Hitler's Spy Princess

by Martha Schad

  Stephanie must have been to Ischl quite often. Yet whenever she stepped inside the imperial mansion she was unable to shake off an oppressive feeling; she could not forget the many blows that Fate had dealt to the Habsburg dynasty: the terrible death of the Empress, the tragic suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf after he had murdered the young Baroness Vetsera; the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 of the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Countess Sophie. Stephanie only ever went to Ischl when the imperial family were absent.

  During the First World War Archduke Franz Salvator, a general in the cavalry, served as Inspector-General of Medical Volunteers, in which capacity he ran an aid operation for prisoners-of-war in Russia. In 1916 he received an honorary doctorate from the faculty of medicine at Innsbruck University, and became Patron of the Austrian Red Cross and of the Union of Red Cross Societies in the lands under the Hungarian crown. It was not long before the Princess also took an interest in nursing work.

  Soon after the birth of her son, Stephanie volunteered as a nurse and received her basic training in Vienna. After that she worked for three months as ‘Sister Michaela’ under the direction of the ‘melancholy beauty’, Archduchess Maria Theresa, who was a very popular member of the Austrian royal family. Stephanie claims that it was through the Archduchess that she first met Franz Salvator, the old Emperor’s son-in-law, and that this happened in the hospital in Vienna’s Hegelgasse. However, this account does not correspond with the known facts.

  Working as a Red Cross nurse in Vienna became too tedious for Stephanie. She wanted to go to the Front, and Archduke Franz Salvator made arrangements for her to be posted there. She gives a vivid account of her experiences. She went first to the Russian Front, to a field hospital in Lvov, which then bore the German name of Lemberg. Stephanie’s sister Milla had also decided to work there as a Red Cross nurse. Stephanie travelled with her butler and her chambermaid, Louise Mainz. As if this was not enough to raise eyebrows, the rubber bath-tub she brought with her struck people as especially odd. For a nurse, admittedly, hygiene was very important. And in order to protect herself from the stench of ether and gangrenous flesh, Stephanie almost continuously smoked the Havana cigars that she had, with considerable foresight, brought in large quantities from Vienna. She did not last very long at the Front. The medical officer in charge of the field hospital, Dr Zuckerkandl, showed no great enthusiasm for his ‘nurse’. Stephanie described him as very nervous and irritable, though a brilliant physician.

  In the middle of the First World War, on 21 November 1916, Emperor Franz Joseph died. Princess Stephanie drove to Vienna and wanted to mingle with the mourners at the Hofburg palace. However, she was not permitted to do so. Ironically, the new Emperor’s High Chamberlain, who denied her access to the palace, was also a Hohenlohe, Prince Konrad Maria Eusebius (1863–1918). So she had to content herself with the role of a spectator outside St Stephen’s Cathedral.

  Stephanie was very moved by the sight of the young Emperor Karl and the Empress Zita, as they left St Stephen’s Cathedral, together with the Crown Prince, the little Archduke Otto, to the sound of a 41-gun salute and a carillon of bells. She was convinced that ‘each individual would have willingly given his heart, his blood, all he had, and laid it at the feet of the three young people, to help them carry their new, heavy burden and make a success of it’.

  In Vienna Stephanie and Archduke Franz Salvator spent hours together in the park and zoo at Schönbrunn palace. Since at that time the park was not yet open to the public, the two could stroll there completely unobserved. But on one occasion there was a mishap: when Stephanie tried to feed a bear and stretched her hand through the bars, it bit one of her fingers. She was afraid she might develop blood-poisoning and wanted to have an anti-tetanus injection immediately. But who could drive them to a doctor? The Archduke’s hands were tied, since he had picked up Stephanie from her apartment in Hofgartenstrasse in a coach with gilded wheels, which was reserved exclusively for members of the royal family. There would have been a scandal if the public had found out that, while the court was in mourning, the Archduke has been strolling with his mistress in the royal zoological park. He therefore took her to the nearest tram-stop, so that she could go to the doctor on her own.

