Hitler's Spy Princess Page 6

  It was known that Wiedemann was ‘downright alarming in his youthful zeal for the Party’ and that Hitler had a particularly soft spot for him. As Wiedemann recalled wryly: ‘So as to appal my Party colleagues even more, I actually wore a monocle.’

  In 1937 Hitler employed four personal adjutants: SA Gruppenführer Wilhelm Brückner; Julius Schaub, former head of his bodyguard, who had once been imprisoned with Hitler in Landsberg Castle, and rose to become his private secretary, general factotum and ‘note book’; Fritz Wiedemann, and finally Albert Bormann, brother of the ‘grey eminence’, Martin Bormann, who in 1941 became chief of the Nazi Party Central Office, with the rank of minister.

  Wiedemann made no secret of the fact that Hitler frequently gave him expensive presents, one of which was a six-seat Mercedes-Benz saloon. In 1934, through the publisher Max Amann, and very probably on Hitler’s instructions, Wiedemann received a loan of 10,000 Reichsmarks, which he urgently needed for the dairy business in Fuchsgrub. Even while serving as an adjutant Wiedemann had retained his financial interest in the dairy. The good people of Fuchsgrub must surely have been amazed when Princess Stephanie went to visit him there in her luxurious drophead coupé. She asked to be given a guided tour of the dairy and met the entire Wiedemann family. Clearly, there was no question of the Wiedemanns separating.

  At the start of his friendship with the princess, Wiedemann was given an important personal instruction by Hitler. He was authorised to disburse up to 20,000 Reichsmarks as a maintenance allowance. ‘In money matters Hitler was very generous, because he had no feel for the value of money’, Wiedemann said. He made extravagant use of his financial privilege, for the princess had her hotel and restaurant bills, telephone expenses, taxi and air fares and sometimes the clothes she bought, all charged to her friend Wiedemann’s account.

  Stephanie von Hohenlohe enjoyed Munich very much. In the summer of 1937, as she was strolling around the city, she ran into a man whom she had got to know well during her days and nights spent in Deauville: King Alfonso XIII of Spain. The monarch, who continued to cling to the Divine Right of his royal house of Bourbón y Austria to rule Spain, had left that country in 1931 but had not renounced his claim to the throne. In 1935, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, Stephanie had, at the request of the king, who was staying in London at the time, asked Rothermere if he might support Alfonso in his efforts to return to the throne of Spain. However the press baron had emphatically dismissed the idea.

  When they met in Munich, King Alfonso invited the art-loving princess to join him in a visit to the exhibition of ‘Decadent Art’, which the Nazis were currently showing in the city, in an attempt to discredit leading modern artists, especially if they happened to be Jewish. The king said he needed ‘moral support’. There were no posters advertising the ‘Decadent Art’ show, only a slip printed in red, inserted in the catalogue of the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art’, which mockingly drew attention to the other exhibition a short distance away, in the Museum of Castings of Classical Sculptures.

  King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Stephanie von Hohenlohe were among more than two million visitors who went to look at the paintings of Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Vasily Kandinsky, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí and others – works which were described by the Nazis as ‘the out-pourings of lunacy’.

  The paintings were deliberately hung badly in small rooms. Yet Stephanie and the Spanish king were thrilled by them, and felt none of the ‘moral outrage’ so earnestly desired by the National Socialists. We do not know whether the princess also visited the ‘Great Art Exhibition’ in the ‘House of German Art’, in order to be enthralled by the pure and noble creations of ‘Aryan’ artists.

  The year 1937 also brought special recognition for Stephanie. For her tireless activities on behalf of the German Reich she was awarded, with Adolf Hitler’s express approval, the Honorary Cross of the German Red Cross by its president, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As the princess was staying at the Ritz in Paris at the time, her friend, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, travelled there and personally decorated her with the medal. He also handed her a document from Hitler authorising the award.

  The year ended with a very friendly letter from the Reich Chancellor to his ‘dear princess’. In it he thanked her at length for her work and for the sympathy she had shown for the German people.

