Nazi Princess (15 page)

To say Londonderry was impressed is to understate the effect the three-week trip had on him. He returned home determined to work for the relationship with Britain Hitler and Goering so desired. He was reassured that by his friendship with Princess Stephanie he would be able to maintain direct contact with the Nazi power brokers in Berlin. In a speech delivered in Durham shortly after his return, Londonderry referred to Hitler as ‘a kindly man with a receding chin and an impressive face’. He said Britain would be lacking in statesmanship if, in the event of war, it found itself engaged on a different side to Germany. Nazi organisational brilliance, he said, had enabled rapid expansion of its air force, and the German armed forces would be the strongest in the world. He expressed his conviction that ‘The German nation as a whole, and the German government, are actuated by a desire for friendliness towards this country’.
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The Londonderrys found, however, that not everyone was impressed by the enthusiastic praise they gave their Nazi hosts. The
Manchester Guardian
carried a report sarcastically headlined, ‘An Innocent’s Return’, pouring scorn on the former British Air Minister.
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He was met in influential political circles with derision. His trip, and the message he brought back, were treated with deep suspicion.

Their poor reception did not deter Lord and Lady Londonderry from writing with lavish praise to their German hosts. Lady Londonderry in a personal letter to Hitler said: ‘To say I was deeply impressed is not adequate. I am amazed. You and Germany remind me of the book of Genesis in the Bible. Nothing else describes the position accurately.’
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In May 1936 the Londonderrys hosted the Ribbentrops for a weekend at their mansion at Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland – a weekend which became christened and derided in the province as the weekend of the ‘swastika over Ulster’. Ribbentrop was about to be appointed Hitler’s ambassador to London. He was a well-known figure in London society, having been introduced by Rothermere to a number of prominent British businessmen. He was a frequent guest at some of the most fashionable society parties in London, many of them social events where Princess Stephanie also figured high on the guest list. Lady Londonderry was one of the hostesses who ensured Ribbentrop met important contacts in high society and the weekend house party in Ulster, which was given prominent exposure in the press, only served to heighten the reputation of the Londonderrys as notorious German sympathisers. Indeed, in England Lord Londonderry was considered so pro-German that behind his back he was referred to in jest as the ‘Londonderry Herr’.

The Nazis regarded their assiduous courting of members of the British aristocracy as an important diplomatic coup. They truly believed such leading people in British society, certainly those with a voice in the Upper House, had far more influence than in fact they actually had – hence the importance of Princess Stephanie’s mission to capture the sympathies of so many in the ranks of the British aristocracy. The Berlin Olympic Games of August 1936 nevertheless provided the Nazis with an unmatchable opportunity to strengthen links with those members of British society they believed important to their cause. The princess was feeding back to the Reich Chancellery information on who should receive such privileged treatment, who was most sympathetic to Nazi ambitions and who might be susceptible to persuasion. There were huge receptions in Berlin for selected foreign guests hosted by Ribbentrop and Goebbels. Most impressive of all was a massive garden party for 800 people staged by Goering. Hitler took the opportunity to welcome members of the Anglo-German Fellowship, together with the two leading British press barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook. From the Nazi point of view, the Olympics provided a world stage on which the growing strength of Germany could be paraded. More importantly, it was an event at which the fears of those deeply concerned about Nazi dictatorship and Nazi policy could be soothed. Privately, Hitler’s ambition was that after 1940 the Olympics would be held permanently in Germany in a 400,000 capacity stadium in Nuremberg, that would also be used for the Nazi Party’s mass rallies. He had asked his personal architect Speer to design such a stadium, believing that when the Third Reich dominated all of Europe, he would have the power to insist that the Olympics become a fixture in Nazi Germany.

The year 1936 was in many ways the pivotal one leading to the Second World War. It has been described as the ‘hinge of the Devil’s decade’. It began with the death of King George V, encompassed Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia, Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the battle of Cable Street in London in opposition to Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Jarrow hunger march. It ended in the Abdication Crisis. For those alert enough to recognise the signs, it was the year the world changed from a post-war era to a pre-war one.

Although the Londonderrys were unable to attend the Summer Olympics, they were back in Germany in October 1936 at Goering’s personal invitation. After a hunting trip to Carinhall, they again had an audience with Hitler, who as ever was keen to express his thanks for everything Londonderry and his wife were doing to encourage friendship between Germany and Britain. Privately, by the end of 1936 Londonderry was beginning to get increasingly gloomy about his chance of preventing war by pursuing an overtly pro-Nazi line. He blamed the disastrous attitude taken by the Foreign Office and wanted Britain to pin Hitler down on his policy options, and ensure he adhered to a peaceful policy whatever the circumstances.

In September 1937 Londonderry paid his third visit to the Nazis, again accepting an invitation to hunt with Goering at Carinhall. Goering told him that because Britain had shown repeated unwillingness to take the still-offered German hand in friendship, Germany had had to seek allies elsewhere, namely Italy and Japan. Britain appeared forever reluctant to help Germany attain her rightful place as a world power.
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Londonderry, like others who had been the recipients of Nazi hospitality, detected growing impatience from his hosts. The leaders of the Third Reich were beginning to feel that all their wining and dining of British aristocrats was producing very small dividends. Londonderry was disappointed and frustrated. His report back to Chamberlain was treated by the British Prime Minister with only superficial interest. But Lord Londonderry was nothing if persistent. In November he was invited, again personally by Goering, to attend a banquet in Berlin to launch the International Hunting Exhibition. To his disappointment, when he was in the German capital he had only a fleeting discussion with Goering and no opportunity to meet Hitler. In June 1938 Londonderry made his last trip in a final effort to try to win a lasting peace through personal diplomacy. The British government was far from keen for him to go, concerned that someone so well known as a German sympathiser would send out the wrong messages. Londonderry had the opportunity on this occasion for talks with Himmler and Ribbentrop. He also made another visit to Carinhall for a further chance to indulge in the sport he loved. But when he reported back in London, the British government was dismissive of what he had been told by the Nazi leaders. They thought he had swallowed far too much propaganda, particularly from Goering.

Princess Stephanie commented on an embarrassing encounter between Goering and Lord Londonderry during one of these visits to Carinhall. She recalled Reichsmarschall Goering asking her: ‘Tell me Princess, is it true that Lord Londonderry’s daughter is married to a Jew?’ Stephanie said there was no way she could deny that Londonderry’s daughter, Helen Maglona, had indeed committed what the Nazis called
Rassenschande
, by marrying the Hon. Edward Jessel, a Jew. If she had been a German citizen, that very fact would have been enough to declare the marriage null and void, and her ‘crime’ would have been punished by a sentence of three to five years’ hard labour. ‘Goering seemed perturbed. He threw his arms up and shouted: That’s dreadful. I made a terrible blunder. I was arguing with Lord Londonderry about race and religion and I asked him what he would do if his own daughter should want to marry a Jew.’ Stephanie said she asked Goering what answer Londonderry had given. Goering said: ‘He didn’t. Imagine, he never said a word. It wasn’t fair. He let me go on and never said a word. He should have stopped me. How tactless of him. Would you expect an aristocrat to behave like that? It just wasn’t fair.’
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As the Czechoslovakian crisis began to boil up, Londonderry’s passionate overtures to the Nazi hierarchy, after a period of three years, effectively came to an end. In the public’s view, when war came Londonderry was the most notorious German sympathiser of all. Though Rothermere’s track record of praising Hitler in his private correspondence with the Reich Chancellor, even as late as Hitler’s march into Prague in 1939, was a good deal more outrageous, it had not been public knowledge. Indeed, the bulk of that highly damning evidence remained classified in MI5 files until 2005. Rothermere’s close confidant Collin Brooks was well aware of what was contained in most of Rothermere’s correspondence with the Nazi leaders. Nevertheless, when he heard of his master’s death in December 1940, as Britain stood alone and in great danger of invasion and defeat, his verdict on Rothermere’s wooing of Hitler and other leading Nazis was generous. He wrote in his diary: ‘Everybody now seems to realise that the nation owes him a true debt both for the rearmament campaign and the attempts to keep Germany and Britain in some kind of accord.’
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MI5 noted in the late 1930s, with some obvious alarm, that Princess Stephanie had, in their words, ‘wormed her way into British society’ through her contacts with an expanding circle of aristocrats and political power brokers.
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Her charm, her devious and disarming skills and her title took her to the very top of British public life, though she failed in her mission to deliver what Hitler most wanted: an ally, sympathetic to his policies, on the English throne.

The abdication of King Edward VIII in December 1936, to allow him to marry Wallis Simpson, his twice-divorced American mistress, caused a shockwave throughout Britain. In Germany, Hitler viewed it as little short of a disaster. For Princess Stephanie it was a rare failure for the brand of intrigue in which she excelled. She had worked hard behind the scenes, no doubt on instructions from Berlin, to steer the king and his mistress further towards the Nazi cause. Both Edward and Wallis were sympathetic to National Socialism. That much was becoming disturbingly clear to government ministers. But it was a key aim of the princess, and of Hitler’s diplomats in the German Embassy in London, to keep Edward on the throne, preferably with Wallis at his side.

The princess had an apartment in Bryanston Court, close to London’s Marble Arch. It was no coincidence that her apartment was in the very same building in which Mrs Simpson was living. Stephanie had known Edward when he was Prince of Wales. He was a keen golfer and she had met him at some of the well-known golf clubs he frequented in England and in the south of France. Before and after he became king there were social functions both of them attended in London.

The Prince of Wales was not the only member of the royal family the princess knew well. She was also close to Edward’s youngest brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent, who, like the heir to the British throne, also showed a deep interest in the political philosophy of the Nazis. He regarded Hitler as a worker of economic and social miracles in Germany. He had met Hess and the influential Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, and dined frequently in London with Ribbentrop. From the early 1930s Prince George was involved in fostering closer relations between Britain and Germany, and as war loomed he was a participant in moves to avert hostilities. His involvement in the mysterious flight Hess made to Scotland in May 1941, and his subsequent death in an air crash in Scotland, has left many questions still unanswered.

Stephanie’s closeness to Prince George is illustrated by the fact that letters between them were invariably handwritten and personally signed and addressed. One letter that has survived in the princess’ personal papers is an effusive note to her from the prince dated 10 November 1934, expressing ‘a million thanks’ for the present of an expensive piece of furniture. There is no doubt the two saw a great deal of one another and shared political views. Indeed, both were at the lavish party given by Ribbentrop at the German Embassy in London to mark the coronation of King George VI in May 1937.

The Nazi hierarchy knew Stephanie had positioned herself adroitly to cultivate Edward and Wallis’ fascist sympathies, in the same way she had influenced others in the upper reaches of the British aristocracy. What was almost certainly known to Stephanie – but definitely not common knowledge in London – was that while in Shanghai in 1925 with her first husband, an officer in the US Navy, Wallis had had an affair with the handsome fascist Count Galeazzo Ciano, son-in-law of Mussolini. Ciano was soon to become Italy’s Foreign Minister in Mussolini’s Fascist government and was a key figure in the alliance between the dictators of Italy and Germany. The affair had resulted in a pregnancy, and a carelessly carried out abortion had left Wallis unable to have any more children. But the friendship persisted, and it gave Wallis a direct link to the Italian dictator.
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Edward cherished his German ancestry. He felt a strong affinity with Germany and he spoke the language fluently. Until the First World War the name of the British royal family, indeed the name Edward was born with, was German – Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Because of the need to distance the court from its German ancestry during the First World War, the royal family name was changed by George V to the very English title of the House of Windsor. Edward regretted the deep divisions the First World War had caused with his German relatives. In his teens he had been very friendly with the kaiser’s family and he had spent many of his youthful holidays in Germany in the company of his favourite cousin, the Eton-educated Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who under the Third Reich became a member of the Schutzstaffel, the SS. When the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was in London, representing Hitler at the funeral of George V, he told Edward there should be a high-level meeting between the British Prime Minister and the Führer. Edward welcomed the idea and the duke reported back to Hitler that as head of state in Britain and head of the British Empire, the new king fully supported bringing Britain and Germany closer together. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Conservative MP, leading socialite and commentator, noted in his diary that Edward ‘was going the dictator way and is pro-German. I shouldn’t be surprised if he aimed at making himself a mild dictator – a difficult enough task for an English King.’
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