Mayerling incident


The Mayerling incident is the series of events surrounding the apparent murder–suicide of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and his lover, Mary Freiin von Vetsera. Rudolf, who was married to Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, was the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, and was heir apparent to the Imperial throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Rudolf's mistress was the daughter of Albin Freiherr von Vetsera, a diplomat at the Austrian court. Albin had been created a Freiherr in 1870. The bodies of the 30-year-old Kronprinz and the 17-year-old Freiin were discovered in the Imperial hunting lodge at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods, southwest of the capital, on the morning of 30 January 1889.
The death of the Crown Prince interrupted the security inherent in the direct line of Habsburg dynastic succession. As Rudolf had no son, the succession would pass to Franz Joseph's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, and his eldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
This destabilisation endangered the growing reconciliation between the Austrian and Hungarian factions of the empire. Succeeding developments led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist and ethnic Serb, at Sarajevo in June 1914, and the July Crisis that led to the start of the First World War.

Bodies discovered

By 1889, many people at the Imperial Court, including Rudolf's parents and his wife, Stéphanie, knew that Rudolf and Mary were having an affair. His marriage to Stéphanie was not a particularly happy one and had resulted in the birth of only one child, a daughter called Elisabeth, known as Erzsi.
On 29 January 1889, Franz Joseph and Elisabeth gave a family dinner party before leaving for Buda, in Hungary, on 31 January. Rudolf excused himself, claiming to be indisposed. He had arranged for a day's shooting at Mayerling hunting lodge early on the morning of the 30th, but when his valet Loschek went to call him, there was no answer. Joseph Graf Hoyos, the Archduke's hunting companion, joined in, with no response. They tried to force the door, but it would not give.
Finally, Loschek smashed in a door panel with a hammer so that he could put his hand through to open the door from the inside. He found the room shuttered and half-dark. Rudolf was found sitting motionless by the side of the bed, leaning forward and bleeding from the mouth. Before him on the bedside table stood a glass and a mirror. Without closer examination in the poor light, Loschek assumed that the Crown Prince had drunk poison from the glass since he knew strychnine caused bleeding. On the bed lay the body of Mary Freiin von Vetsera; rigor mortis had already set in. The mistaken impression that poison was involved, and even that the baroness had poisoned the Crown Prince and then killed herself, would persist for some time.
Graf Hoyos did not look any closer, but rushed to the station and took a special train to Vienna. He hurried to the Emperor's Adjutant General, Graf Paar, and requested him to break the shocking news to the Emperor. The stifling protocol that characterised every movement in the Hofburg swung ponderously into action. Paar remonstrated that only the Empress could break such catastrophic news to the Emperor. Freiherr Nopcsa, Controller of the Empress's Household, was summoned. He, in turn, sent for Ida Gräfin Ferenczy, Empress Elisabeth's favourite Hungarian lady-in-waiting, to determine how Her Imperial Majesty should be informed.
Elisabeth was at her Greek lesson and was impatient at the interruption. White to the lips, Ferenczy announced that Baron Nopcsa had urgent news. Elisabeth replied that he must wait and come back later. The Gräfin insisted that he must be received immediately, finally being forced to add that there was grave news about the Crown Prince. This account comes from Gräfin Ferenczy herself and Archduchess Marie Valerie, to whom Elisabeth dictated her memory of the incident, in addition to the description in her diary.
The Gräfin Ferenczy entered the room again to find Elisabeth distraught and weeping uncontrollably. The Emperor appeared outside her apartments and was forced to wait there with Nopcsa, who was controlling himself only with great effort. The Empress broke the news to her husband in private.
The Minister for Police was summoned and the national security services sealed off the Imperial hunting lodge and the surrounding area. The body of Mary Freiin von Vetsera was interred as soon as possible, without judicial inquiry and in secret. Her mother was not even allowed to attend her burial.

