page_title: Hugo W. Koehler
section_title: Early life and family history
hierarchical_section_title: Hugo W. Koehler / Early life and family history
caption_attribution_description: English: Oscar C. Koehler
context_page_description: Hugo William Koehler was a United States Navy commander, secret agent and socialite. Following the First World War, he served as an Office of Naval Intelligence and State Department operative in Russia during its civil war, and later as naval attaché to Poland. He was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the Crown Prince of Austria and to have assisted the Romanovs in fleeing Russia following the revolution of 1917. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his service during World War I and was the step-father of United States Senator Claiborne Pell.
context_section_description: Hugo W. Koehler was born on July 19, 1886, in St. Louis, Missouri, and named after a paternal uncle. His father, Oscar C. Koehler (1857–1902), was a first-generation German-American and second-generation St. Louis and Davenport, Iowa brewer and entrepreneur. Although it was privately rumored for much of his life that Hugo was the illegitimate son of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, who is generally believed to have died with his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, in a murder-suicide pact in January 1889 (the "Mayerling incident"), no corroborating evidence of this ancestry has been established.  The speculation was fueled by a few factors: 1) Koehler, who was reputed to be the "wealthiest officer" in the American navy in the 1920s, was apparently the beneficiary of a substantial trust fund. It was further speculated that this trust had been established by the Habsburgs with approval of the Holy See when Hugo Koehler was a child, to provide for his support and maintenance; 2) As a child, Hugo made several European visits with his paternal grandfather, Heinrich (Henry) Koehler, Sr.] (1828-1909), where he was introduced to aristocracy and elites; and 3) Koehler had the distinctive Habsburg chin.
  Ironically, in 1945, The New York Times published a story that a German lithographer by the name of "Hugo Koehler", following his death at the age of 93, was revealed to be Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, son of Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany and a member of the Imperial Austrian Habsburg family. Johann had been a witness to the tragic events at Mayerling in 1889.  Rudolf, unsatisfied in his marriage to Stephanie, daughter of Leopold II of Belgium had found romance with Mary, the younger daughter of a Hungarian earl.  Taking her along on a party to his hunting lodge at Mayerling, the young woman soon became excessively animated and sought to interject herself into court politics and intrigue.  Rudolf snubbed her for this, and in a fit of rage, the 17-year old baroness smashed a bottle of champagne over Rudolf's head, killing him.  Hearing the fracas and then a gunshot, Johann and other revelers on a nearby balcony, rushed into the salon to discover that Rudolf's valet had avenged his master's death with a single, fatal gunshot to Mary Vetsera.  The event was immediately covered-up, and the story of a murder-suicide was fabricated.  Enemies of both Rudolf and Johann, began spreading innuendo that Johann was implicated in Rudolf's death.  When Emperor Franz Joseph questioned the young archduke about these rumors in 1889, Johan became furious and broke his sword over his knee. Tearing the epaulets and decorations off his uniform, Johann threw them at the feet of the emperor, and renounced his right to the throne until such time as he might be cleared of the false accusations.  The Emperor, indignant at Johan's actions, sentenced him to lose his princely rights and succession for twenty years.  Johan then left the country and assumed his new life and the name "John Orth".  Orth and his wife, an actress, were believed lost at sea in a shipwreck off Cape Horn in 1890 and were declared dead in absentia in 1911. The 1945 story of Johan's (Orth's) survival has not been established as true.
  Koehler's grandfather, Heinrich, was born in the state of Hesse in Germany. A master-brewer trained at Mainz, he had immigrated to America at the age of twenty-one, quickly making his way to St. Louis, where German-Americans accounted for nearly one-third the population of 78,000 in 1850.  Working his way up to foreman at the Lemp brewery, by 1851 Koehler had saved enough capital to start his own brewery, and moved 225 miles upriver on the Mississippi to Fort Madison, Iowa, where he purchased a small, but established brewery and introduced lager beer to the surrounding area.  Around 1863, Heinrich, who now went by "Henry", leased his brewery to his father-in-law, and moved back to St. Louis where he bought a partnership interest in the Excelsior Brewery from his younger brother, Casper (1835–1910).  By then the city's population had swelled t
caption: Oscar C. Koehler
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