Hitler's Spy Princess Read online

  ‘After an evening meal in the coffee-shop belonging to the camp, and run by Mr Koch, a fanatical Nazi supporter, the subject and Wiedemann retired to their cabin for the night at about 9.30 p.m. With the co-operation of the park wardens the agents secured cabin No. 545, from which anyone entering or leaving No. 582 could be observed. Surveillance of cabin No. 582 was maintained throughout the entire night. At 8 a.m. on 30 May the subject Hohenlohe and Wiedemann left their cabin and drove straight to the General Grant National Park, where they had breakfast.’ Despite this romantic bliss, the princess claimed years later, when being interrogated by the FBI, that intimacy never occurred between her and Wiedemann. That night, as only one cabin had been assigned to them, Wiedemann had, she said, slept in the car.

  Their tour took them back to the coast, to the Café Lucca in Santa Clara and then on to the San Francisco suburb of Hillsboro and 1808 Floribunda Avenue, the residence of the German Consul-General. It was there that the Wiedemanns lived, and from now on, with Frau Wiedemann’s agreement, so did Stephanie von Hohenlohe and her mother.

  So as to have better protection from the press in California – by now Stephanie was being described as the new Mata Hari – Wiedemann made an official declaration to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin: ‘One of the circumstances under which my wife and I have taken the Princess as a guest into our home is that she is about to publish her memoirs, for which various publishers have offered her advances of up to $40,000.’

  Soon after Wiedemann’s arrival in the USA, a report on his sphere of activity appeared in Time magazine: ‘Fritz Wiedemann, Adolf Hitler’s tall, burly 47-year-old “Man Friday”, who as personal adjutant to the Führer, has already had to carry out a number of sensitive missions in Europe, was last week dispatched to a new post. He will act as Germany’s Consul-General in San Francisco. Captain Wiedemann’s job will be to calm ruffled German-American relations and make the Nazi regime more palatable to a far from friendly USA.’

  As early as 2 January 1940, the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr received the following report from one of his officials, John Wiley:

  An informant on [the Wall Street banker] Mr Kuhn’s staff reported a while back that the German Consul-General in New York, Borchers, was saying that Wiedemann has been given the job of keeping America out of a war with Germany, since both Hitler and Wiedemann are worried that Germany could repeat the Kaiser’s historic error of bringing America as a combatant into the German war. Wiedemann and Stephanie worked closely together on the ‘non-violent’ solution at Munich and we may suppose that they are now expected to perform a similar task in the United States. Borchers went on to say that Wiedemann has been sent to San Francisco as a future German ambassador, should one need to be appointed; this would suggest that Wiedemann is not persona non grata with Hitler.

  However, Wiedemann maintained that he was definitely persona non grata with Ribbentrop and that he had been sent to America because Hitler no longer trusted him.

  There is a very revealing picture of Fritz Wiedemann’s activities in the USA to be found in the Federal German Archives in Koblenz, in the record of a lawsuit in California, in which a certain Alice Crockett sued Wiedemann for a sum of money. This American woman living in San Francisco claimed to have been employed by the German Consul-General and accused him of being the head of an espionage network operating in the USA and the western world.

  Alice Crockett had found out that the German government had transferred a sum ‘greatly in excess of $5 million, to be used in espionage activity in the United States and the Western Hemisphere’.

  A number of men and women, whose names the plaintiff did not know, were on Fritz Wiedemann’s payroll. The German government and Wiedemann also employed ‘Princess Holenhole’ [sic]. Her job was to ‘contact and pay the aforementioned employees the aforementioned sums of money for espionage activity on behalf of the Government of Germany and the defendant, Fritz Wiedemann.’

  From San Francisco, Fritz Wiedemann made numerous trips to Mexico, usually to exchange secret documents. Alice Crockett went with him to Mexico herself, in the first week of April 1939. And Stephanie von Hohenlohe also travelled to Mexico, though without Wiedemann’s knowledge.