  In the following year, 1938, the princess received surprising, not to say sensational, news. On 8 June Fritz Wiedemann cabled her in Paris: ‘Recommend you come Berlin urgently as Chief wants speak you this week.’ Not even Wiedemann himself was yet privy to the fact that his mistress was to be formally honoured by the Führer.

  On 10 June 1938 the princess spent many hours with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery, where a remarkable and solemn ceremony took place: Stephanie, Princess von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, born plain Steffi Richter, both of whose parents were Jewish, became ‘a bride of the National Socialist Workers’ Party’ as the Führer pinned the Nazi Party’s Gold Medal of Honour to her bosom. The medal bore his signature on its reverse.

  This award was reserved for a tiny handful of individuals. It was presented by Hitler exclusively to long-standing party members, whose membership number was lower than 100,000, as well as to ‘those who have rendered outstanding service to the National Socialist movement and to the achievement of its goals’. Stephanie was now a de facto party member and of German blood, in other words an ‘honorary Aryan’.9

  Quite apart from the award of the party’s Gold Medal, the fact that Stephanie had a four-hour audience with the Führer caused great surprise and considerable annoyance among his inner circle. One man who was particularly incensed was Herbert von Dirksen, who had been German ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1933. He recalled that on his return from Moscow he had tried several times without success to have a personal interview with Hitler. Casting an eye towards Stephanie von Hohenlohe, he could not resist writing: ‘[Hitler] had received her for a conversation lasting several hours, a distinction that he notoriously denied the official representatives of the Reich abroad.’10

  Even someone as senior as Göring expressed amazement that the Führer should spend four hours in conversation with the princess. He told Stephanie that he was fully informed about it: ‘I know everything. It’s my job to know everything.’ To which Stephanie retorted: ‘But do you actually know everything we talked about in all that time, Herr Feldmarschall?’ Naturally, he was forced to admit he did not. But he was pleased when Stephanie, in order to quell his curiosity a little, told him that Hitler had also talked about him.

  Stephanie was convinced that ‘every one of their clique yearned to have the Führer or at least his ear, exclusively to himself. Every visit of mine to the Reich Chancellery seemed to them an impudent encroachment on their sacred privileges, and every hour that Adolf wasted upon me was an hour which he might have spent to so much greater advantage in their devoted company.’

  It is striking that Stephanie von Hohenlohe here refers to Hitler by his first name. This could indicate that she was on such close terms with the Reich Chancellor that she addressed him with the intimate Du, something that would have to be scrupulously avoided in official company. One of the few other women who were on such close terms with Adolf Hitler was the English-born Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the great composer and châtelaine of Bayreuth.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Stephanie’s Adversary:

  Joachim von Ribbentrop

  We do not know when Princess Stephanie and Joachim von Ribbentrop first met. But we do know that when Lord Rothermere invited the Reich Chancellor and his party to dinner at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin in 1934, Stephanie von Hohenlohe was placed next to Ribbentrop. In her draft memoir, the Princess goes into considerable detail about Hitler’s foreign policy adviser. She saw him as the man ‘who considered himself the one and only political authority on England in the Third Reich, and anyone who did not agree with him that the E
nglish were hopelessly decadent, that they would never stand up to fight against the Germans, and that their world empire has reached its zero hour, was a personal enemy of his’.

  Stephanie had made a fairly close study of the leading Nazis, including Hitler, Göring, Hess, Goebbels, Himmler and Julius Streicher. None of them had ever been to Britain. None could speak or write a word of English; most of them came from the lower middle class and had had very variable upbringing and education. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the one-time champagne salesman, was the only one of them with international experience. Before marrying into a wealthy German family he had spent much of his early life in England and Canada; he spoke exceptionally good English, dressed impeccably and always took care to behave like an English gentleman.

