Nazi Princess (29 page)

As for Princess Stephanie’s female rivals for Hitler’s attention, the Mitford sisters: Unity was shattered by the outbreak of war between the two countries she loved. She could not bear to live with her loyalties so torn and a few hours after the war broke out she sat on a park bench in Munich’s Englischer Garten and put a bullet through her head. For days she lay unconscious in hospital in Munich, her life hanging in the balance. Eventually, Hitler arranged for her to be moved to a hospital in Switzerland, which remained a neutral country. The Führer was personally shocked and full of regret at her fate. ‘She lost her nerve just when for the first time I could really have used her,’ he was recorded as saying. In January 1940 her mother and one of her sisters, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, travelled to Switzerland to bring her home. She could not walk, and could only talk with difficulty. Above all, she appeared to her family as a stranger, a totally changed personality and in need of constant care. Unity never fully recovered and died in 1948.

Her sister Diana, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, was interned with her husband for much of the duration of the war. MI5 believed there was evidence that Mosley thought he would be able to seize power if Hitler successfully carried through with Operation Sealion, the Nazi plan to invade Britain. Had this happened the British authorities feared the Germans would have put into action Operation Willi: replacing George VI with the Duke of Windsor as king, his wife Wallis as queen and Mosley as prime minister. Goebbels, writing in his diary in January 1940, expressed that hope: ‘The Mosley people keeping their heads down at the moment. Their only, but perhaps their big chance.’
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But that opportunity never came.

Sir Oswald lived on after the war and formed yet another new party, the Union Movement, which failed to gain anywhere near the support he had achieved with the BUF in the 1930s. He and Lady Mosley took up residence in France, only a few miles from the Windsors’ home, and all four became close companions, dining together twice a week. Sir Oswald died in December 1980. His wife Diana survived for more than twenty years longer, dying in Paris in 2003 in her 90s, still sticking to her fascist views. In an interview in 1986 she was insistent that from the 1930s right up until their deaths, the Windsors shared her and her husband’s views on politics.

Hitler’s adjutant and former senior officer, Fritz Wiedemann, having been captured by the Americans following the Japanese surrender, was interrogated and then held in detention. He was moved back to Germany under guard and required to give evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in October 1945. But the extensive FBI file on Wiedemann and Princess Stephanie was never considered at Nuremberg. It was never asked for by the trial authorities. Wiedemann was credited with being part of the plot in which the chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Franz Canaris, had hoped to remove Hitler, which enabled Wiedemann to escape much of the evidence that he might have been confronted with. The tribunal hearings over, he was kept in detention until May 1948, one of only 6,656 Nazis who faced conviction for crimes following the fall of the Third Reich. He died at the age of 78 in Fuchsgrub in January 1970.

Wiedemann’s lover and co-conspirator, Princess Stephanie, outlived him by two years – but of all this cast of extraordinary characters she was the survivor. After her release from internment by the American authorities at the end of the war, she set about totally reinventing herself. As she had succeeded in doing all her life, she clawed her way back into high society in the States. She used a series of wealthy male friends, whom she either charmed or seduced, as her source of funding, and she exploited her title and her notoriety as her entry ticket to American society. First she had to contend with continuing newspaper criticism and attempts by the American immigration authorities to eject her. In March 1947 she was living in New York with her lover, Major Lemuel Schofield, who had remained infatuated with her throughout the time she was held in internment as an enemy alien. Yet her past refused to fade. In July 1947
The San Francisco Examiner
published a story saying that she was being feted in Long Island and Connecticut society. ‘The Princess is pretty well known locally,’ the newspaper reported. ‘Not favourably. She was once an ardent and well-subsidised Nazi good-will ambassador. She still is an outspoken admirer of certain Nazis. How forgiving and forgetful we get!’
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She was trying to live down her colourful past and reinvent herself, but it was short-lived. A leading newspaper columnist, Robert Ruark, with a column syndicated throughout the States, noted in March 1947 that the princess – who by then was playing a not-insignificant role in New York society – was the same Princess Hohenlohe who had been released from one of America’s ‘top security prisons for spies’. His column went on to remind his readers that she had been a close friend of Hitler and ‘his most trusted female spy’. She had arranged the famous meetings between the Führer and Lord Rothermere, and had set up the Sudetenland talks between Viscount Runciman and the German gauleiter in Czechoslovakia, Konrad Henlein, the outcome of which was the ‘glowing fuse before the world blew up’. The column continued that in Nuremberg the Allies had strung up a number of ‘her old buddies’ for similar misdeeds, and it suggested she was a legitimate candidate for similar treatment. Finally, Ruark asked how New York society could nurture a one-time member of the Nazi hierarchy to its bosom. After this attack she was seen dancing at the classy New York Stork Club which prompted Ruark to publish another jibe. Soon American society would see Ribbentrop parading in similar circumstances, he wrote. Although, of course, Ribbentrop had paid the price with his life at Nuremberg.
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After that public attack, the princess sought refuge out of the public eye on Schofield’s farm, Anderson Place near Phoenixville in Pennsylvania, although she retained an apartment at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia. They lived on the farm as man and wife until Schofield died in 1954. She must have felt her reinstatement into American society was complete when in 1953 she was named by the New York Dress Institute as one of the Ten Best Dressed Women in America. The Philadelphia
Sunday Bulletin
described her as dividing her time between fashionable society in Paris and Salzburg when not in her apartment at the Barclay Hotel on Rittenden Square, Philadelphia.
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Stephanie’s new image was shattered some months after Schofield’s death, however, when sensational claims were printed in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in August 1955, headlined: ‘Wealthy Princess filed no Tax Returns for Three Years Agents Find’. The report described her as ‘a resident alien and international cosmopolite who occupies a sumptuous suite at the Barclay’. The princess’ apartment, the news report said, could be called a ‘royal suite … Its walls are hung with priceless tapestries and paintings by famous artists, among them those of Thomas Gainsborough.’
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The newspaper was wrong about Princess Stephanie’s tax returns, but right about her late lover’s tax debts. Schofield had failed to file returns for the last six years of his life, leaving a tax and penalty liability that approached $1 million, effectively wiping out his entire estate.

In the early 1950s Stephanie applied to become a US citizen. In a letter to the authorities, Schofield had written: ‘There never was a scintilla of evidence that her presence in this country was hostile or adverse to the best interests of the United States.’
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Her persuasive powers produced a sworn affidavit in support of her bid for naturalisation, in which she was described as ‘a person of great education, intelligent and of exemplary moral character’. Before the death of her lover she made a couple of trips with him to her old haunts in Europe, visiting France, Austria, Germany and Italy. On one of these she could not resist revisiting Schloss Leopoldskron to recall the days she had spent there as chatelaine courtesy of Adolf Hitler. In Germany she also renewed her friendship with Fritz Wiedemann, no doubt to talk over past memories of the Third Reich and the Führer.

With her financial support and her home gone, and little or no benefit from Schofield’s estate, Princess Stephanie did what she had proved she could always do in a crisis – she seduced another wealthy man. This time it was multi-millionaire Albert Monroe Greenfield, the richest man in Philadelphia. She went to live with him at his ranch at Cobble Close, New Jersey, and his riches and reputation gave her new opportunities to be welcomed in American society. In 1957 she was guest of honour at the influential Women’s Press Club of New York.

In 1959 she moved back to Europe, settling in Geneva in an apartment with a living room that looked out in one direction on Lake Geneva and on the other to Mont Blanc. There she signed a contract with the magazine
Quick
to act as a consultant, much as she had done years before for Rothermere, setting up contacts with important and newsworthy people, using her title and her network of friends to open doors. She became a personal friend of President Richard Nixon and, using her influence, her contacts and her fatal charm, she arranged interviews with successive American Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In an extraordinary turnaround from Nazi spy to American socialite, she was even invited to Johnson’s presidential inauguration ceremony in Washington in January 1965.
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An ex-prisoner of the United States, denounced as a danger to democracy and to American liberty, she was now an honoured guest of the President.

