Draft:Felix Schaffgotsche: Difference between revisions

 

Line 7: Line 7:

[[File:Felix von Schaffgotsch.jpg|thumb|Felix von Schaffgotsch]]

[[File:Felix von Schaffgotsch.jpg|thumb|Felix von Schaffgotsch]]

<!– Important, do not remove anything above this line before article has been created. –>

<!– Important, do not remove anything above this line before article has been created. –>

”’Count Felix Schaffgotsche”’, ”genannt Semperfrei von und zu Kynast und Greiffenstein” (born February 16, 1904 [[Enns]], [[Upper Austria]]; died August 11, 1942 near [[Kurganinsk]]) was an Austrian nobleman and location scout for Sun Valley.

”’Count Felix Schaffgotsche”’, ”genannt Semperfrei von und zu Kynast und Greiffenstein” (born February 16, 1904 [[Enns]], [[Upper Austria]]; died August 11, 1942 near [[Kurganinsk]]) was an Austrian nobleman and location scout for Sun Valley.

== Family and Childhood ==

== Family and ==

His father was Count Franz de Paula Schaffgotsche, a major in the cavalry and aide-de-camp (”Flügeladjutant”) to [[Franz Joseph I|Emperor Franz Joseph I]].<ref>”Gothaisches Genealogisches Taschenbuch der Gräflichen Häuser”, Gotha, Verlag Justus Perthes 1915, pp. 831-832.</ref><ref>”Schematismus für das kaiserliche und königliche Heer und für die kaiserliche und königliche Kriegsmarine für 1905, 1906, 1907”, amtliche Ausgabe, Druck und Verlag der k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1904-1906.</ref> His mother Aglaë, née Witt von Dörring, was a granddaughter of [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Johannes_Wit_von_Dörring Ferdinand Johannes Wit, genannt von Dörring] and, via her maternal forebears, a descendant of the princely [[House of Auersperg|Auersperg family]]. Through his paternal lineage, Schaffgotsche was one of the last descendants of the Bohemian line of the [[Schaffgotsch family]]; this branch–which varied the spelling of the surname slightly from that favored by their Lower-Silesian cousins–was extinguished with the death of Schaffgotsche’s younger brother Friedrich in 1993.

His father was Count Franz de Paula Schaffgotsche, a major in the cavalry and aide-de-camp (”Flügeladjutant”) to [[Franz Joseph I|Emperor Franz Joseph I]].<ref>”Gothaisches Genealogisches Taschenbuch der Gräflichen Häuser”, Gotha, Verlag Justus Perthes 1915, pp. 831-832.</ref><ref>”Schematismus für das kaiserliche und königliche Heer und für die kaiserliche und königliche Kriegsmarine für 1905, 1906, 1907”, amtliche Ausgabe, Druck und Verlag der k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1904-1906.</ref> His mother Aglaë, née Witt von Dörring, was a granddaughter of [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Johannes_Wit_von_Dörring Ferdinand Johannes Wit, genannt von Dörring] and, via her maternal forebears, a descendant of the princely [[House of Auersperg|Auersperg family]]. Through his paternal lineage, Schaffgotsche was one of the last descendants of the Bohemian line of the [[Schaffgotsch family]]; this branch–which varied the spelling of the surname slightly from that favored by their Lower-Silesian cousins–was extinguished with the death of Schaffgotsche’s younger brother Friedrich in 1993.

17:11, 13 December 2025 (UTC)17:11, 13 December 2025 (UTC)~~

If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the “Edit” tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Declined by Htanaungg 11 hours ago. Last edited by Michael C.M. Huey 0 seconds ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

Schaffgotsche was hired by Averell Harriman as a location scout for what was to become Sun Valley

Count Felix Schaffgotsche, genannt Semperfrei von und zu Kynast und Greiffenstein (born February 16, 1904 in Enns, Upper Austria; died August 11, 1942 near Kurganinsk) was an Austrian nobleman and location scout for Sun Valley.

His father was Count Franz de Paula Schaffgotsche, a major in the cavalry and aide-de-camp (Flügeladjutant) to Emperor Franz Joseph I.^[1][2] His mother Aglaë, née Witt von Dörring, was a granddaughter of Ferdinand Johannes Wit, genannt von Dörring and, via her maternal forebears, a descendant of the princely Auersperg family. Through his paternal lineage, Schaffgotsche was one of the last descendants of the Bohemian line of the Schaffgotsch family; this branch–which varied the spelling of the surname slightly from that favored by their Lower-Silesian cousins–was extinguished with the death of Schaffgotsche’s younger brother Friedrich in 1993.

