Alice Habsburg

Alice Habsburg (18 December 1889 – 26 November 1985) was a Swedish-born aristocrat and member of the Polish Home Army during World War II. Early life and first marriage Born Alice Elisabeth Ankarcrona in Hölö, Sweden, she was the daughter of Oscar Carl Gustav Ankarcrona. She grew up in Sweden. In 1911, she married Count Ludwig Badeni, a diplomat working at the Austro-Hungarian legation in Stockholm. During their engagement, she converted to Catholicism. The couple had a single son, Kasimir Badeni, born 1912. Shortly after his birth, Ludwig Badeni started to suffer from mental illness and was taken to a mental hospital. He died in 1916. Her son Kasimir inherited his father's manor house and estate in Busk, today in Ukraine. Alice was shocked by the poverty in Austrian Galicia and sold off most of her jewelry to invest in welfare and economic improvements at her Busk estates. At the end of World War I she was in Vienna. In the background of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian state she witnessed first-hand the Polish–Ukrainian War and the Battle of Lwów, where she was impressed by the Polish Lwów Eaglets, and then rejoined her son at Busk which had been looted by Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants.