Hitler's Spy Princess Read online

  I have been told how staunchly and warmly you have spoken up in your circles on behalf of the new Germany and its vital needs, in the past year. I am well aware that this has caused you a number of unpleasant experiences, and would therefore like to express to you, highly esteemed Princess, my sincere thanks for the great understanding that you have shown for Germany as a whole and for my work in particular.

  I add to these thanks my warmest best wishes for the New Year and remain, with devoted greetings,

  Yours,

  Adolf Hitler

  On 31 December 1937 a telegram was despatched from the Obersalzberg to Princess Hohenlohe at the Dorchester hotel in London: ‘A happy New Year and best love. Fr.’ It seems that Stephanie would have to see in the New Year without her lover, but no doubt in pleasant company, with the champagne flowing freely. But Fritz Wiedemann was certainly not bored that New Year’s Eve. At that time, on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s powerful adjutant was very close to Eva Braun’s younger sister, Gretl. Wiedemann conceived a great affection for this still unmarried sister of Hitler’s mistress.

  Stephanie made another trip to the United States in February 1938, this time on express instructions from Wiedemann. She travelled once again on the MS Europa with her maid and a new friend, Madame Charalambos Sinopoulos, the wife of the Greek ambassador in London. Needless to say, all three travelled at the expense of the German Reich. But this time she came across a man who did not succumb to her charms. He was Ralph Ingersoll, the publisher of Time magazine in New York. Before she left, Wiedemann wrote to her in London:

  Dear Princess,

  As promised I am enclosing an article, which we can assume would have a favourable impact, if it were to be published in Time magazine. As you know, Herr Ingersoll owes us a favour. So that you can see our position on this question, I am also sending you the document sent from Hamburg to Herr Feldmann on 29 January. This paper, which in fact contains important hints, is based on the mistaken assumption that I wanted to sign the article. There is no question of that. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wants to can sign this article. The important thing is that it gets published. So, please do your best and don’t disappoint us!

  With the German salute

  Your very devoted servant

  Wiedemann

  Adjutant to the Führer

  The four-page article entitled ‘Hitler as Architect’, was written by Helmuth von Feldmann, a member of Goebbels’ staff. It culminated in this crass statement: ‘As a statesman Hitler is an architect, as an architect he is a statesman.’ This was meant to convince people that Hitler was in favour of peace, for surely all the magnificent buildings he created were not meant to be destroyed in another war. However, the pro-Hitler article did not in fact appear, since the princess was unable to get an appointment with the publisher during her eight-week stay.

  Full of longing, Stephanie sent a telegram to her ‘dear Fritz’. She was feeling so unhappy about the painful separation from him. She missed him terribly. But at the same time she kept in close touch with her other lover, the opera singer Lawrence Tibbett, who was on tour in Cleveland. She met him several times there.

  Then, however, Time did draw the public’s attention to Adolf Hitler in a dramatic way. At the end of 1938, the magazine chose him as ‘Man of the Year’, and on the front cover he was billed as ‘an unholy organist’ who played on the ‘organ of hatred’.

  While Stephanie had been in America, a great deal had changed in Europe. Austria, her homeland, had been incorporated into the German Reich. At dawn on 12 March 1938 Hitler ordered units of the Wehrmacht to cross the frontier into Austria. Two days later he made his appearance on Vienna’s Heldenplatz and announced to thunderous cheers ‘the entry of my homeland into the German Reich’. A plebiscite held on 10 April confirmed with an overwhelming majority the annexation of the ‘Ostmark’, as the country was now called. Even the leader of the Austrian socialists, Karl Renner, publicly voted ‘yes’ and Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna also greeted the Anschluss ‘with joy’, and had the churches ‘decorated’ with swastika flags. Before the Anschluss, Stephanie von Hohenlohe was known as an agent of the German Reich, and people knew that she was ‘hostile towards the present Austrian government’. This fact had been reported to the Foreign Office by the British ambassador in Vienna. Now Stephanie was back from the United States, there was a Greater German Reich – and Stephanie’s ‘adversary’, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was Reich Foreign Minister.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rivals for Hitler’s Favour: Stephanie and Unity

  The Austrian princess, Stephanie von Hohenlohe, was to become the most serious competitor of Unity Mitford, the British Fascist. By this time, Stephanie was forty-seven years old and, always dressed with striking elegance, she stood high in Hitler’s estimation. But the 24-year-old Unity had made no less an impression on the Führer. Whether he was in Munich or Bayreuth, Berlin or the Berghof, he always liked to have her close to him.

