Hitler's Spy Princess Read online

  A year later, Stephanie von Hohenlohe could scarcely believe it when Ribbentrop invited her to meet him for a discussion at the Kaiserhof hotel in Berlin. Ribbentrop, who by now had been promoted to Reich Foreign Minister, ran his office from a luxury suite at the hotel. The discussion that followed lasted an hour, but Ribbentrop did most of the talking. The chief point he wanted to convey to his guest was that the Führer was all too often misrepresented in the British and American press. In fact there had been no concrete reason for von Ribbentrop to summon Stephanie. Yet he knew that it was important for him to be on the best of terms with Hitler’s ‘ambassadress’ – as she referred to herself.

  Stephanie left the Kaiserhof with a great sense of relief. The reason for this was that, prior to the meeting, she had not been altogether sure whether Ribbentrop’s invitation might not have some connection with a conversation she had had with Göring earlier the same day, of which more will be said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lady Astor and the Cliveden Set

  An article in the Home News section of the London Daily Herald of 1 July 1938, was headlined: ‘Hitler’s “dear princess” must pay £46 laundry bill’, and ran as follows:

  Sued for a £46 laundry-bill at Brentford (Middlesex) County Court, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfuerst, in whose luxury Mayfair home stands a signed portrait of Hitler dedicated to his ‘dear friend, the Princess’, did not appear and was not represented …

  Judge Drucquer gave judgement by default to the laundry …

  Described on the [court] list as ‘Her Serene Highness’, the princess is one of the most powerful leaders of the Nazi colony here. She it is who provides a social platform for Hitler’s envoys – not only in this country, but in the United States, too.

  In her house in Brook St, London W., there is a huge display of photographs of many of the most prominent figures in recent political history. Hitler is among them. … Her wholehearted admiration of Hitler has led to a close friendship between the two, and the Fuehrer has given her one of the highest decorations of Nazi Germany.

  In the same year a journalist named William Hillman wrote an item for the International News Service under the headline: ‘Princess Hohenlohe bewilders Europe as Hitler’s “Madame de Staël”’. In it he named the princess ‘Europe’s Number One secret diplomat, Hitler’s mysterious courier’, and ‘a modern Madame de Staël’. Hillman believed she had a very great influence on Hitler, and also that Hitler needed her.

  Even the American press was taking an interest in this woman, who so clearly enjoyed the Führer’s favour. Thus, the US journalist Hugo George Robosz told readers of the New York Mirror this about the princess’s political influence: ‘Her apartment in Mayfair has become the focus for those British aristocrats who have a friendly stance towards Nazi Germany. Her soirées are the talk of the town. Prominently displayed in her drawing-room is a huge portrait of Hitler. So it was only natural that her efforts on the Führer’s behalf would also bring her into contact with the “Cliveden Set”, whose members include some of the most important statesmen of the British Empire.’

  The Cliveden Set was a group of people sympathetic to Germany, who advocated a policy of appeasement towards the Nazi regime. It existed alongside two other informal pro-German associations in London: the Link, and the Anglo-German Fellowship. Together they formed the basis for National Socialist infiltration of Britain, both on the political and the propaganda level. The Link received financial support from Berlin; it and the Anglo-German Fellowship were also backed by Lord Rothermere and his son Esmond. So it is no surprise that Princess Stephanie was made an honorary member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. Her most important and influential friends in this association were Lord Elibank1 and Lord Sempill.2 It was through these two members of the House of Lords that the princess was kept constantly informed about shifts in policy and sentiment within the British government.