Two years later she signed a contract with
Stern
magazine in Germany – which became Europe’s highest-selling magazine – to develop story opportunities. In this role she arranged high-profile interviews with President Johnson, Vice-President Hubert Humphreys and Supreme Court Judge Earl Warren, who had been in charge of the commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. Further interview successes followed, notably with Grace Kelly when she became Princess Grace of Monaco, the wife of the Shah of Iran and Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the US President. She also worked for another influential publisher, Axel Springer, who owned, among other publications, the tabloid newspaper
Bild
and the broadsheet
Die Welt
, two of the most influential organs in West Germany in the 1960s. Perhaps fittingly, given Stephanie’s own Jewish heritage, Springer was intent on making a significant contribution towards reparation of the terrible wrongs done to the Jews in Europe under the Nazis. The princess reverted to the role she had played so successfully between Rothermere and Hitler, as fixer, go-between and manipulator. But this time the part she played did not include, as had been the case in pre-war Europe of the 1930s, the role of spy.

It took longer for the British government to forgive. In 1962 the British Consulate in Geneva refused her application for a visa to return to Britain. At that time Sir Frank Soskice, a friend of the late Lord Rothermere and one of the law team who represented him in the celebrated court case in 1939, was Home Secretary. In 1966, twenty-seven years after she had left England on the understanding she would never be granted permission to return, she wrote from Geneva to Soskice’s successor, Roy Jenkins, begging for the opportunity to explain personally why the ban on her returning to London, if only as a visitor, should be lifted. Her letter asked him not to pay any attention to her MI5 file. ‘It is made up for the major part,’ she wrote, ‘of newspaper stories, gossip, hearsay and a great deal of deliberate distortion.’ She said she did not want to return to England to reside but ‘merely to clear up this humiliating matter once and for all’.
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In a postscript to the letter to the Home Secretary, she wrote: ‘At the outbreak of war, on 20 December 1939, my mother and I left London for the United States. In other words we lived in war-time London for a full three months with the British authorities’ knowledge and consent unlike so many other foreigners who were immediately interned.’ (She failed to say that the only reason she was allowed to stay was because of the court case against Lord Rothermere.) Her postscript went on: ‘A year later Mr Esmond Harmsworth came to New York and asked Sir William Wiseman to do everything in his power to prevent publication of my memoirs.’ A fortnight later she was informed by the Home Office that she was free to apply for a British visa, if she chose to do so. After over a quarter of a century, the ban on her never returning to England had been lifted.

Three months before her 81st birthday, Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst died in a private clinic in Geneva. She was buried in the village cemetery at Meinier, in the mountains above the town. Among those who attended the funeral were the Consul Generals of Austria, the country of her birth, and Germany, the country she served under the Third Reich; and the wife of the American ambassador, the country that first interned her and then embraced her as a socialite. She had played an extraordinary role during her life and had lived in an extraordinary and colourful, if duplicitous, way. The deception she practised in life even followed her to her death. The small plaque on her grave records the year of her birth as 1905 – fourteen years later than her actual birth as a Jew in Vienna in 1891!

Finally, as a postscript and as testament to how close my father was to Rothermere and to Jack Kruse, my late brother was given Conrad as one of his three Christian names, from Captain Jack Frederick Conrad Kruse. I received as one of mine the name Harold, after Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere.

Public Record Office, Kew: Two British intelligence files record Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe’s activities. The first (PRO KV2/1696) covers the years 1928–39. The second (KV2/1697), covering 1939–47, is chiefly concerned with her application to leave the UK for America and subsequent steps to ensure that she did not return.

Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, California: ‘The Prinzessin Stephanie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst Papers’, consisting of nine boxes of letters, telegrams, documents and biographical notes.