  The two women already knew each other from pro-German gatherings in London and had met several times at the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg. But neither was particularly ‘amused’ by the other.

  The national rallies of the NSDAP, the Nazi Party, had been held in Nuremberg every year since 1927, and they exerted a great fascination on the public at large. They were meant to show the whole world that Führer und Volk were as one. The most solemn moment always came in the evening, when searchlights created a vaulted ‘cathedral of light’ over the parade ground. It was hugely impressive when thousands of uniformed men marched past to martial music, their arms raised in the Nazi salute, and then, as total silence returned once more, listened mesmerised to the Führer’s words. Enthusiasm for the Third Reich then welled up in their souls. Those taking part in the rallies had been selected by their local party organisers. On the podium sat special guests of the Führer, both German and foreign.

  Stephanie was deeply impressed by this ‘orgy of dedication’ with its quasi-religious character. It was in 1935 that she first attended a Nuremberg rally, as the representative of Lord Rothermere. On 2 July 1937, Fritz Wiedemann informed the Reichsleiter and ‘dear party colleague’, Martin Bormann, that on the Führer’s instructions Princess Hohenlohe had to be invited to the ‘National Labour Rally’ in Nuremberg. At the same time Bormann was alerted to the fact that the lady was likely to suggest that another important personage from England should be invited.

  Stephanie brought an English friend of hers, the journalist Ethel Snowden, widow of Philip (Viscount) Snowden, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1931, and later Lord Privy Seal, who had died in 1937. Lady Snowden wrote for Rothermere’s Daily Mail. Goebbels, in his diary for 14 September 1937, noted about her: ‘Lady Snowden writes an enthusiastic article on Nuremberg. A woman with guts. In London they don’t understand that.’ It was mainly Ethel Snowden’s Jewish friends who were unable to forgive her for being so eager to accept the way the Nazis presented themselves. Another member of Stephanie’s party at the rally was Wiedemann’s wife.

  The ‘Reich Party Congress of Greater Germany’ on 5 September 1938 saw the princess once more take her seat on the VIP dais at Nuremberg. In advance of the event, Wiedemann had sent Stephanie’s son, Franzi von Hohenlohe, the tickets for the Party Congress, and for the parade of the Reich Labour Service and also, of course, the necessary transit permits.

  What displeased the princess at this party rally was the fact that she had to share the dais with the British fascist, Unity Mitford, and her parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914–48) and her five sisters were the famous, not to say notorious, but never uninteresting Mitford girls.1

  Unity, who had first visited Munich with her sister Diana in August 1933, became an ardent devotee of Hitler, to whom she was introduced in February 1935, in his favourite Munich restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria in Schellingstrasse. She apparently found out that he frequented this hostelry from none other than Stepha
nie von Hohenlohe.

  Unity was fascinated by National Socialism, but at a very naïve level: she simply loved all the parades, the songs, and the good-looking young men in their uniforms. And she liked wearing a black shirt with a short skirt and matching black elbow-length gloves.

  In this outfit, with her statuesque figure and thick blonde hair, she resembled one of those warlike maidens after whom she had been named. That ‘crazed Valkyrie’ as her sister Nancy described her, had, through her acquaintance with Hitler, suddenly been given a feeling of great importance, so that she had no difficulty in buying his anti-Semitic propaganda and repeating it readily on every occasion that presented itself. ‘The Yids, the Yids, we’ve got to get rid of the Yids!’ Unity had recorded this refrain on wax in a studio at Harrods department store and took it with her to Germany.

  Another man for whom Unity conceived a deep affection was Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, and one of Nazism’s most sadistic Jew-baiters. At his invitation, in June 1935, Unity went to a demonstration on the Hesselberg hill, near Dinkelsbühl, south-west of Nuremberg, the ‘sacred mountain of the Franks’, where she publicly declared her fascist convictions and hatred of the Jews. She addressed a crowd estimated at 25,000 and told them of her loyalty to Hitler.