  But Stephanie also belonged to the exclusive Cliveden Set. This informal grouping took its name from the Thames-side country house, Cliveden, near Maidenhead, owned by Lord and Lady Astor. Lady Astor (1879–1964) was born Nancy Witcher Langhorne and brought up in Virginia, one of the five exceptionally good-looking Langhorne sisters. After an unhappy marriage to Robert Gould Shaw she was on her way to Europe in 1905 when she met William Waldorf Astor (1879–1952), who in 1919 succeeded his father to become Viscount Astor of Hever. Before that, from 1910 to 1919, Astor had been the MP for Plymouth and, in the Lords, he continued his political career as a junior minister in the Foreign Office. In 1931 he was Britain’s delegate to the League of Nations. Since 1911, Astor had also owned the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer,3 and the Pall Mall Gazette, and was said to be one of the richest men in the world.4 Nancy and William rushed headlong into marriage. At their wedding in May 1906 the bride’s father made Nancy a present of Cliveden, as well as a London town house in St James’s Square. Cliveden had been owned by the Astor family since 1893. Modelled on the Villa Albano in Rome, it was designed and built for the Duke of Sutherland by Sir Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of Parliament, and stands on a wooded hill overlooking a bend in the Thames, upstream from Maidenhead.5

  In the 1920s and 1930s Nancy Astor invited a long list of important figures to Cliveden, including the Queen of Rumania, George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, the Irish playright Sean O’Casey, King George V and Queen Mary, Henry Ford, King Gustav of Sweden, and the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. Nancy occasionally played golf with the prince and paid him the dubious compliment that it required a great deal of skill to lose a match against him.

  Apart from this, Nancy, like her husband, devoted her life to social and political causes. In 1919, when Astor became a peer, Nancy took over his parliamentary seat and was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons (as a Conservative), even before women were given the vote. She held her seat continuously until 1945, concerning herself with women’s rights, state education and employment legislation, and campaigned for social reform. Her doughty duels of words inside and outside the House of Commons are genuine high points of this period. Her son David describes her as highly intelligent, and as an intuitive woman with great warmth of heart. Yet her kindness and affection for people were marred by intolerance. This trait in her character became more pronounced when she joined the Christian Science Church in 1914. She became even less tolerant towards her political and religious opponents – especially against the Roman Catholic Church, the Jews, and other minorities.

  Nancy Astor admired not only Hitler’s political leadership, but also his lifestyle. He neither drank nor smoked and this was very important to someone who had advocated Prohibition in the United States. Among the British Labour Party, Lady Astor was seen as trying to impose a pro-Hitler policy on the country. She was considered as a woman who was ‘fighting bravely for Hitler and Mussolini’.

  In London there were other hostesses who played a high-profile role in the three pro-German circles already mentioned. One was Lady Londonderry, wife of the Marquess of Londonderry, holder since 1935 the office of Lord Privy Seal, and another was Lady (Emerald) Cunard, another American-born Englishwoman. Lady Cunard, the widow of Sir Bache Cunard, maintained a literary and musical salon and was known as ‘the Queen of Covent Garden’. In 1935 she was full of enthusiasm not only for Hitler but also for Ambassador Ribbentrop, and it was said that she, through Wallis Simpson, influenced the Prince of Wales to favour Germany. It was at the instigation of Lady Cunard that the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, gave a concert in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, which Hitler himself attended.

  In 1936 Lord and Lady Londonderry visited Hitler together; in February 1937 she described Hitler as the symbol of the new Germany, as its creator and a born leader, a captivating personality and a man who possessed the greatness ‘to act in a perfectly normal way’. She was convinced that he was a guarantor of peace and of friendship with the British. He had preserved Germany from communism and he alo
ne ‘could be relied upon to save Europe’.

  Through Nancy Astor, Stephanie made the acquaintance of yet another influential hostess: Margot Asquith6 (Countess of Oxford and Asquith), the widow of a former prime minister, H.H. Asquith.7 Her political dinner-parties were famous for their sophisticated, intelligent conversation. It was a genuine honour to be invited to her political salon. Stephanie was so fascinated by this Englishwoman that she intended to devote a whole chapter to her in the memoirs which, alas, were never written.

  Lady Oxford had become a fervent admirer of the conductor Arturo Toscanini. As she often spent the summer months in Schloss Fuschl, a castle near Salzburg that Stephanie von Hohenlohe used to rent, Lady Oxford would attend every concert she could get to in the area, if it was conducted by Toscanini.