  Her friendship with the Archduke continued to mean a great deal to Stephanie. It was ‘genuine and heartfelt, a friendship that could only be ended by death’, as Stephanie summed it up in 1940, a year after Franz Salvator died.

  Her next assignment as a Red Cross nurse was with the Austrian army, on its way to fight the Italians at the battle of the Isonzo river, in 1917. As the Austrian troops were advancing exceptionally fast, many comic situations arose. The ditches were filled with large cheeses, wine barrels and other things that the soldiers had looted, intending to send them home, but which were now being thrown away.

  Stephanie recounted that, after the capture of Udine, soldiers had shot holes in the wine casks, got very drunk and nearly drowned. Most of them had poured vast amounts of wine into empty stomachs, often fell senseless and then lay in the wine flowing from the bullet-riddled barrels. She felt that many soldiers behaved quite atrociously in the occupied territories. But it was not just the common soldiery who went on these rampages; officers also helped themselves generously. Stephanie believed she might have done the same herself and was only restrained by her timidity, not by any high ideals. ‘All our officers took whatever they wanted.’ Count Karl Wurmbrandt-Stupach, one of her Red Cross friends, apparently despatched wagon-loads of fine glassware and antiques from Italy back to Vienna. She herself became the owner of the bed in which Napoleon slept at Campo Formio, after signing the peace treaty there a century earlier. However, she had not stolen the bed, but bought it from a starving farmer.

  In the region around Tolmezzo, where Stephanie was working in the hospital, the local inhabitants were very short of food. People often came to the hospital and offered beautiful hand-woven linen in exchange for sugar, salt and bread, and so the doctors and nurses later returned home laden with valuable items.

  Stephanie was in the town of Görz (now Gorízia in Italy) shortly after it was captured. All the houses had been destroyed and the surrounding forest completely burned down. The townspeople had fled and were living in little huts in the mountains or huddling in the abandoned trenches.

  In all her spells of duty in the different field-hospitals Stephanie got on best with patients from the Tirol, from Hungary and Russia. They could stand pain and were very courteous. She thought that the Czechs and the Viennese were the worst – always moaning, always complaining, never satisfied – at least that was her experience of them.

  Stephanie spent some time in Friuli, the Italian region bordering what is now Slovenia. She witnessed Austria’s defeat on the River Piave, in a battle that raged from 15 to 24 June 1918, when the Italians took their revenge for their humiliation at Caporetto. The princess had long ago become convinced that this war could not be won. ‘But when she tried to talk to her friends about her disillusionment, she was accused of defeatism’, her son Franz writes.

  The situation at the Front had deteriorated seriously. There was nothing to eat, either in the hospitals or for the fighting troops. Morale was far from good. Then one day Stephanie received an urgent order to leave the war-zone. All the wounded able to travel were sent back to their home countries, and there was less for the nurses to do. Stephanie set off from Trieste back to Vienna. The journey of about 250 miles took her three days and nights.

  In midsummer 1918 the princess moved with her son for a time to Grado, a resort on the Adriatic that was then still in Austrian territory and which, in the final months of the war, was a pleasanter place to be than Vienna. The armistice on 11 November 1918, which had rapidly followed the abdication of the German Kaiser, also meant the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  The socially unequal marriage between Stephanie and Prince Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe came to an end in 1920. On 29 July of that year their
divorce was formalised in Budapest. Friedrich Franz made it very clear that he wished a separation from his wife. What greatly annoyed Stephanie was the fact that only six months later he remarried, although he had sworn to her that there was no question of him marrying again. It was on 6 December 1920 that the Countess Emanuela Batthány (1883–1964), who had left her husband and three children, became Prince Friedrich Franz’s second wife.

  One of the chapters in Stephanie’s memoir is entitled ‘Europe between the Wars’. She makes no secret of having greatly enjoyed the 1920s. She was now free to do or not do whatever she chose. As she explains, in Austria under its first republic, just as in Germany’s Weimar Republic, there was a great pursuit of pleasure, especially among the rich. And yet Stephanie was well aware of the political difficulties in Germany which, having lost the war that it started, was saddled with massive reparations and – as she put it – ‘robbed Peter to pay Paul’ by printing money and devaluing its currency in order to make these payments. She also observed with great anxiety the chaos into which the Balkan states, in particular, were descending.