  Wiedemann was meant to devote special attention to the Panama Canal Zone and to find out ways of making the canal impassable to United States shipping.

  The plaintiff further claimed that Wiedemann had the task, ‘as head of German espionage in the United States and Western Hemisphere, to promote strife and class hatred in the United States’, and that he ‘did employ ruffians to stir racial hatred…and did pay the said ruffians from the funds of the German government…and that the defendant Fritz Wiedemann did encourage strikes of all types and kinds of industry…for the purpose of undermining the strength and ability of the United States to prepare to fight for the national defence’. Fritz Wiedemann’s ‘spy-ring’ included numerous factory supervisors, foremen and workers, especially in the steel and armaments industries. The persons named were paid by Fritz Wiedemann.

  Alice Crockett had also been told by Wiedemann that he ‘directed the activities of the German-American Bund (League) … and was active in secretly storing large quantities of ammunition in the USA, and more particularly in the eastern portion of the United States and New Jersey; that this ammunition was to be used by members of the German-American Bund in fighting against the government of the United States.’

  But Wiedemann was not working alone. On the east coast, German propaganda was in the hands of Dr Friedhelm Draeger, based in New York. Under him, the New York office was run by Dr Mathias Schmitz, while the head of propaganda on the west coast was Hermann Schwimm. Alice Crockett’s deposition did not mention the names of anyone else working for Wiedemann.

  However, it seems that Wiedemann told Crockett he was working with the famous transatlantic aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh. Wiedemann used him to lull the Americans into a false sense of security from attack by Germany. Because of his high reputation with the American public, Colonel Lindbergh was ‘the best propagandist in America for Germany and Nazism’. Wiedemann told the plaintiff that Lindbergh was ‘working for and with the Nazis’. Wiedemann also worked with Henry Ford, and the Ford Motor Company, which had important investments in Germany, in ‘furthering the German and Nazi cause in the United States’.

  According to Alice Crockett’s submission, Wiedemann had ‘serious misunderstandings…with high officials of the German government and the Nazi Party, including the Führer, Adolf Hitler himself, Joseph Goebbels, the head of propaganda, Field-Marshal Göring, and others whose exact names and titles are unknown to the plaintiff’. The issue was usually whether Fritz Wiedemann, as head of the propaganda section, was capable of performing his tasks adequately.

  Since Wiedemann was anxious to know ‘whether his work was being done to the satisfaction of the German government, the Nazi Party and the aforementioned high officials’, he sent Alice Crockett to Berlin on 1 May 1939. There she visited Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and other senior military and party officials. Everywhere she found satisfaction with Wiedemann’s activities. In respect of her services, Wiedemann had agreed to pay Alice Crockett the sum of $500 per month plus expenses. As she had worked for six months and incurred expenses of $5,000, Crockett was claiming a total of $8,000, but she asserted he had not even paid a part of this. She therefore asked the court to award her this sum of money, together with her legal costs. It appears that the court ruled in the plaintiff’s favour. In the notes left by the journalist Bella Fromm, there are also indications that Wiedemann was heavily involved in espionage and that the Panama Canal played a certain role in this, as did the building up of a German-Japanese spy network.

  Ever since Stephanie had been back at Wiedemann’s side again, there were intense discussions about the political situation, and how this terrible war in Europe might be ended. In New York, Rudolf Kommer had sent her off with some ideas which she was very keen to put into practice.

 
Hence, on 27 November 1940, there was a meeting in suite 1024–1026 of the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco between two men and a woman: the person who joined Fritz and Stephanie for ‘peace talks’ was Sir William Wiseman, former head of the British Secret Service in the western hemisphere and now a partner in the prestigious Wall Street banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.