  Ribbentrop, Stephanie wrote, ‘was fairly justified in seeing himself as the only man of the world in the upper hierarchy of the Party’. However, she also saw how Ribbentrop overestimated himself when he posed as the great expert on Britain. She found his notions of Britain ‘puerile, ignorant of all deeper issues and often tragically misleading’, yet she did admit he was superficially well informed. By contrast, she felt that neither Hitler, Göring nor Hess had the first idea about Britain.

  In November 1934, as Hitler’s foreign policy adviser, Ribbentrop spent three weeks in London. He was deluged with invitations, which he gladly accepted. There he met not only Lord Rothermere and Princess Stephanie, but many others including Sir Austen Chamberlain (the former Foreign Secretary), George Bernard Shaw and the Archbishop of Canterbury. As Ribbentrop’s biographer writes: ‘It was the kind of world he liked, the world in which he wanted to move – rich, influential men, members of the best clubs, who were accustomed to the lower classes looking up to them with deference.’1

  Naturally, Ribbentrop was interested to know more about this princess who was featuring so prominently in Hitler’s orbit. So he began to look into her past, always hoping he would find some dark corner that would give him a reason to advise the Führer to be more sceptical towards her. ‘Thus, in his eyes, I became an arch-fiend, a subversive meddler, a pestilential intruder.’

  The British journalist Ward Price, whom Hitler held in high regard, shared the princess’s opinion of Ribbentrop: ‘His career was much more cosmopolitan’ than those of the Chancellor’s closest colleagues.

  Ribbentrop was born in 1892, in the Rhineland town of Wesel, the son of an army officer. He spent his youth in various countries, where he quickly learned English and French. From the age of fifteen to seventeen he lived in Switzerland and England, and when he was eighteen he and his younger brother Lothar went to Canada. He went into business there, and moved in high society, but when the First World War broke out he returned to Germany. Rumour had it that he was deported for suspected espionage activities. He joined the German army, was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and promoted to Oberleutnant.

  In 1920 he married Annelies Henkel, daughter of the enormously rich producer of Germany’s most famous Sekt, the champagne of the Rhine. Ribbentrop was an excellent violinist, owned racehorses, hunted chamois in the mountains, and played golf well. But his subsequent career was truly astonishing. In the words of the German historian Joachim Fest, Ribbentrop rose rapidly to the top despite ‘a downright dangerous lack of competence’.

  At his very first encounter with Hitler, Ribbentrop was so impressed by him that he was convinced this was the only man who, with his party, could save Germany from communism.

  The relationship between Ribbentrop and the princess became more complicated when he realised that she was the mistress of a man who had an extraordinarily powerful influence over Hitler – Fritz Wiedemann. Ribbentrop saw his own standing with Hitler now under threat from Wiedemann. And Wiedemann himself had a very low opinion of Ribbentrop.

  Ribbentrop then found out that the princess was keen to see Hitler’s adjutant made a minister, preferably Reich Foreign Minister. On this subject Stephanie’s maid, Wally Oeler, commented: ‘She always sleeps with Captain Wiedemann now, that’s why I don’t trust him. She wants to make a minister of him, come hell or high water … If he’s to be a minister, he’ll have to have done something special. So Milady is fixing it for him.’2

  Ribbentrop’s stubbornly anti-British attitude and Wiedemann’s anglophile tendencies collided. At all events Ribbentrop ‘made his personal contribution to the growing aversion to the Third Reich, which could be sensed in Britain’.3 As Stephanie assures us in her memoir, Ribbentrop’s motto was: ‘War with Britain at any time, at any cost and under all circumstances.’ Indeed, after Hitler, Ribbentrop was the greatest warmonger of all the Nazis.

