The Exile of Adolph Schwarzenberg and the Confiscation of his Property by the Nazis

During Hitler's victory celebrations on the Heldenplatz in Vienna in 1938, Adolph Schwarzenberg raised a black flag over his palais on the hill above Vienna. When the Nazis banned Jews from public gardens and parks, he opened the garden of his Vienna palais to the public with a sign saying "Jews Welcome". As a Czechoslovak patriot he and his cousin Heinrich (Jindrich) Schwarzenberg-Hluboka (whom he later adopted) refused to receive Hitler in Krumlov.

The occupying forces were immediately suspicious of him. Schwarzenberg's "anti-German and pro-Czech attitudes" were underscored in various Nazi reports.

The Gestapo intended to arrest him at the beginning of the war, but he managed to flee to Italy just in time. In 1940, the director of the Bohemian Discount Bank (Böhmische Escomptebank) reported to the Gestapo that he had met Adolph Schwarzenberg on a train in Switzerland and that Schwarzenberg had told him that he had gone into exile because he could only live in a free country, and would not return until the Nazi regime was gone. The Gestapo then seized all of Adolph Schwarzenberg's property on 17 August 1940. When Adolph's adoptive son and delegate Heinrich tried to intervene against the seizure, he was refused re-entry into the Reich and Bohemia. On orders from Himmler himself, the Gestapo arrested Heinrich Schwarzenberg and sent him to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was released in 1944 with the help of the Communist resistance group there, and spent the rest of the war as a forced labourer, but was active in the resistance.

During the war, Adolph Schwarzenberg lived with his wife Hilda (née Luxembourg) in America, where he was involved with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.