  The object of this conspiratorial encounter was to work out a plan for persuading Hitler to make a separate peace with Britain. Stephanie von Hohenlohe had the experience and ability to take on the role as intermediary between London and Berlin. She was firmly convinced that Adolf Hitler would be delighted to see ‘his dear princess’ again. Wiedemann suggested that she should travel on her Hungarian passport through Switzerland to Berlin and personally present Hitler with an Anglo-German peace plan. In her own unpublished memoirs Stephanie genuinely saw herself as the woman who wanted to stop the war and who could have been a peace broker. She initially believed that her efforts, together with those of Wiseman and Wiedemann, would meet with success and that the war would be over by the beginning of 1941. Her son Prince Franz even published an essay to this effect, entitled ‘The Woman who Almost Stopped the War’.

  The three ‘peacemakers’ were clear in their own minds that the fighting had to be stopped and that the moment for this could not be more favourable. The man best suited to do this, they thought, was the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, whom both Wiedemann and Stephanie knew very well.

  The question also arose as to who in Germany would back such a peace plan. The first name to be mentioned was that of Crown Prince Wilhelm, then came the Chief of Police in Berlin, Count von Helldorf,6 and the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder.7 (Stephanie even mentioned the Gestapo and SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, as a possible ally, on the grounds that he was a ‘royalist’, which gives an indication of how out of touch she was with the realities of Nazi Germany.) It was not particularly clever to mention the other names in the hearing of a member of British intelligence, since it revealed the identity of potential German resistance fighters who might be unwittingly exposed.

  Trustingly, Wiedemann also informed Sir William that the German embassy in Washington and all official German establishments in the USA had received instructions from Berlin not to do anything that might mobilise American public opinion against Hitler and the Third Reich. However, Wiedemann expressed the belief that National Socialism, if only by reason of its revolutionary nature, would inevitably come into conflict with the USA.

  The 27 November meeting, which had been preceded by shorter discussions between Wiseman and Wiedemann, or Wiseman and Stephanie, was bugged by the head of the FBI’s San Francisco office, N.J.L. Pieper, recorded on tape and later transcribed as an 111-page document. On 13 January 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a 30-page summary of the meeting of the ‘peace envoys’ in California.

  Hoover’s summary includes this account of the princess’s contribution to the discussion:

  The Princess stated that she had not seen Hitler since January 1939. Wiseman then suggested that Hitler might think she was going to Germany on behalf of the British. In reply to this remark, the Princess stated she would have to take that chance but that Hitler was genuinely fond of her and that he would look forward to her coming, and she thought Hitler would listen to her.

  When asked by Wiseman just what she would say to Hitler, she replied, ‘I must say more than “war is terrible and must stop”.’ She stated she would make Hitler see that he was ‘butting against a stone wall’ and make him believe that at the opportune moment he must align himself with Britain and that such an alliance would bring a lasting peace.

  The Princess stated that she would set forth three powerful arguments: First that Hitler had failed to conquer Britain [two months earlier the RAF had beaten off the German Luftwaffe, and Hitler’s plans to invade Britain were postponed indefinitely. Tr.]; secondly that the alliance with Russia [i.e. since the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. Tr.] and Italy was of little importance compared to an alliance with Britain which would bring about a lasting peace. She stated also that ‘Mussolini is a clown, the laughing-stock of the whole American nation’. […]

  She continued that the third point in her discussion with Hitler would be to point out the strength of the American nation and that ‘anybody that told Hitler that the German Reich was stronger than the United States, was telling damn lies’.

  Stephanie pointed out to her colleagues that President Roosevelt was already technically in breach of US neutrality by sending fifty destroyers to Britain at America’s expense. A few days later, on 8 December, Winston Churchill sent a long and historically decisive letter to President Roosevelt, asking for America’s financial and material assistance in waging the war against Nazism. He ended the letter: ‘If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr President, that the defeat of the Nazi and Fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and to the Western Hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.’