  A frequent guest of Lady Astor at Cliveden was Joachim von Ribbentrop, whom she had known since the early 1930s. Once she asked him to lunch at a restaurant in St James’s Square, not far from her London house. ‘When someone in the restaurant came up to speak to him, his right arm shot into the air and he shouted “Heil Hitler!” I said: “None of that nonsense in here, thank you.” I thought it was supposed to be a joke, but he was quite serious.’ After a dinner with Ribbentrop, the hostess wrote that Ribbentrop had talked of a very uneasy Hitler, who thought that ‘Britain would always treat him with condescension’.

  At Cliveden Ribbentrop and Nancy Astor would often engage in fairly mild battles of words. Reinhard Spitzy, Ribbentrop’s embassy secretary, recalled how the ‘intelligent’ Lady Astor was one of the people who tried again and again to pacify Ribbentrop in his tirades against Britain.

  In February 1938 a bombshell was dropped. The highly respected London journalist, Claud Cockburn, published an article in The Week, a magazine he edited, exposing the Cliveden Set. He wrote: ‘An informal but powerful pro-German group constitutes a second British Foreign Office’, and claimed that high-ranking politicians foregathered at Cliveden every weekend. British foreign policy, he said, was no longer really being made in the Foreign Office but at Cliveden. His article unleashed a storm of speculation, but no-one was able to contradict him.

  Looking back on this period, Stephanie wrote that after 1933 many people were indeed convinced that Adolf Hitler’s new Germany should be given stronger support. All the same, she considered it ‘ridiculous and futile to seek a political conspiracy behind these tendencies. The term “Cliveden Set”, which was later bandied about by influential journalists, was an exaggeration. The Cliveden Set simply consisted of a number of leading British figures, who enjoyed Nancy Astor’s hospitality over long and interesting weekends. It is correct to say that at Cliveden people frequently gathered, who had an emollient attitude towards conditions in the new Germany – but in those days “appeasement” was hardly a dirty word.’

  It goes without saying that, from the outset, both the policy of ‘appeasement’ and genuine sympathy with Nazi Germany provoked determined and influential opposition. And the one politician who showed such great foresight in his warnings and in the political line he pursued was also a welcome guest of Lady Astor at Cliveden: it was there that Stephanie von Hohenlohe met Winston Churchill.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stephanie, Wiedemann and the Windsors

  Admirers of Adolf Hitler were not only to be found in the British Houses of Parliament; but on the very throne itself, in the person of King Edward VIII.

  On 10 December 1936, after having succeeded to the throne only a few months earlier, the king abdicated, saying that he could not live without his great love, Mrs Wallis Simpson, but was not permitted to rule with her as his consort.1

  In Hitler’s view, the departure of the King of England from his throne was a disaster for Anglo-German relations. As early as January 1936, shortly after succeeding to the throne, the king had sent word to Hitler via a German kinsman, Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to say that he believed an alliance between Great Britain and Germany was politically necessary and that it could even lead to a military pact including France. It was therefore his wish, King Edward said, to speak personally to the Reich Chancellor as soon as possible, either in Britain or Germany.

  Hitler saw Edward’s abdication as a victory for those forces in Britain that were hostile to Germany. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, confirmed Hitler’s view that ‘the King had a pro-German and anti-Jewish attitude, and had been deposed as the result of an anti-German conspiracy in which Jews, freemasons and powerful political interests had made common cause’.2 Joseph Goebbels’ comment on the king’s abdication was less than friendly: ‘He has made a complete fool of himself. What’s more it was lacking in dignity and taste. It was not the way to do it. Especially if one is king.’3

  When King Edward VIII saw that he was being forced to abandon the throne, rumours circulated not only in Germany, but also in Britain and the USA, about a ‘plot behind the scenes’ to remove the ‘pro-Nazi’ monarch. The fact that, in December 1936, the German press received instructions from the very highest level to be particularly reticent in its coverage of the Abdication Crisis, shows what far-reaching consequences these events were seen to have.

  In London, Wallis Simpson found in her immediate vicinity someone to defend her love for the king. By pure coincidence, Mrs Simpson was living in Bryanston Court, near Marble Arch – the same building in which Stephanie had her apartment. And Stephanie was very favourably disposed towards the royal love affair. Edward, as Prince of Wales, had also known the princess for quite some time, having met her at various golf-clubs in England and the South of France.