Schaffgotsche grew up in Linz and Altmünster, Upper Austria in the milieu of the high nobility. His father’s early death in 1907 and the repercussions of World War I, including the loss of his mother’s fortune at the end of it, were the formative events of his childhood. He was schooled first in Linz at the Kaiser Franz Joseph Staatsoberrealschule and then in Vienna at the Theresianische Akademie, where his elder brother Franz died while in attendance in 1919, rendering him head of his family line. He attained his baccalaureate at the Bundesgymnasium Freistadt in 1924.^[3]

His early career path led him from Donaueschingen, where he was in the employ of close relatives in the Fürstenberg family, to the Netherlands. In Amsterdam he switched to private banking and then continued in the same sector at M. Samuel & Co. (see Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted) in London in 1929/30 as well as at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York in 1930/31.^[4][5] His business ties to W. Averell Harriman broadened into a friendship that flourished during the 1930s. At the outset of that decade, Schaffgotsche founded a separate hunting venture, the Jagd-büro ‘Austria’, together with his relative and lifelong friend Prince Tassilo zu Fürstenberg, who would later marry Clara Agnelli and become father-in-law to Diane von Fürstenberg.^[6]

In 1935 Harriman hired the gregarious and well-connected Schaffgotsche as a location scout for what was to become Sun Valley resort. After nearly two months of travel on the Union Pacific Railroad, taking him on a broad swath through the western United States and during which he kept a detailed journal, Schaffgotsche arrived at Ketchum, Idaho in late January 1936. He quickly recognized the site’s potential.^[7] Collaborating with Harriman in the development of Sun Valley, which opened in December of the same year, Schaffgotsche stayed on into the spring of 1937, returning again for the winter seasons 1937/38 and 1938/39. During the intervening summers, Schaffgotsche managed the Jagd-büro back in Austria. For Sun Valley he organized the hiring of ski school instructors (such as Hans Hauser) and myriad other details, conceptualized future development together with Harriman and others, played the part of animateur and promoter, and socialized with high-level guests as Harriman’s stand-in during his absences.

Over the course of the 1930s Schaffgotsche’s sympathies toward the Nazi regime grew pronounced, yet he did not join the NSDAP.^[8] In his travels between Europe and Sun Valley he became friends with the actor David Niven, who visited Schaffgotsche in Sun Valley during the winter of 1938 and included tales of him in his 1971 memoir The Moon’s a Balloon. It was there that Niven made the inaccurate and misleading assertion that Schaffgotsche had ties to the SS^[9], a claim that has formed the basis for much unsourced speculation in our own age. Records in German state archives show that Schaffgotsche absolved his initial military training in the fall of 1938 with a Wehrmacht anti-tank artillery unit (Kornwestheim 4 [E] Pz. Abw. 25) at Kornwestheim near Stuttgart and ultimately joined the Wehrmacht Lehrregiment Brandenburg z.b.V. 800 in the summer of 1940, rising then to the position of Unteroffizier, or corporal.^[10] Having volunteered for frontline duty, he was first dispatched to Normandy as part of Operation Sea Lion, and then, with the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, to the Caucasus, where he was injured in battle—shot in the chest/lung—in July 1941. After a lengthy but incomplete recovery, he returned to the front in the summer of 1942. He was shot again in battle, bleeding to death internally in Kurganinsk on August 11, 1942 and was buried there in the days to follow.

Michael Huey, Unpredictable Weather. The Sunny, Surprising, Sad Case of Count Felix ‘Wetti’ Schaffgotsche 1904-1942, Album Verlag, Vienna 2026, ISBN 978-3-85164-222-3.

A. Kuzio-Podrucki, Das Haus Schaffgotsch. Das wechselvolle Schicksal einer schlesischen Adelsdynastie, Tarnowskie Góry 2009, ISBN 978-83-61458-32-6 (German).

John Lundin, Skiing Sun Valley—A History from Union Pacific to the Holdings, The History Press, Charleston 2020, ISBN 9781467143936.

Andreas Praher, Österreichs Skisport im Nationalsozialismus. Anpassung-Verfolgung-Kollaboration, Oldenbourg, Munich 2021, ISBN 978-3110724103 (German).