Vienna, the edge of the Krater Feld, 15 January 1943

My people—Germans and Magyars, Czechs and Poles, Croats and Slovenes, Ruthenians and Italians, Jews and Romani, all who call this Empire home—

We gather today where a city once stood.

Thirty years ago, on a January morning much like this one, the heart of Vienna vanished. In an instant of light no astronomer has explained and no priest has fully consoled, two million souls were taken from us—among them my grandfather, the Emperor Franz Joseph, who had reigned since before living memory; my cousin Franz Ferdinand, who would have worn this crown before me; and countless ordinary Viennese—bakers, teachers, students, mothers—who simply woke that morning in the wrong part of a city they loved.