Count Ludi Salm

Biography

During World War I, Count von Salm-Hoogstraeten served as a dragoon officer in the Austrian Army and as a military aide to the governor of Vienna. After the war he settled in Vienna, where he lost much of his fortune and properties over card games held at the Jockey Club.[36] He married his first wife, Anne-Marie von Kramsta, on 30 June 1909. His second marriage, on 8 January 1924, was to American heiress Millicent Rogers and produced one son, but the couple had divorced before he was born. Apart from playing tennis, he occasionally acted in movies because his friend Count Alexander Kolowrat, who was a film producer and owner of Sascha-Film. His director Mihály Kertész encouraged Kolowrat to offer Salm movie roles and hire him. After having been cast in a number of feature films alongside Lucy Doraine, he published a book in 1929 dedicated to his son, Peter, titled Mein lieber Peter ... beichte eines vaters. While living in Austria, he gave private tennis etiquette and fair-play lessons to Viennese children. After his financial breakdown, Salm moved to Budapest and started a wine business. He rented and lived in a second-story room in the Hotel Dunapalota-Ritz. On 23 July 1944, he jumped off the hotel balcony onto the Danube Promenade and died immediately. According to the Winona Daily News, he did so because the Nazis had arrived on the scene to arrest him for his Jewish ancestry. According to his friend Sidney Wood, the root cause behind his suicide was that the Nazi regime pressured him to engage in espionage, which he refused to do and thus the SS wanted to hunt him down. On the contrary, according to the Jewish Criterion, he was a Nazi collaborator and avid anti-Semite and chose to end his life in fear of post-war reprisals.