Albrecht | |||||
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Duke of Bavaria | |||||
Head of the House of Wittelsbach | |||||
Tenure | 2 August 1955 – 8 July 1996 | ||||
Predecessor | Rupprecht | ||||
Successor | Franz | ||||
Born | Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire | 3 May 1905||||
Died | 8 July 1996 91) Berg Castle, Starnberg, Bavaria, Germany | (aged||||
Burial | Wittelsbach cemetery, Andechs Abbey, Bavaria | ||||
Spouse | Countess Maria Draskovich de Trakostjan (m. 1930;died 1969)Countess Marie-Jenke Keglevich de Buzin (m. 1971;died 1983) | ||||
Issue |
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House | Wittelsbach | ||||
Father | Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria | ||||
Mother | Duchess Marie Gabrielle in Bavaria |
Albrecht, Duke of Bavaria (Albrecht Luitpold Ferdinand Michael; 3 May 1905 – 8 July 1996 [1] ) was the son of the last crown prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, and his first wife, Duchess Marie Gabrielle in Bavaria. He was the only child from that marriage that reached adulthood. His paternal grandfather was Ludwig III of Bavaria, the last king of Bavaria, who was deposed in 1918.
Following the First World War, Albrecht's grandfather King Ludwig was deposed. Albrecht and the family temporarily moved from Bavaria to the Austrian Tyrol. [1]
His family, the House of Wittelsbach, were opposed to the regime of Nazi Germany and refused to join the Nazi Party. His father, the former Crown Prince Rupprecht, earned Hitler's enmity by opposing the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, he sent his son Albrecht to President Paul von Hindenburg with a protest letter strongly objecting to the appointment of governors at the head of the federal states and thus the de facto abolition of German federalism. This public opposition meant that Prince Albrecht, who had studied forestry, was prevented from completing his studies. [1] In July 1934, Albrecht emigrated to Hungary with his family. From 1935 to 1939 the family returned to Bavaria and lived in seclusion in Kreuth, but his father emigrated to Italy in 1939 and Albrecht and his family moved back to Budapest, where they stayed in a rented apartment in the Castle Quarter. They often visited his wife's Hungarian and Croatian relatives in the countryside, as well as Albrecht's uncle Prince Franz of Bavaria at his Nádasdy Castle in Sárvár. The children received private lessons. Albrecht took over the management of court hunting for the Prince Regent Paul of Yugoslavia until 1941. [2]
In September 1943, the German Army occupied Italy and the former crown prince went into hiding in Florence. In October 1944, after Germany had occupied Hungary in March, Albrecht and his family were arrested by the Gestapo in the Erdődy mansion in Doba, Hungary, and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. [1] Together with his wife, his four children and three of his half-sisters, they were held captive as “special prisoners” and then transported to the Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps. Albrecht almost died of dysentery. Badly hit by hunger and disease, the family barely survived. His son Franz writes in his memoirs that they only received one slice of bread, often moldy, per person per day as food. Despite the dramatic situation, according to him, his parents behaved “completely confidently from the start”. “My father used his aggressiveness as his only weapon and attacked anyone who came too close to him.” [3]
Towards the end of the war, they were interned with other special prisoners, including the family of General Paulus, in a former hotel on Lake Plansee (Tyrol), but had to remain there under military guard even after they were liberated by the United States Third Army. After a while, Albrecht and his family fled to Linderhof and hid there with a forest ranger. Finally, together with numerous refugees from Hungary, they moved into an outbuilding of Leutstetten Castle near Starnberg, which was occupied by an Allied commission, where after some time the former crown prince also returned from Rome. [4]
Since 1949 Albrecht lived at Berg Palace (Bavaria), 20 kilometres (12 mi) southwest of Munich on Lake Starnberg, in relative seclusion until the end of his life. His son Franz remembers: “He came back after being away for many years, having previously experienced a decade of severe disappointments - including on a human level. He came back to a country where almost all of his real friends had been murdered or fallen. And he had mostly bad memories of some of the people who had survived and whom he met back then... For him, many places were contaminated by the Nazi era. He came back to a Bavaria that was no longer his Bavaria. The resulting isolation accompanied him throughout his life.” [5]
Albrecht became head of the deposed royal family of Bavaria with the death of his father on 2 August 1955. As head of the House of Wittelsbach, Albrecht was also Grand Master of the Wittelsbach House Orders, the Order of Saint George, the Order of St. Hubert and the Order of Theresa. On Christmas Eve 1952, Albrecht of Bavaria was invested in the Knights' Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; he was president of its Bavarian Order Province.