  Fritz Wiedemann was watching the young Englishwoman very closely; in his work for the Führer, he frequently had dealings with her. On a rather despairing note, he remarked ‘Strange as it sounds, Unity Mitford also had considerable influence … being a friend of Hitler. She did her own country a disservice by giving him the idea that defeatism was rife in Britain. Everything that Mitford told Hitler he took as gospel; on the other hand, those people who had made a correct assessment of Britain could not get their views accepted. In this, as in everything else, he only believed what he wanted to believe.’

  Unity Mitford complained vehemently to Hitler about his obvious fondness for Stephanie von Hohenlohe, despite the fact that the woman was a Jewess. As Princess Carmencita Wrede told Unity’s biographer later: ‘She said to Hitler: “Here you are, an anti-Semite, and yet you have a Jewish woman, Princess Hohenlohe, around you all the time.” Hitler did not answer.’2

  It is striking that Hitler showed no reaction and said not a word when Unity confronted him with Stephanie’s Jewish origins. His silence may mean that she was working for German intelligence, or was supplying him with information that he simply could not afford to be without. And precisely what game Unity herself was playing is still not entirely clear, even today.

  Unity hated the Hohenlohe woman, calling her a ‘rusée’, a wily manipulator, ‘who reported to Lord Rothermere exactly what Hitler was planning’. She also admitted freely that she was unspeakably jealous of the princess.

  Unity feared the great influence that the older woman was exerting on her beloved Führer. What the two women were really competing over was which of them could attract more attention and achieve greater propaganda value in Britain.

  Unity was incandescent with rage when she learned that Hitler had presented Stephanie with a large signed photograph of himself. She herself had received a small portrait in a silver frame, which she showed to everyone and kept on her bedside table, even when travelling in a sleeping-car. Furthermore, the jealous Unity could not fail to notice that Stephanie wore the Gold Medal of the Nazi Party. Unity for her part had only been given the normal decoration by Hitler, a round, white enamel badge with a black swastika surrounded by the words ‘Nationalsozialistische DAP’, which all party members wore pinned to their lapel.

  When the 1937 Party Rally took place, Unity Mitford was already under surveillance by the SS, who suspected her of espionage. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, could not stand the Englishwoman, and nor could Hitler’s chief adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner. The latter disliked the uncomfortably close relationship between Hitler and Unity and later objected: ‘What if she’s an agent of the British Secret Service, cleverly placed right under our noses? We should be more cautious, mein Führer!’

  On 3 September 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, events rapidly gathered pace. Only a few days earlier the British Consul in Munich had again urged Unity to leave Germany, as hordes of her fellow-countrymen were doing. Yet she continued to cherish the illusion that she was under the Führer’s protection and stayed on in Munich. If Unity’s escapades had at first only raised a smile, many of Hitler’s entourage stopped laughing when they heard that she had met with Hitler on no less than 140 occasions.

  The correspondent of Reuters’ news agency, Ernest Pope, who had stayed close on Hitler’s heels, claimed that Unity had been tireless in passing on to Hitler anti-Nazi remarks by Germans and others who were hostile to his regime, and had thus become ‘the most dangerous woman in Munich’.

  On the day war was declared Unity tried to commit suicide. She sat on a park bench in Munich’s famous Englischer Garten, pointed a revolver at her head and fired. But she survived, since the bullet lodged in the back of her skull. As a matter of ‘Reich secrecy’ she was rushed to a hospital in Nussbaumstrasse. On 8 November the errant Englishwoman received a visit from the Führer, who promised to make all arrangements for her return home.

  In a specially equipped railway carriage of the German Reichsbahn, she travelled with a doctor and nurse to the Swiss capital, Bern. From there her mother collected her and took her back to England. In 1948, after long years of infirmity, she suddenly contracted meningitis and died. Thus, in the end, she too became a victim of the war.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wiedemann’s Peace Mission

  ‘Göring and Halifax’ is the heading that Stephanie wrote over her notes about the political mission she undertook with Fritz Wiedemann. In London, on 27 June 1938, the princess received a telegram from Wiedemann requesting her to come to Berlin immediately: ‘Audience Wednesday or Thursday.’ She guessed that on one of those days she would have the long-planned meeting with Field-Marshal Göring. Since she had to attend a wedding in Berlin anyway, she flew there immediately.

