thumb|On duty aboard SM U-5
Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp (4 April 1880 – 30 May 1947) was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Navy who became the patriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. After their naturalisation as US citizens, the family name was changed to 'Trapp' without the 'von'.
Trapp was the most successful Austro-Hungarian submarine commander of World War I, sinking 11 Allied merchant ships totaling 47,653 GRT and two Allied warships displacing 12,641 tons. Trapp's accomplishments during World War I earned him numerous decorations, including the Military Order of Maria Theresa.
His first wife Agathe Whitehead died of scarlet fever in 1922, leaving behind seven children. Trapp hired Maria Augusta Kutschera to tutor one of his daughters and married her in 1927. He lost most of his wealth in the Great Depression, so the family turned to singing as a way of earning a livelihood. Trapp declined a commission in the German Navy after the Anschluss and emigrated with his family to the United States.
After his death in 1947, the family home in Stowe, Vermont, became the Trapp Family Lodge. Maria von Trapp's 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers was adapted into the West German film The Trapp Family (1956), which served as the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music (1959) and the 1965 film adaptation directed by Robert Wise.
Early life
Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp was born in Zara in the Kingdom of Dalmatia, then a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Croatia. His father, Fregattenkapitän August Johann Trapp (1836-1884), was a naval officer, and his mother, Hedwig Wepler (1855-1911) had immigrated to the Adriatic Coast from the Grand Duchy of Hesse. His father had been raised to the Austrian nobility with the hereditary title of Ritter, upon being made a member of the Order of the Iron Crown; he died of typhoid fever in 1884 (aged forty-eight), when Georg was four. He commanded U-6 until 1913.
World War I
On 17 April 1915, Trapp took command of . He conducted nine combat patrols in U-5, and sank two enemy warships. One was the French armored cruiser , sunk at on 27 April 1915, south of Cape Santa Maria di Leuca. In hunting and sinking Gambetta, Trapp achieved a notable success as commander of the first-ever underwater nighttime (and only the second) submarine attack on a vessel in the Adriatic. He also captured the Greek steamer Cefalonia off Durazzo on 29 August 1915. Some sources incorrectly credit Trapp with sinking the Italian troop transport and armed merchant cruiser , which resulted in the greatest loss of life in any submarine attack in World War I, but the ship was actually sunk by U-5 under its later commander, Friedrich Schlosser.
Trapp was transferred to the , the former French submarine Curie, which had been sunk and salvaged by the Austro-Hungarian Navy. He conducted ten more war patrols in the much larger submarine, attacking merchant ships instead of warships. Between April 1917 and October 1917, U-14 sank 11 Allied merchant ships under Trapp's command.
In May 1918, he was promoted to Korvettenkapitän (equal to lieutenant commander) and given command of the submarine base at Cattaro in the Gulf of Kotor. However, Austria-Hungary's defeat in World War I led to the empire's collapse. The territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was divided among seven countries, with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes keeping most of the seacoast. The Republic of German-Austria was landlocked and no longer had a navy, putting an end to Trapp's naval career. Trapp is ahead of Hudeček when warship displacement is added to merchant tonnage, giving him over 60,000 tons of enemy ships sunk. Hudeček is competitive on merchant ship tonnage sunk, but only when he is credited with sinking the British tanker Mitra, which was actually damaged but not sunk. When Mitra is removed from Hudeček's list, Trapp is ahead even on merchant shipping.
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
|+ Vessels attacked while in command of U-5
! scope="col" | Date
! scope="col" | Vessel
! scope="col" | Nationality
! scope="col" | Fate
|-
| align="right"|27 April 1915
| align="left" |
| align="left" |
| align="right"|Sunk
|-
| align="right"|5 August 1915
| align="left" |
| align="left" |
| align="right"|Sunk
|-
| align="right"|29 August 1915
| align="left" |Cefalonia
| align="left" |
| align="left" |Captured
|-
|}
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
|+ Vessels sunk while in command of U-14
! scope="col" | Date
! scope="col" | Vessel
! scope="col" | Nationality
! scope="col" | Location
|-
| align="right"|28 April 1917
| align="left" |Teakwood
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|3 May 1917
| align="left" |Antonio Sciesa
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|5 July 1917
| align="left" |Marionga Goulandris
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|23 August 1917
| align="left" |Constance
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|24 August 1917
| align="left" |Kilwinning
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|26 August 1917
| align="left" |Titian
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|28 August 1917
| align="left" |Nairn
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|29 August 1917
| align="left" |
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|18 October 1917
| align="left" |Good Hope
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|18 October 1917
| align="left" |Elsiston
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|-
| align="right"|23 October 1917
| align="left" |Capo Di Monte
| align="left" |
| align="right"|
|}
Orders, decorations and medals
- Knight's Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa (1924)
- Knight's Cross of the Imperial Order of Leopold
- Knight 2nd Class of the Order of the Iron Crown (1917)
- Bronze Military Merit Medal ("Signum Laudis")
- Military Merit Cross
- 1898 Jubilee Medal
- 1908 Jubilee Cross
- War Medal 1914–1918 with swords
- Long Service Cross (18 years)
- Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class (German Empire)
- Liakat Medal (Ottoman Empire)
- Order of St. Stanislaus 3rd Class (Russian Empire)
First marriage and inherited wealth
thumb|Lieutenant Georg Ritter von Trapp and Agathe Whitehead about 1910
Trapp married Agathe Gobertina Whitehead, the eldest daughter and third child of Countess Agathe Gobertina von Breunner-Enckevoirth (1856–1945), Austro-Hungarian nobility, and Cavaliere (Knight) John Whitehead (1854–1902), son of Robert Whitehead (1823–1905) who invented the modern torpedo and a partner at the family's Fiume Whitehead Torpedo Factory Trapp's first command was the U-boat U-6 which was launched by Agathe.