  In 1936 Ribbentrop was appointed German ambassador to Britain. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Ribbentrop apparently felt this posting to be a setback in his career planning. As a typical courtier, he presumably feared that once he was away from the capital his position would be undermined by cabals and political in-fighters. The elegant London building that housed the German embassy had been remodelled during the winter of 1936–7. Its location above the Mall, the processional avenue between Buckingham Palace and Admiralty Arch, could scarcely be more advantageous. At Hitler’s request, his personal architect, Albert Speer, was summoned to London to oversee the conversion of the embassy premises. It was to be ready in time for the coronation of King George VI and was to make a special impression during the social events that would follow. The furniture was based on designs by Speer’s mentor, Professor Troost, and shipped from Germany to save on foreign currency. Even the workmen on site were German. However, Speer tells us that Annelies von Ribbentrop chose the lavish décor herself, and he felt rather superfluous.4

  The inauguration of the building duly took place in time for the coronation festivities in May 1937. Ribbentrop had invited Hitler’s adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, to a coronation party, as a member of the official German delegation, along with 1,400 other guests. But the princess’s name was not on the invitation list.

  However, Princess Stephanie was not going to accept this snub without a fight. She had to defend her quasi-official status in the German delegation. Lord Rothermere gave her the job of looking after the German guests and especially the head of the delegation, Werner von Blomberg, the Reich Minister of War, whom she was to interview for Rothermere. Blomberg had been sent as the representative of the German Chancellor and was staying at the ambassador’s private residence.

  The princess told Wiedemann to ask the Führer to have a word with Ribbentrop. When she had apprised Wiedemann of the situation in London, he broached the matter with Hitler, who ordered that the princess be invited immediately. Even so, it needed a second command from ‘on high’ before Ribbentrop decided to ask the princess to the party. Hitler even gave Ribbentrop an ultimatum, and forced him to apologise to Princess von Hohenlohe.

  So it was that the first official appearance of the ill-matched couple, the personal adjutant of the German Reich Chancellor in the company of the divorced princess, thus took place in May 1937 at the German embassy in London, on the occasion of the coronation of George VI. The reason Ribbentrop had given for failing to invite the princess – of whom even in England it was whispered that she was a Jewess – was that the British aristocracy would refuse even to meet ‘the Hohenlohe woman’, let alone spend an evening with her. However, Ribbentrop’s fears were unfounded.

  Wiedemann was also thoroughly pleased with the outcome: ‘When I escorted the princess to the reception, and she set foot inside the German embassy, I could observe how very warmly she was greeted on all sides, and everywhere accepted as a member of high society. Under the eyes of all the guests, she cleverly approached the Duke of Kent, the new king’s younger brother, who courteously got up from his chair and engaged her in animated conversation for several minutes.’

  Although Ribbentrop had predicted that as soon as the princess appeared, several guests, and notably the Duke of Kent, would immediately leave the party, on that night of 13 May nothing of the kind occur
red. The guests included the brother of the Japanese emperor, the chief of the French General Staff, General Gamelin, and senior members of the British government. Only two weeks after the reception, Neville Chamberlain would succeed the retiring prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, but that evening Chamberlain was attending as Chancellor of the Exchequer, together with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. The following year, Eden would resign over the appeasement of Germany and be replaced by Lord Halifax, who was also at the coronation party. Another, perhaps more surprising guest was Winston Churchill MP, now sixty-three years old and out of office, but constantly warning Parliament of the Nazi threat. Also present were Lord and Lady Redesdale, parents of the egregious Mitford sisters, one of whom, Unity, was to become Stephanie’s rival for the favour of Adolf Hitler.

  Musical interludes were provided by Frieda Leider, of the Chicago Civic Opera who, from 1942, was a Nazi-approved soloist at the Berlin State Opera, and Rudolf Bockelmann, another ‘official’ Nazi singer. Dancing went on until the early hours of the morning, to the legendary Barnabas von Géczy Orchestra, which was known as ‘Hitler’s house band’.

  The evening turned into a social triumph for the princess, and she relished it to the full. On this occasion she had beaten Ribbentrop on his own turf. Even so, Wiedemann observed that after this successful performance by his mistress, relations between her and Ribbentrop were not quite so strained. In Ribbentrop’s own memoirs, Between London and Moscow, we find not a word about his problems with ‘the Führer’s dear princess’.