Among other things, Trapp bought seven bottles of water from the Jordan River which were later used to baptize his first seven children. On the voyage home he visited the Holy Land where he met a Franciscan monk who took him on a tour of all the Biblical sites he wanted to see. He graduated four years later and completed two years of follow-on training voyages, including one to Australia. In 1894, aged fourteen, the young Trapp followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy, entering the naval academy at Fiume (now Rijeka). His older sister was the Austrian artist Hede von Trapp, and his brother, Werner, died in 1915 during the First World War.

Ritter is roughly the equivalent of a baronet in the UK, who is a hereditary knight, but not a peer: the Ritter is a knight with a hereditary title and is noble above the lowest rank of Edel (noble) and below Freiherr (baron), Graf (count), and Herzog (duke).Īugust Ritter von Trapp died in 1884, when Georg was four. His father, Fregattenkapitän August Trapp, was a naval officer who had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in 1876, which entitled him and his descendants to the style of Ritter (Knight) von in the case of male and von in the case of female offspring. Georg Johannes Ritter von Trapp (4 April 1880 – ) was born in Zara, Kingdom of Dalmatia, then a Crown Land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Zadar, Croatia). 5 Departure from Austria and later life.The story of his family served as the inspiration for the musical The Sound of Music (1959). Fearing arrest, Trapp fled with his family to the United States, where he set up a farm and lived the remainder of his life there until his death in 1947. The family came under increasing persecution from the Nazis after the Anschluss, when Trapp refused to serve in the German Navy due to his opposition to Nazi ideology. Five years later, Trapp married his children's tutor Maria Augusta Kutschera, who trained the children to perform at various events as a way of earning a livelihood after most of the family's wealth was wiped out in a failed banking venture. Under his command, the submarines SM U-5 and SM U-14 sank 13 Allied ships totaling about 45,669 gross register tons (GRT).įollowing Austro-Hungary's defeat and subsequent collapse, Trapp returned to his family but lost his first wife to scarlet fever, in 1922. His naval exploits during World War I earned him numerous decorations, including the prestigious Military Order of Maria Theresa.

Lieutenant Georg von Trapp and Agathe Whitehead about 1910Ĭorvette Captain Georg Johannes, Ritter von Trapp (4 April 1880 – ), often incorrectly referred to as Baron (Freiherr) von Trapp, was an Austro-Hungarian Navy officer. Knight's Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa (1915) Submarine base commander at Cattaro (May–November 1918) SM U-14 (captured French submarine Curie) (October 1915 – May 1918) Zara, Kingdom of Dalmatia, Austria-Hungary (present-day Zadar, Croatia)Īgatha Whitehead (1891–1922) ( m. 1911–22) (7 children) Incorporates information from the article in the German Wikipedia Georg von Trapp

Captain george von trapp