  Roosevelt himself did not think much of the endeavours of Wiseman, Wiedemann and Princess Stephanie, yet he gave them some consideration. Firstly he thought Hitler unpredictable; secondly Sir William Wiseman was known to be the mouthpiece of a political group in Britain headed by Lord Halifax. These individuals were pinning their hopes on being able to bring about a lasting peace between Great Britain and the German Reich.

  It emerged from the report to Roosevelt that none of the three ‘peacemakers’ trusted each other. It can be assumed that Wiseman wanted to persuade Wiedemann to sign a statement in which he would betray his frank opinion of Hitler. In the two reports that Wiseman had sent to the British embassy, he represented Wiedemann as a genuine and serious opponent of Hitler and an honourable Bavarian officer. Yet in the discussions Wiedemann seemed very inept and frequently lapsed into German, until the princess forced him to conduct this vitally important conversation in English. Towards the end of the meeting, it was agreed that they should bypass the British Ambassador in Washington, the Marquess of Lothian, and send their peace proposal direct to 10 Downing Street. The princess remarked that Churchill knew her personally and knew of ‘the other reports’ that she had delivered in the past.

  But, as we now know, events had already overtaken Stephanie and her well-intentioned peacemakers. Despite Britain’s perilous position, Churchill’s government had rejected all earlier peace feelers put out by Germany. Churchill believed that, even without direct military intervention by the USA, its economic support would gradually turn the tide. As he wrote elsewhere in his 8 December letter to Roosevelt: ‘If…we are able to move the necessary tonnage to and fro across salt water indefinitely, it may well be that the application of superior air-power to the German homeland and the rising anger of the German and other Nazi-gripped populations will bring the agony of civilisation to a merciful and glorious end.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Stephanie’s Fight against Expulsion and Internment

  In November 1940 Princess Stephanie’s temporary visa expired. She tried to get it renewed on the grounds that, given the current political situation, she would rather remain in the United States and stay with friends. But her application was refused. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, blocked it. And he informed his subordinates about the lady:

  Stephanie von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg, who uses various aliases, is very close to Fritz Wiedemann, the German Consul-General in San Francisco…and in the past has been suspected by the French, British and American authorities of working as an international spy for the German government…The princess is described as extremely intelligent, dangerous and cunning, and as a spy ‘worse than 10,000 men’…I would like to stress emphatically that in my opinion this woman’s visa ought not to be renewed. I would further suggest that she be deported from the United States at the earliest possible moment.
r />   Stephanie’s son now had an excellent idea. His mother should go through the formalities of marrying one of her long-time friends. He should of course be an American, and then, as his wife, she could not be deported. Franzi was thinking here of Donald Malcolm, though Malcolm did not accept an invitation to come to California. Instead he suggested that Stephanie should travel down to Mexico, which she later did, but only for a few days.

  On 14 December Stephanie and Fritz Wiedemann met for the last time in their love-nest, the St Francis hotel. Three days later a police officer informed the princess that her temporary residence permit was not being renewed, and that she had to leave the country within four days, that is to say on 21 December.

  The events leading up to Stephanie’s deportation were also being closely followed at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels commented with glee in his diary for 22 December 1940: ‘We remember the “Princess” who is today destitute and has been deported from the USA. Wiedemann has completely fallen for her, sexually.’ At that moment Goebbels was sitting with Hitler in the air-raid shelter of the Reich Chancellery, as the air-raid siren had just sounded. The Führer said he did not believe the Americans would enter the war. They were afraid of Japan.

  Prince Franz, Stephanie’s 26-year-old son, was earning his living in New York as an artists’ and photographers’ model. As soon as he heard about his mother’s deportation he gave an interview to the tabloid PM, in which he understandably presented his mother in the best light. All the same, he felt it was not a good thing for her to be living in the home of the German Consul-General. He said she had no connection whatever with the Nazis, and was not even in favour with them any longer. He was anxious to tell the public that ‘incidentally, she is not Jewish, has not had any cosmetic facial surgery, and is certainly not 120 years old’.