Agathe's inherited wealth sustained the couple and permitted them to start a family, and they had two sons and five daughters over the next ten years. Their first child was Rupert, born on 1 November 1911 at Pula while the couple were living at Pina Budicina 11. Their other children were: Agathe, also born in Pula; Maria Franziska, Werner; Hedwig, and Johanna, all born at the family home the Erlhof in Zell am See; and Martina, born at the Martinsschlössel at Klosterneuburg, for which she was named.
On 3 September 1922, Agathe von Trapp died of scarlet fever contracted from her daughter Agathe. During this period, he delivered several lectures and conducted interviews on his naval career. They were married on 26 November 1927 when he was 47 and she was 22. They had three children: Rosmarie, born on 8 February 1929,
Turning to music
thumb|left|The two eldest Trapp sons, [[Rupert von Trapp|Rupert (right) and Werner, in U.S. Army uniforms, reading sheet music on 24 January 1946]]
In 1935, Trapp's money, inherited from his (English-connected) first wife, was invested in a bank in England. Austria was under economic pressure from a hostile Germany, and Austrian banks were in a precarious position. Trapp sought to help a friend in the banking business, Auguste Caroline Lammer (1885–1937), so he withdrew most of his money from London and deposited it in an Austrian bank. The bank failed, wiping out most of the family's substantial fortune. Around 1936, Lotte Lehmann heard the family sing, and she suggested they perform paid concerts. When the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg heard them on the radio, he invited them to perform in Vienna. Father Wasner became the group's musical director.
Departure from Austria
According to Maria von Trapp's memoirs, Georg von Trapp found himself in a vexing situation after the German takeover of Austria in 1938. He was offered a commission in the German Navy. This was a tempting proposition, particularly when Georg von Trapp saw the technological advances in 1930s U-boats unthinkable compared to those he had once commanded in World War I, but Trapp decided to decline the offer out of opposition to Nazi ideology. He also politely declined a request for the family choir to perform at Hitler's birthday concert. After his eldest son also announced his intention to refuse to benefit from anti-Semitism and to similarly decline a medical position at a prestigious Vienna hospital that had just fired all Jewish doctors, Georg von Trapp realized that the writing was on the wall. He summoned all his children and warned them that no family could safely refuse three successive offers from a man like Adolf Hitler. After Georg advised them that they must choose between a life of comfort or become refugees and keep their honour, first traveling to London, before sailing to the United States for their first concert tour.
In 1939, the family returned to Europe to tour Scandinavia, hoping to continue their concerts in cities beyond the reach of the Third Reich. During this time, they went back to Salzburg for a few months before returning to Sweden to finish the tour. From there, they traveled to Norway to begin the trip back to the United States in September 1939, just after World War II broke out. In The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949), Maria von Trapp pointed out that there was a high incidence of lung cancer among World War I U-boat crews, due to the diesel and gasoline fumes and poor ventilation, and that his death could be considered service-related. She also acknowledged in her book that, like most men of the period, he was a heavy smoker.
Children
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Image|| Name || Mother || Birth || Death || Notes
|-
| ||Rupert || rowspan="7"|Agathe Gobertina née Whitehead || 1 November 1911 He was a physician.
|-
| 100px||Agathe || 12 March 1913 |||| She worked as a singer and an artist, and lived in Baltimore, Maryland. Agathe ran a kindergarten with her longtime friend of 50 years, Mary Louise Kane, at the Sacred Heart Catholic parish in Glyndon, Maryland. She had no children.||
|| She worked as a singer and missionary in Papua New Guinea, no children. In 2008 she visited the ancestral home.
|-
| || Werner || || || He married Erika Klambauer in 1948 and had four sons and two daughters, including Elisabeth von Trapp.
|-
|100px||Hedwig || 28 July 1917 || || Rosmarie worked as a singer and missionary in Papua New Guinea. She most recently lived in Pittsburgh, and had no children.|| She married Hugh David Campbell in 1954 and had seven daughters. She lived with her family in Waitsfield, Vermont.
|}
Portrayals
Trapp has been portrayed in various adaptations of his family's life such as The Sound of Music, both the 1965 film (played by Christopher Plummer) and the Broadway musical, as well as two German films, The Trapp Family (1956) and The Trapp Family in America (1958). However, these adaptations often altered the portrayal of the Captain. In real life and in the memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, written by his second wife Maria Augusta Trapp, the Captain has been described as being a warm and loving father who was always around. However, the Captain was portrayed in a more negative light in many adaptations. For instance, in the 1965 film, Georg von Trapp was portrayed as a disciplinary man who always went away and did not care for his children or their feelings at the beginning of the film. BBC Radio presented a different account of the family in October, 2009, in a play by Annie Caulfield called The Von Trapps and Me, focused on Princess Yvonne, "the woman Captain Von Trapp jilted in order to marry Maria."