Otto Habsburg dies

Germany at the age of 98.
The man who was once first in line to the throne of the former Austro-Hungarian empire which covered most of central Europe, died at his home in Poecking on Lake Starnberg in Bavaria, his spokeswoman said in a statement.
The son of emperor Karl I, who reigned for only two years before the empire disintegrated, Otto Habsburg was born on November 20, 1912 in Reichenau an der Rax, now eastern Austria.
Known abroad as Otto von Habsburg, this elegant man with large glasses and a big smile was just Otto Habsburg in Austria, after the state abolished his family’s titles and confiscated their property in 1919.
But he found a calling in the European project, heading the International Paneuropean Union for over 30 years and serving as an elected member of the European parliament from 1979 to 1999 for Bavaria’s CSU party.
He held Austrian, German and Hungarian citizenship.
An ardent anti-Communist, Habsburg organised in August 1989 the now-famous “Pan-European picnic” in Sopron, near Hungary’s border with Austria, during which some 700 East Germans were able to escape to the West, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell on November 9. – AFP.