  The princess stayed, as usual, at the Adlon hotel in Berlin, and arranged for a limousine from the Reich Chancellery to drive her out to Karinhall, Göring’s imposing country house north-east of Berlin.

  In the course of her two-hour ‘pilgrimage’ from the capital to Karinhall, Stephanie prepared herself mentally for the meeting with the Reich Minister of Aviation and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, the man she described as ‘conservative, most un-Nazi of all Nazis’. She recalled that the astute Joseph Goebbels had called him ‘an upright soldier with the heart of a child’. But she had been told that what he really meant was: ‘An upright soldier with the brain of a child.’

  Stephanie saw in Göring the courageous pilot and possible successor to Adolf Hitler.1 There was no man in Germany about whom the Führer spoke with such respect, admiration and gratitude. ‘What would I be without Göring?’ Hitler had confessed to the princess. And he went on: ‘What would I have achieved without him? … I may have great ideas but it is Göring who translates them into reality.’ With tears in his eyes – and they were real tears, Stephanie noted – Hitler begged Göring not to drive his car at such a reckless speed.

  Stephanie von Hohenlohe was extremely well informed about the career of Hermann Göring. She brooded over the course of his turbulent life, recalled the successful pilot who, during the First World War, had shot down between thirty and forty enemy aircraft, and by the end of the war was in command of the famous ‘Richthofen Circus’ fighter squadron. He had been awarded Germany’s highest military decoration, the Pour le Mérite, whereas Hitler ‘only’ had an Iron Cross. During Hitler’s Munich putsch in November 1923, Göring had been severely wounded. His treatment with morphine went on far too long, and he became addicted. But the princess also recoiled from the terrible things he had done. She knew of the events surrounding the so-called Röhm putsch in June 1934, the murder of the former Reich Chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher, and his wife, and other hideous crimes
in which Göring was heavily implicated. Suddenly, she had the feeling that she did not want to drive out to Karinhall after all. But then she wondered whether she should sit in judgement over the Field-Marshal. Might she not even have an opportunity to exert a moderating influence on this ‘apocalyptic monster’? Now she felt like the Devil’s Advocate. All the good things that came into her mind in connection with this ‘corpulent Nazi Lohengrin’ gained the upper hand.

  Stephanie had heard countless stories and jokes about the Field-Marshal’s overweening vanity, his elaborate wardrobe, his collection of jewellery, his passion for pomp and parades. Despite his great obesity, he was known as the ‘prancing pierrot’.

  As the chauffeur drove her through the entrance gates to the Karinhall estate, Stephanie decided to be friendly towards Göring, regardless of what fancy dress he might be wearing, and also to avoid showing any fear of the lion-cubs which he kept as pets. ‘That was how I finally met the Number One of Hitler’s twelve apostles. He was given that nickname in 1928, when he was elected as one of the twelve National Socialist Party members to sit in the Reichstag.’ The princess imagined Göring one day joining the ranks of Germany’s legendary folk-heroes, like Till Eulenspiegel or Götz von Berlichingen.

  Göring talked to Stephanie about his personal ambitions, his efforts on behalf of Germany, his relationship with Hitler and other top Nazis. In the course of their conversation she could not help sensing signs of disharmony within the party.

  Göring was keen to visit Britain. He remarked emphatically that ‘it was no bluff, that Hitler would soon declare war’. Only he, Göring, could prevent this, if he could just speak to [the British Foreign Secretary] Lord Halifax in London. Tensions within the party would prevent him from travelling there. Stephanie was to arrange a suitable meeting, but von Ribbentrop must know nothing about it. (Ironically, it was just before her visit to Karinhall that she had had the meeting with Ribbentrop, at the Kaiserhof hotel in Berlin.) Göring was anxious that Lord Rothermere should not find out about it either.