Habsburg, saw end of empire, dead at 98

BERLIN -- Otto von Habsburg saw the crumbling of the empire his family had ruled for centuries and emerged from its ashes as a champion of a united and democratic Europe.

The oldest son of Austria-Hungary's last emperor fought Nazism and Soviet communism during his long decades of exile from his homeland, and was lionized by leaders across the continent as "a great European." Habsburg died yesterday at age 98 in his villa in Poecking in southern Germany, where he had lived since the 1950s, with his seven children nearby, his spokeswoman Eva Demmerle told The Associated Press.

Habsburg used his influence in a vain struggle to keep the Nazis from annexing Austria before World War II, then campaigned for the opening of the Iron Curtain in the decades after the war.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he used his seat in European Parliament to lobby for expanding the European Union to include former Eastern bloc nations.

"My father was a towering personality," Habsburg's oldest son, Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, told the Austria Press Agency. "With him we lose a great European who has influenced everything we do today beyond measure."

Born in 1912 in Austria, Habs-burg witnessed the family's decline after the empire was dismantled and Austria became a republic following World War I. He became head of the family at his father's death in 1922 and continued to claim the throne until the 1960s.

He was a member of the European Parliament for the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union in southern Germany and also served as president of the Pan-European League from 1979 to 1999.

In that role, he was instrumental in helping organize the Pan-European Picnic peace demonstration in 1989 on the border of Austria and Hungary. The border was briefly opened in a symbolic gesture, which created the opportunity for 600 East Germans to flee communism months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the first time an Eastern European nation had opened its borders, and is widely seen as the start of the fall of communism.

Habsburg's wife, Regina, died last year. Their eldest son, Karl, now runs the family's affairs and has been the official head of the House of Habsburg since 2007.