Von Trapp.

This is coolbert:

The "Sound of Music" - - the untold story!

Baron von Trapp as played by the British actor Christopher Plummer in actuality during the First World War an outstanding and heroic even officer of the Austro-Hungarian navy a nobleman serving nobly in a losing cause, a submariner of repute and accomplished in combat.

From the Al Nofi StrategyPage CIC # 386:

"The k.u.k. Kriegsmarine Helps Create a Musical Legend"

The man named to be the first commander of the U-6 was Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp, the dashing 30-year-old scion of an old naval family.  Among the guests at the commissioning was the woman who had christened the U-6 the previous June, 20-year-old Fräulein Agathe Whitehead, the rather wealthy granddaughter of Robert Whitehead (who invented the 'automobile torpedo' and founded the Whitehead shipyards).  Agathe and Georg married shortly afterwards."

"During World War I, Baron von Trapp proved one of Austria-Hungary’s greatest naval heroes, completing 19 war patrols in various submarines, accounting for 11 merchant vessels sunk for a total of 45,669 tons, as well as a French armored cruiser and an Italian destroyer, not to mention at least one ship captured.  Meanwhile, the Baron and Agathe began a family, which numbered seven children by 1922, when Agathe died."

The first wife of Baron von Trapp the granddaughter of the man [Whitehead] generally credited with inventing the torpedo as we understand the weapon today. The Baron remarrying to the famous Maria, the family of singers eventually "attaining fame in America"!

"The Baron remarried in 1927, to Maria Augusta Kutschera, with whom he had three more children.  A decade later, the entire family fled Austria and the Nazi threat, settling in America and attaining fame as the 'Trapp Family Singers.'”

And for the rest of the story, according to the revisionist Mark Weber, Hollywood taking a lot of artistic license inventing a fable generally believed as true, embellished to a great extent but however not without foundation:

"What really happened?"

"According to the movie, the head of the von Trapp family decides to flee the country with his wife and children to avoid having to serve in the German navy. While it's true that Georg Ludwig von Trapp, who is played in the movie by Christopher Plummer, was a monarchist who was hostile to Hitler and National Socialism, he was never forced to choose between service in the German armed forces or emigration from the country."

"In the movie, the von Trapps flee Austria in secret, hiking over the mountains into Switzerland carrying their suitcases and musical instruments. In reality, they left the country by train, and they did so quite openly. And instead of going to Switzerland they traveled to Italy before ultimately settling in the United States. As daughter Maria said years later in an interview: 'We did tell people that we were going to America to sing. And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing,'"

Personally, Mark Weber has made a much to-do about nothing? Baron von Trapp was indeed a war hero with a large family and opposed to Hitler [albeit a monarchist and not a democrat] but please, allow for the story-telling some allowance for "embellishment" and fiction, slight but not excessive!!

coolbert.