Above: Helene's daughter Hanna evidently made more than one manuscript copy of the memorandum for distribution among friends. This one wound up in the possession of Gaby Tobis, sister of Mary's music teacher and close friend, Hermine Tobis. In 2022 it sold at auction for 4,096 euros.

Source: Dorotheum (Auction house).

18. Aftermath: Helene (continued)

The police, of course, were watching. They quickly descended on the printer and seized every copy they could find, about 200 of them, all of which were ultimately destroyed. But like every other effort to suppress evidence of what happened at Mayerling this one was only partially successful. An estimated 25 printed copies of the memorandum escaped destruction, one of them winding up in the Austrian National Library (Vetsera).

The Times of London bought a copy of the memorandum but the editorial office assured Austrian ambassador Count Christoph von Wydenbruck that "Publication will not take place" and that the purchase was made "for the very purpose of preventing publication in a London journal" (Judtmann 197).

Other papers were less fastidious. The Liverpool Daily Post published the memorandum in full, as did the Paris newspaper L'Éclair, and excerpts were printed in other newspapers. At least one copy crossed the Atlantic and was offered to the New York Herald.

Copies of the memorandum also survived in manuscript form. Helene was forced to sign a guarantee that she had destroyed the last printed copy of the memorandum in her possession (Jilek) but before Helene complied her daughter Hanna transcribed the contents along with an addendum that told of the Countess's efforts to extort money from Rudolf. The addendum was leaked to L'Éclair in Paris and published on September 3, 1891. The original of this manuscript was in the possession of Helene's granddaughter, Nancy Vetsera, in the 1960s.

Another manuscript copy turned up with the documents that were discovered during a bank audit in 2015 (Jilek).

Ironically, an additional manuscript version was preserved by none other than Baron Franz von Krauss, the Police President who was responsible for destroying the printed copies. Following his orders to the letter Krauss made sure that the printed copies were burned but before that happened he, with the help of three police officers, copied out the contents and filed the manuscript in his secret Mayerling dossier.