions achieved from 1938 onwards with the help of Germany and Italy.

His conduct in 1944 is the most open to criticism. When in October Horthy tried to take Hungary out of the war and the Germans installed Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross in power, the archduke, according to Hungarian studies, supported the coup and greeted its supporters from the balcony of his palace. Szálasi’s rule brought deportations and the mass murder of Budapest’s Jews. At the end of 1944 Joseph August left Hungary ahead of the approaching Red Army. He went to the United States and later settled in West Germany. In 1957, after Horthy’s death, he became head of the Order of Vitéz in exile. He died on 6 July 1962 at Rain near Straubing in Bavaria, the last surviving field marshal of the old monarchy. In 1992 his remains were transferred to the Palatine Crypt in the Royal Palace of Buda.

Assessment

In Hungarian memory Joseph August is remembered above all as the defender of Doberdò, a commander who shared the hardships of the front with his soldiers and whose popularity among Hungarian units was exceptional in an army where many senior commanders knew the front only from maps. Hungarian military historians stress his personal courage. On the Karst, however, he commanded within a defensive plan that required every scrap of ground to be held, and the price of those tactics was the enormous losses of his corps; on the Eastern Front, moreover, operational decisions lay largely with the German command.

As a politician he is judged much more harshly. In October 1918 he tried to save the monarchy in Hungary, but he had neither the strength nor the support to do so, and Hadik’s appointment only hastened the outbreak of revolution. His brief regency in 1919 showed that the victors would not allow a Habsburg restoration, and his conduct in 1944 makes him, in Hungarian historiography, at the very least a controversial figure. His life reflects well the path taken by the Hungarian elite, from loyalty to the dynasty in 1918 to alliance with Hitler’s Germany.