[This New Order] is something quite different from the Old, the Universal, the peoples-binding, the Christian established position in official life, the boundedness also of the Order of Justice and the Eternal Order proceeding from God, the faith in a moral and not naked power Order among States and Peoples, the Justice also towards men of other language and race.

-Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg

On the morning of March 18th, 1938 in the Church of Mary of Sorrows in Grinzing, Dr. Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg was arrested by the Gestapo during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He was denied the reception of Holy Communion, taken to the prison on the Elisabethpromenade, and four months later transferred to the concentration camp at Dachau. When asked by the Camp Commander the reason for his imprisonment, he replied, “Because I see in Faith in God and in a Christian Austria under the Leadership of the House of Hapsburg the only Salvation for the Independence and Sovereignty of my Fatherland.” He later died of injuries sustained during his transport to Dachau, giving his life as a witness to the Legitimacy of “the Emperor who never dies.”

This valiant professor, who dared to greet Heinrich Himmler by saying “Zeßner Freiherr von Spitzenberg- You have arrested me because I am a leader of the Monarchist Movement of Austria…” was not alone in his sacrifice.  Early after the Nazi “Operation Otto” (Anschluss) a member of the Legitimist Organization Corps Der Ottonen was shot trying to raise the Red-White-Red flag of Austria. In October of 1938, the leaders of the Ottonen, Captain Karl Burian, Erwin Drahowzal von Allsperg, Josef-Viktor Wotypka, Ernst Prosl,  Ludwig Krausz-Wienner, Josef von Krinninger, Julius Kretschmer, and Rochus Kosak were each arrested. Karl Burian, who had from his position as Captain in the Wehrmacht supplied military intelligence to Poland and to Austrian resistance fighters, continued while imprisoned to coordinate and recruit for the Legitimist cause. For him there was no end of the Nationalsozialist tyranny in sight, no human possibility of the restoration of freedom and of the Fatherland which he had served his entire life. Yet the words of a fellow prisoner show no sign of despair; “The Ottonians did not give up and tried to recruit for their corps even in prison … The soul of Der Ottonen was the Captain Burian… He was perfectly certain of his condemnation to death at the next trial, but apparently this prospect touched him little. He was a cheerful, humorous, and clever man. He had two concerns. First, the future of Austria and the Donauraum. Second, the Corps der Ottonen.“

For Captain Burian, deployment into Eternal Life to join the ranks of Church Triumphant came in 1944, a mere year before the victory over the legions of the Desecrated Cross. As to other members of the Corps der Ottonen, many are killed, but most of their leaders survived, including Erwin Drahowzal, to see almost of all of Austrian Crownlands descend into the Red Night of Communism. Others survived, from various legitimist resistances (among them Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s sons, Duke Maximilian and Prince Ernst von Hohenberg), united by their common devotion to the true Right.  All but forgotten by their country and homeland, yet never forgetting their sacred cause, some yet lived to see the fall of Communism across a deeply wounded Europe as did their beloved Kaiser Otto. Ever valiant he prepared to personally resist the dictatorship of Hitler’s Unreich over the true Reich. Unable to do so from Austria, he guided his loyal legitimists from afar, while trying desperately to gain recognition in the West of the unlawful occupation of his country.

Peter Graf von Revertera-Salandra was one such legitimist who lived through the Nationalist nightmare of the Second World War, and had attempted to aid Claus Graf von Stauffenberg in ending it. A former soldier of the Imperial and Royal Army (as were many yet not all Legitimist leaders), he was rewarded for his allegiance to his Emperor with Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest of Catholic Imperial Orders. Yet he  and his wife also lived to see the last remnants of the ancient and new Sacrétemporal Order of the World swept away by the flood of modernity.

Each and every of the brave Kaisertreu Legitimists now stands as a shining Exemplar of Hope to we who follow the cause for which they proudly went forth. We, knights of Christendom, cannot foresee the outcome of our struggle with Radical Leftism and the unyielding hydra of Identitarianism, just as they our forebearers of the Black and Golden Banner could not see the eventual victory over National and International Socialism. We may never see the victory of Sacrétemporal worldview over profane secular and pagan ideologies. Yet our fight will not have been in vain, for even as we take up the fallen standard of Christendom from the martyred Legitimists of yesteryear, so too will it be taken from our hands by those who believe in the true Right, the Universal, Catholic, and Moral Order of World which is the last sanity of Mankind.

Viribus Unitis

-Ritter von Donau