Attempted cover up

, Ministerpräsident of Cisleithania, issued a statement at noon on behalf of the Emperor that Rudolf had died "due to a rupture of an aneurism of the heart". The Imperial Family and Imperial Court were still under the impression that he had been poisoned. It appears that even Mary's mother, Helene Freifrau von Vetsera, initially believed this.
von Vetsera,
The Imperial Court medical commission, headed by Dr. Widerhofer, arrived in Mayerling that afternoon and established a more accurate cause of death. Widerhofer made his report to the Emperor at 6 a.m. the following morning. The official gazette of Vienna still reported the original story that day: "His Royal and Imperial Highness, Crown Prince Archduke Rudolf, died yesterday at his hunting lodge of Mayerling, near Baden, from the rupture of an aneurism of the heart."
Foreign correspondents descended on Mayerling and soon learned that Rudolf's mistress was implicated in his death. This first official version of a heart attack was quickly dropped. At that stage, the "heart failure" version was amended. It was announced that the Crown Prince had first shot the baroness in a suicide pact and sat by her body for several hours before shooting himself. Rudolf and the Emperor were known to have recently had a violent argument, with Franz Joseph demanding that his son end the liaison with his teenage mistress. Their deaths were the tragic result of the desperate decision of thwarted lovers taken "while the balance of the Archduke's mind was disturbed". The police closed their investigations with surprising haste, in apparent response to the Emperor's wishes.
Franz Joseph did everything in his power to get the Church's blessing for Rudolf's burial in the Kapuzinergruft Imperial Crypt. This would have been impossible had the Crown Prince deliberately committed murder and suicide. The Vatican issued a special dispensation declaring Rudolf to have been in a state of "mental imbalance", and he now lies with 137 other Habsburgs in the Church of the Capuchins in Vienna. The dossier on the investigations and related actions were not deposited in the state archives, as they would typically have been.
The story that Rudolf had violently quarreled with the Emperor over his liaison with Freiin von Vetsera may have been spread by agents of Germany's Chancellor, Otto, Fürst von Bismarck, who had little love for the politically liberal Rudolf. It was certainly doubted by many of Rudolf's close relatives, who knew the Chancellor personally.
Empress Victoria of Germany noted:
She then wrote to her mother, Queen Victoria:
Allegations of a double murder masked as a murder-suicide have also been made. In a series of interviews with the Viennese tabloid newspaper Kronen Zeitung'', the Empress Zita, who was not born until three years after the incident, expressed her belief that the deaths of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his mistress were not a double suicide, but rather murder by French agents sent by Georges Clemenceau.

Theories of motivation

, in her book Rudolf, Crown Prince and Rebel, states Rudolf had first proposed a double suicide to a prominent courtesan, Mizzi Kaspar. It was after she refused that Rudolf proposed the death pact with the more susceptible Vetsera. Hamann, in an interview, argued Rudolf "was a poetic young man and brooded a lot. He was ill with syphilis and felt guilty that he had infected his wife." This is the theory most widely accepted by historians.
Gerd Holler argues in his book, Mayerling--New Documents on the Tragedy 100 Years Afterward, that Mary was three months pregnant with Rudolf's child. Rudolf arranged an abortion for Mary, who died in the process. Rudolf then committed suicide.
Clemens M. Gruber, in a piece called The Fateful Days of Mayerling, argues Rudolf died in a drinking brawl. In Gruber’s story, Vetsera's relatives forced their way into the lodge and Rudolf drew a revolver, accidentally shooting the baroness. He was then killed by one of her relatives.
The death of Kronprinz Rudolf caused a dynastic crisis. As Rudolf was the only son of Franz Joseph, the emperor's brother, Karl Ludwig, became heir-presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He renounced his succession rights a few days later in favour of his eldest son, Franz Ferdinand.
After Franz Ferdinand's assassination in 1914, Franz Ferdinand's nephew, Karl, became the heir-presumptive. Karl would ultimately succeed his great-uncle as Emperor Karl I in 1916.

Exhumations and forensic evidence

Freiin von Vetsera's body was spirited out of Mayerling and interred in the graveyard at Heiligenkreuz. The official story of murder-suicide went unchallenged until just after the end of the Second World War. In 1946, occupying Soviet troops dislodged the granite plate covering the grave and broke into Vetsera's coffin in the graveyard, perhaps hoping to loot it of jewels. This break-in was not discovered until 1955 when the Red Army withdrew from Austria per the Austrian State Treaty.
In 1959, a young physician named Gerd Holler, stationed in the area, accompanied by a member of the Vetsera family and specialists in funereal preservation, inspected her remains. Dr. Holler carefully examined the skull and other bones for traces of a bullet hole but stated that he found no such evidence. Intrigued, Holler claimed he petitioned the Vatican to inspect their 1889 archives of the affair, where the Papal Nuncio's investigation had concluded that only one bullet was fired. Lacking forensic evidence of a second bullet, Holler advanced the theory that Vetsera died accidentally, probably as the result of an abortion, and it was Rudolf who consequently shot himself. Holler witnessed the body's re-interment in a new coffin in 1959.
In 1991, Vetsera's remains were disturbed again, this time by Helmut Flatzelsteiner, a Linz furniture dealer who was obsessed with the Mayerling affair. Initial reports were that her bones were strewn around the churchyard for the authorities to retrieve. But Flatzelsteiner removed them at night for a private forensic examination at his expense, which finally took place on February 1993.
Flatzelsteiner told the examiners that the remains were those of a relative killed some one hundred years ago, who had possibly been shot in the head or stabbed. One expert thought this might be possible, but since the skull was not only in a state of disintegration but was actually incomplete, this could not be confirmed. Flatzelsteiner then approached a journalist at the Kronen Zeitung to sell both the story and Vetsera's skeleton. That these were Vetsera's remains was confirmed through forensic examination. The body was re-interred in the original grave in October 1993, and after a court case, Flatzelsteiner paid the abbey €2000 for damages.
In July 2015, the Austrian National Library issued copies of Vetsera's letters of farewell to her mother and other family members. These letters, previously believed to be lost or destroyed, were found in a safe deposit box in an Austrian bank, where they had been deposited in 1926. The letters—written in Mayerling shortly before the deaths—state clearly and unambiguously that Vetsera was preparing to commit suicide alongside Rudolf:

In the media

The Mayerling affair has been dramatized in:

Literature