Official
4 April 1880, Zara (now Zadar, Croatia) - 30 May 1947, Stowe, Vermont, USA
Born 1880 in Zadar. Austro-Hungarian Navy submarine commander in WWI; awarded the Military Order of Maria Theresa. First wife died 1922; seven children. Moved to Villa Trapp in Aigen in 1923. Married Maria Kutschera in 1927. Left Austria by train in March 1938 after the Anschluss. Died 1947 in Stowe, Vermont. The inspiration for the Captain in The Sound of Music.
Georg von Trapp was a genuine war hero before he became a musical character. Born in 1880 in Zadar, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he entered the Imperial Naval Academy at fourteen and spent his career in the Adriatic. During the First World War he commanded submarines on the U-5 and U-14, sinking eleven merchant ships and two warships. The Military Order of Maria Theresa, the empire’s most prestigious military decoration, conferred the “von” title automatically on its recipients. He earned it.
After the war Austria had no coastline and no navy. He bought Villa Trapp, a 22-room manor in Aigen, in the early 1920s and settled in Salzburg with seven children from his first marriage. His first wife Agathe, daughter of torpedo inventor Robert Whitehead, had died of scarlet fever in 1922. He married Maria Kutschera in November 1927.
The film portrays him as a stern, militaristic father who whistles for his children. People who knew him describe someone quieter and more musical than that, a man who genuinely loved the sea and was adrift without it. The singing group that eventually became the Trapp Family Singers was largely Maria’s initiative; Georg was reluctant about public performance.
When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, he was offered a commission in the Kriegsmarine. He refused it. His oath had been to Austria. The family left within weeks. They did not walk over the Alps. They boarded a train to Villach, crossed into Italy at the border, and made their way toward the United States using Georg’s Italian papers, which he held as a native of Zadar, Italian territory after 1920. Villa Trapp was seized and later became the residence of Heinrich Himmler.
Georg never returned to Salzburg. He died in Stowe, Vermont, in 1947, two decades before the film that made his name famous worldwide.
Locations
Built 1863
The actual home of Georg von Trapp and Maria von Trapp in the Aigen district of Salzburg, not to be confused with Schloss Leopoldskron, which served as the film exterior. The family lived here from 1922 until they left Austria after the Anschluss in 1938.