  In Vienna she sensed serious social unrest and thought to herself: ‘What could we, and what especially can I, as a woman, do about all this?’ She gave her own answer: ‘Nothing, except entertain the tired diplomats and ministers, in whose overburdened laps these responsibilities lie. They always like to chat with a woman after a hard day signing treaties.’ In Vienna Stephanie was among the chosen circle around Frau Sacher, the proprietress of the Hotel Sacher, which still exists today. She spent much of her time there making new friendships and cultivating them in discreet private dining-rooms. But it was also on the golf-course and in hunting-parties that she got to know rich and usually aristocratic men.

  At the time the princess was certainly not aware that the contacts she made in those turbulent and pleasure-seeking days would one day be of incalculable value to her. But in retrospect she confirmed that ‘they provided me with a “passport” that could open any door for me, and later that is just what happened’.

  The stories that Stephanie planned to write about the international high society in which she moved would, as she herself admitted, have been extremely amusing but also pretty revealing about a number of personalities in the public eye. Her anecdotes would to a degree reflect what people in those high positions said and thought.

  Stephanie then produces a list of people who, in those ‘peacetime years’ and later on, played a part in her life: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Aga Khan, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Popes Pius XI and Pius XII, Arturo Toscanini, Lady Cunard, Sir Thomas Beecham, King Gustav of Sweden, King Manuel of Portugal, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Lord Rothschild, Leopold Stokowski, Admiral Horthy (the Regent of Hungary), Neville Chamberlain, Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The Times), the journalist Wickham Steed, Fritz Kreisler, Lady Londonderry, the Maharaja of Baroda, Margot Asquith, Lord Brocket and Lord Carisbrooke.

  The princess’s drawing room in Vienna was frequented by many friends and admirers. As her son repeatedly assures us, she received a steady series of marriage proposals, but she wanted to go on living a life without attachments. One of her many admirers was George de Woré, the Greek Consul-General in Vienna. He came from an extremely wealthy Athenian family and his real name was Anastasios Damianos Vorres. He offered her the kind of life she liked. All year round they travelled together from one end of Europe to the other, and at no time did Stephanie have to worry about money.

  Then along came a rich American, John Murton Gundy, followed in turn by a married millionaire named Bernstiehl, her ‘devoted slave’, who lavished gifts on her.

  Yet Stephanie began to realise more and more that the war had robbed Vienna of its sparkle, that the end of the monarchy had brought many changes, and that now, when she went with some rich, influential galant to her much-loved Hotel Sacher, she felt she was being watched.

  The threat of inflation was very much in the air. And being the clever woman she was, she decided in 1922 to leave Austria. She managed quite quickly to find a buyer for her apartment, along with all her furniture, porcelain, and cars. Her son describes the sum she received for them as ‘astronomical’. However, she did not pay the money into a bank account. Instead, she stuffed the notes into several suitcases and headed for Paris. But then, at the last minute, probably because of the cold winter weather – it was just before Christmas – she decided to take a train to Nice. Needless to say, she did not travel alone. With her were her son Franzi and his nanny, a maid, a butler, her sister Milla, and her friends Ferdinand Wurmbrandt, Karl Habig, and Count and Countess Nyári.

  When they arrived in Nice, the party poured out from the wagon-lit, quickly followed by several dogs and any number of trunks and suitcases. After she had rented a villa at 123 promenade des Anglais, she acquired a motor-car, with one object in mind – to make a splash: it was a yellow Chenard & Walker tourer with a shiny silver bonnet and a second windscreen for the rear seats.

  Stephanie lived life to the full. She was a frequent visitor to the casino – once, as her son tells us, ‘with no brassière under her transparent muslin dress’.