  Consequently, the press barons Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, together with Princess Stephanie, stood up as champions of the king’s cause. Stephanie had floated the idea of a morganatic marriage. As the best example of this, Stephanie reminded them of the marriage between the Heir Apparent to the Austrian throne, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, and the Countess Sophie Chotek who, though well-born, was by no means of royal blood. Had the couple not been so fatefully assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, Franz Ferdinand would have duly become Emperor, but Sophie would only have been his consort, without the title of Empress; nor would children of that marriage have had any rights of succession.

  Lord Rothermere’s son, Esmond Harmsworth, invited Wallis Simpson to dinner and drew her attention to this possible form of marriage, for which she was most grateful. Yet what was feasible in other European dynasties failed in Britain. Since there is no tradition of morganatic marriage in English law, a special Act of Parliament would be necessary. On 25 November, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had a private meeting with the king, who asked him if such a measure might be possible. Baldwin said he would consult his cabinet and the prime ministers of the dominions on this question. On 2 December the two men met again, and Baldwin told the king that ‘neither in the dominions nor here would there be any prospect of such legislation being accepted’. Baldwin reported this to the House of Commons on 10 December 1936, and added that, as far as His Majesty was concerned, ‘the matter was closed. I never heard another word about it from him.’4

  Nancy Astor, Edward’s golf-partner of many years, had pleaded tearfully with him to give up Mrs Simpson once and for all. The reason was not that she was American, but that she had already been divorced twice and without the dispensation of the Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury therefore asserted that the king had no choice but to abdicate if he wanted to wed Mrs Simpson.

  Finally, on 10 December 1936 King Edward VIII ordered his Abdication Statement to be read out to both Houses of Parliament in London. In the gallery of the House of Lords the statement was heard by a woman who, as the daughter of a peer, was entitled to be there. She was the fascist, Unity Mitford,5 who had just returned from Germany. ‘Oh dear, Hitler will be dreadfully upset about this’, she wailed. ‘He wanted Edward to stay on the throne.’

  Joachim von Ribbentrop was certainly one of many who tried to use Wallis Simpson as a way of g
aining access to Edward. His admiration for Mrs Simpson was also demonstrated by the fact that during his frequent stays in London he would have a bouquet of seventeen roses delivered every morning to her flat in Bryanston Court. Those roses were a popular topic of conversation, not only in London, but in Berlin’s diplomatic circles. Even Adolf Hitler teasingly questioned his ambassador as to the secret of the seventeen roses. There was also talk of Ribbentrop sending baskets of orchids to Wallis Simpson. In Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, headquarters of the Foreign Ministry, animosity towards Ribbentrop inspired numerous jibes about the ‘pushy Nazi’ and the ‘travelling wine-salesman’.

  There was even speculation about a sexual relationship between Wallis and Ribbentrop. The constant gossip about this ‘love affair’ annoyed Mrs Simpson so much that in May 1937 she gave an interview to an American journalist, Helena Normanton, in which she stated categorically that she had only met Ribbentrop on two occasions (although they frequently ran into each other at receptions). She vehemently denied being in any way whatsoever a tool of the Nazis in London.

  But there was no denying the fact that Ribbentrop had got close to Wallis Simpson in the circles of Lady Cunard and Lady Astor, and had been able to influence her. Many people were well aware of this and the matter was even raised in the House of Commons. Speaking in the debate on the Abdication on 10 December, the communist MP and dedicated anti-monarchist, Willie Gallacher, observed: ‘The King and Mrs Simpson do not live in a vacuum. Sinister processes are continually at work … The Prime Minister told us he was approached about a morganatic marriage … but he did not tell us who approached him … It is obvious that forces were encouraging … what was going on. […] I want to draw your attention to the fact that Mrs Simpson has a social set, and every member of the cabinet knows that the social set of Mrs Simpson is closely identified with a certain foreign government and the ambassador of that foreign government.’ [Hon. Members: ‘No, no’]. ‘It is common knowledge …’ Gallacher retorted, and went on to say that the only answer was for the monarchy to be abolished altogether.