In 1954 he settled in Pöcking and became a member of the conservative Christian Social Union of Bavaria, which he represented in the European Parliament.
His great mission in the latter half of the 20th century was to try to bring the continent, if not the empire, back together. His family’s former empire fell on the line between East and West, behind the Iron Curtain and in Tito’s Yugoslavia. He returned to Europe and lived in France. Because of his staunch opposition to Hitler, he spent most of World War II, from 1940 to 1944, in the United States. Otto tried to return to Austria in 1938 to fight the Anschluss. In Belgium, he earned a doctorate in political and social sciences at the University in Louvain.
He lived in exile in Switzerland and on the island of Madeira, and went to high school in Spain. He would not give up his own claim to his father’s throne until 1961. Otto was not yet 10 when his father died in April 1922 and he became the official head of the Hapsburg family. His father gave up the throne in 1918 but refused to formally abdicate. Upon Franz Josef’s death and his father’s ascension to the throne, Otto became crown prince. Otto was still a toddler when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot to death in Sarajevo in June 1914, making his father first in line for the throne, but also starting the war that would claim his empire as one of its victims.
20, 1912, in Reichenau, Lower Austria, during the 67-year reign of Emperor Franz Josef I, his father’s great-uncle. Otto was born into one of the most storied noble families in European history on Nov. Less than a month later, Hungary officially opened its western border for East Germans seeking to leave the Communist bloc. This momentary piercing of the Iron Curtain became one of the events that hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of cold war Europe. 19, 1989, and in the process of a symbolic opening of the border, nearly 700 East Germans managed to flee to the west.
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