  Among her friends were many Russians who had fled from the Revolution and were now living in the south of France. Many of them were grand dukes, and Stephanie had an intense flirtation with Grand Duke Dimitri. His name was also romantically linked with that of Coco Chanel, founder of the famous fashion house. Both she and Stephanie were also on close terms with the Duke of Westminster, who invited Stephanie to go fishing with him in Scotland. There she was attended by a Scots ghillie and had to spend hours practising her casts. She did not see the Duke until the evening, and after a week’s rather solitary stay in the wilds of the Highlands she graciously declined his proposal of marriage. She passed him on to Coco Chanel, who did not marry him either.5

  A very long and ‘rewarding’, in other words lucrative, relationship then developed with John Warden, an American from Philadelphia. He initiated her into the financial mysteries of the stock market, where she became very successful. For more than ten years Warden worshipped her; then he married a young Polish woman, who soon afterwards became an extremely rich widow.

  In autumn 1925 the princess set herself up in a Paris apartment at 45 avenue Georges V, in the exclusive 8th arrondissement. At that time the household employed a staff of nine. Living in the same building was a British insurance tycoon, Sir William Garthwaite. Sir William and the lady from Vienna became close, and he frequently helped her out when she was financially embarrassed. On one occasion, when she claimed to have been robbed of everything in broad daylight, Garthwaite took up the case on her behalf and after several years of dispute her insurers made good the ‘loss’.

  The following episode is also worth mentioning. Stephanie loved dogs; her favourite was a Skye terrier, whose sire had been a present from her early admirer Rudolf Colloredo-Mannsfeld. When Stephanie’s butler was taking her terrier for a walk in the park, a man came up to them and said he was interested in just such an animal. He was Michel Clemenceau, son of the indomitable former prime minister of France, Georges ‘Tiger’ Clemenceau (1841–1929). Michel was looking for a pet for his old father and immediately went to introduce himself to Stephanie; he was bowled over by her and wanted to marry her. She preferred to keep the relationship on an informal level, but it lasted for several years nevertheless.

  From time to time Stephanie von Hohenlohe lived in Monte Carlo, but the city soon seemed to her ‘as dreary as stale water’. She preferred Cannes. There she met François André, who had risen from being an undertaker’s assistant to a leading owner of luxury hotels. He also owned the casino in Cannes, where Stephanie won and lost large sums.

  She also liked to spend the summer season in Deauville, the fashionable resort on the Channel coast of Normandy. There she met the multi-millionaire Solly Joel, principal shareholder of the South African diamond company, De Beers Consolidated Mines.

  The summer of 1928 was taken up with a tour of Europ
e in the pleasant company of Kathleen Vanderbilt and her husband, Harry Cushing Sr, as well as Robert Strauss-Huppé, later the US ambassador in Colombo, Brussels and Stockholm, and a number of other upper-crust Americans.

  For a variety of reasons, the year 1932 saw a major change of direction in Stephanie’s life. For one thing she had a road accident while being driven to Trieste by her chauffeur, Mostny. The car was a write-off. So the princess made her own way to Trieste and took the next fast train back to Paris. It was on that journey that she met a good-looking American banker, Captain Donald Malcolm, and for a time the two were inseparable. The greatest change, however, was that the princess found a highly paid political job working for the London newspaper publisher Lord Rothermere, whom she had known since 1925.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Mission for Lord Rothermere

  ‘A number of people have written that from the outset I was determined to play an influential part in international politics. Nothing is further from the truth.’ We find this clarification at the beginning of the notes Stephanie jotted down in the form of short headings for the benefit of her ghost writer Rudolf Kommer. Her political activity did not start until she was retained by the British press baron, Harold Sydney Harmsworth (1868–1940) who, in 1913, was elevated to the peerage as Lord Rothermere. The first time Stephanie met him was in Monte Carlo in 1925. He was a very well known figure on the Côte d’Azur; his power, wealth and influence were common knowledge. He was a passionate gambler and it was in the Monte Carlo Sporting Club that she came across him, surrounded as always by toadies and hangers-on. He invited her to a drink and from that developed a relationship that would last thirteen years.