The Duke appeared in public on important occasions. In order to remain present, he established the annual receptions by the head of the House of Wittelsbach at Nymphenburg Palace, which are still held today, to which around 1,500 guests from state politics, municipalities, churches and sciences, art and medicine as well as friends and relatives are invited. [6]
In 1959 Albrecht, in an official ceremony, returned the Greek crown jewels (originally made for a Bavarian prince who reigned as Greece's first modern monarch, King Otto) to the Greek nation, accepted by King Paul of Greece. Together with his son Franz and a daughter, he had taken part in the ship tours organized by King Paul of Greece and Queen Frederica in 1954 and 1956, which became known as the “Cruises of the Kings” and were attended by over 100 royals from all over Europe. [7]
In 1980 Albrecht presided over sumptuous ceremonies in Bavaria celebrating the 800th anniversary of the ascension of the House of Wittelsbach to the Bavarian throne. [8]
Albrecht was a prolific hunter and deer researcher, collecting 3,425 sets of antlers, now partially shown in a permanent exhibition on his research activities in the former royal castle at Berchtesgaden. He also wrote two books on "the habits of deer" [1] for which he (and his second wife) received honorary doctorates by the biological faculty of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. While visiting Brazil in 1953, where he acquired a facenda in the rainforest, he encountered Brazilian Mastiffs and took some to Germany, introducing the dog breed to Europe.
Albrecht died on 8 July 1996, aged 91, at Berg Palace. His funeral at Theatine Church, Munich was conducted by Friedrich Wetter, the Archbishop of Munich. [1] He was buried on a family graveyard he himself had installed in 1977 at Andechs Abbey.
As the eldest son of the eldest son of Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este (1849–1919), recognized by Jacobites as "Queen Mary IV (of England) and III (of Scotland)", [9] he was also the dynastic representative and heir-general of England, Scotland and Ireland's last Stuart king, James II and VII, deposed in 1688. [10]
Albrecht married Countess Maria Draskovich of Trakostjan (8 March 1904 in Vienna – 10 June 1969 in Wildbad Kreuth) on 3 September 1930 in Berchtesgaden. [11] Daughter of Count Dionys Maria Draskovich von Trakostjan and Princess Juliana Rose von Montenuovo (a great-granddaughter of Marie-Louise of Austria, sometime Empress of the French), she belonged to a family of the Croatian nobility known since 1230 and made Imperial counts in 1631. [12] Although Albrecht's father allowed the wedding, a Wittelsbach family council concluded that the marriage was non-compliant with the dynasty's marital tradition as set out in its historical house laws, [12] and the names of the couple's four children were excluded from the Almanach de Gotha . [11] In 1948, however, a juridical consultation advised that the head of the house has sole authority to determine the validity of marriages within the House of Wittelsbach, prompting Crown Prince Rupprecht to recognize Albrecht's marriage as dynastic on 18 May 1949. [8] [12]
On 21 April 1971 in Weichselboden, Albrecht married Countess Marie-Jenke Keglevich of Buzin (23 April 1921 in Budapest – 5 October 1983 in Weichselboden), daughter of Count Stephan Keglevich de Buzin and Countess Klára Zichy of Zich and Vásonkeö. They had no children. [12]
At the time of his death, Albrecht had four children from his first marriage, fifteen grandchildren and twenty-six great-grandchildren. His children are:
Albrecht was styled Prinz von Bayern (Prince of Bavaria) at birth. [14] After the death of his father in 1955 he changed his style to Herzog von Bayern (Duke of Bavaria). [15]
As head of the House of Wittelsbach, Albrecht was traditionally styled as His Royal Highness the Duke of Bavaria, of Franconia and in Swabia, [16] Count Palatine of the Rhine. [17]
The House of Wittelsbach is a former Bavarian dynasty, with branches that have ruled over territories including the Electorate of Bavaria, the Electoral Palatinate, the Electorate of Cologne, Holland, Zeeland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hungary, Bohemia, and Greece. Their ancestral lands of Bavaria and the Palatinate were prince-electorates, and the family had three of its members elected emperors and kings of the Holy Roman Empire. They ruled over the Kingdom of Bavaria which was created in 1805 and continued to exist until 1918.
Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria, Duke of Bavaria, Franconia and in Swabia, Count Palatine by the Rhine, was the last heir apparent to the Bavarian throne. During the first half of World War I, he commanded the 6th Army on the Western Front. From August 1916, he commanded Army Group Rupprecht of Bavaria, which occupied the sector of the front opposite the British Expeditionary Force.
Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern, commonly known by the courtesy title Duke of Bavaria, is the head of the House of Wittelsbach, the former ruling family of the Kingdom of Bavaria. His great-grandfather King Ludwig III was the last ruling monarch of Bavaria, being deposed in 1918.
The King of Bavaria was a title held by the hereditary Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria in the state known as the Kingdom of Bavaria from 1805 until 1918, when the kingdom was abolished. It was the second time Bavaria was a kingdom, almost a thousand years after the short-lived Carolingian kingdom of Bavaria.
Prince Georg of Bavaria was a member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach and a Catholic priest.
Duke in Bavaria was a title used among others since 1506, when primogeniture was established, by all members of the House of Wittelsbach, with the exception of the Duke of Bavaria which began to be a unique position. So reads for instance the full title of the late 16th century's Charles I, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld and patriarch of the House of Palatinate-Birkenfeld: "Count Palatine by Rhine, Duke in Bavaria, Count to Veldenz and Sponheim". The title grew in importance as Wilhelm, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld-Gelnhausen began to use it, in the early 19th century, as his primary title – Duke Wilhelm in Bavaria. This choice has also had effect for his descendants.
Maria Theresa Henriette Dorothea of Austria-Este was the last Queen of Bavaria. She was the only child of Archduke Ferdinand Karl Viktor of Austria-Este and Archduchess Elisabeth Franziska of Austria.
Max-Emanuel Ludwig Maria Herzog in Bayern as the younger son of Albrecht, Duke of Bavaria, is the heir presumptive to both the headship of the former Bavarian royal house and the Jacobite succession.
Carl Maria Peter Ferdinand Philipp Albrecht Joseph Michael Pius Konrad Robert Ulrich Herzog von Württemberg was the head of the House of Württemberg from 1975 to 2022. He was succeeded by his grandson Wilhelm.
DukeMaximilian Joseph of Bavaria, known informally as Max in Bayern, was a member of a junior branch of the royal House of Wittelsbach who were Kings of Bavaria, and a promoter of Bavarian folk-music. He is most famous today as the father of Empress Elisabeth of Austria ("Sisi") and great-grandfather of King Leopold III of Belgium.
Karl-Theodor, Duke in Bavaria, was a member of the House of Wittelsbach and a professional oculist. He was the favorite brother of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and father of Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians.
Prince Konrad of Bavaria was a member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach.
Prince Alfons of Bavaria was a member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach and a General of Cavalry.
Franz, Prince of Bavaria was a member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach and a Major General in the Bavarian Army.
Prince Ludwig of Bavaria was a member of the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach.
Prince Heinrich of Bavaria was a member of the Bavarian royal House of Wittelsbach.
Marie Gabrielle Duchess in Bavaria, was the youngest daughter of Duke Karl Theodor in Bavaria and his second wife, Infanta Maria José of Portugal. She married Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria in 1900 but died before he became Crown Prince. Through her second son Albrecht, Marie Gabrielle was the grandmother of the present Duke of Bavaria, Franz.
Princess Bona of Savoy-Genoa, later Princess Bona of Bavaria, was a daughter of Prince Tommaso, Duke of Genoa and Princess Isabella of Bavaria.
Maria Elisabeth of Bavaria, nicknamed "Empress-mother", was a German princess of the House of Wittelsbach, granddaughter of King Louis III of Bavaria and wife and royal consort of Prince Pedro Henrique of Orléans-Braganza and pretender to the title of Empress consort of Brazil from 1937 to 1981. If Brazil had quantified to be a monarchy she would have been the Empress Consort of Brazil, was the eldest daughter of Prince Franz of Bavaria, third son of Ludwig III of Bavaria.
The Bavarian monarchy ended with the declaration of a republic after the Anif declaration by King Ludwig III on 12 November 1918 as a consequence of Germany's defeat in the First World War. Monarchism was thereafter particularly strong between 1918 and 1933, when an attempt was made to either make Crown Prince Rupprecht king or general state commissioner in an attempt to forestall the rise of the Nazis to power in the state.