Hitler's Spy Princess

by Martha Schad

  However, there is another version: that the introduction came about through James Kruze, an employee of his company, whose wife Annabel was a former mistress of Rothermere. However, it is not impossible that the sixty-year-old Englishman and the 34-year-old Viennese princess could have got to know each other at the gaming-tables in Monte Carlo. Lord Rothermere was having a run of bad luck and Stephanie, who was playing next to him, helped him out with 40,000 francs. It appears that in return she was given some shares in his newspaper concern.

  At any rate, after their first drink together, Lord Rothermere invited Princess Stephanie to his villa, La Dragonière, in Cap Martin. Though the princess may have hoped for another conquest, for the moment Rothermere only wanted to talk business.

  Harold Rothermere was married, but his wife Mary had left him soon after the end of the First World War, preferring a life of freedom in France where she mixed with literati like André Gide.

  Rothermere himself lived very modestly but had one weakness – attractive young women. Since he was a friend of the Russian ballet director, Sergei Diaghilev, until the latter’s death in 1929, he often romped around with ballerinas or put on evening performances at one of his magnificent residences, featuring the leading dancers of the day.

  Rothermere was the younger brother of Alfred Harmsworth who, as Lord Northcliffe, became famous as the owner of the Daily Mail before and during the First World War. In the years of Germany’s postwar Weimar Republic, Northcliffe became one of Germany’s harshest adversaries and a strong supporter of France’s position. After Northcliffe’s death in 1922, his brother took over full responsibility for the press empire that included the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Evening News, Sunday Pictorial and Sunday Dispatch.

  In the summer of 1927 Stephanie was staying with Lord Rothermere in Monte Carlo. She ran into a journalist who was desperate for a story for his paper. Stephanie mentioned in an offhand way that it might be a good idea if he wrote about the situation in Hungary. Rothermere, who was present, was very intrigued and asked Stephanie to ‘enlighten’ him on the subject. First of all a large map of Central Europe was purchased, on which Stephanie showed him Hungary, within its diminished post-1918 frontiers. In her memoirs the princess asks herself the question whether her heart would have beaten so strongly for Hungary, had she not, by marriage, become a member of the Hungarian branch of an aristocratic Austro-German family. ‘Would I have acted for Czechoslovakia, if I had married a Prince Lobkowitz instead of a Prince Hohenlohe?’ In the end, she explained her interest in Hungary by her love of its people and stressed that at the time she had no political motives whatsoever.

  Stephanie suggested that the Hungarian ambassador in London, Baron Rubido-Zichy, should be invited to Paris to hold talks about the restoration of the monarchy in Hungary. But the ambassador declined. Lord Rothermere now launched a campaign in his papers in favour of revising the terms that had been imposed on Hungary in the Treaty of Trianon, which was signed in parallel with the Treaty of Versailles. In his Daily Mail on 21 June 1927 he published an article under the headline, ‘Hungary’s place in the sun’. Not just the title, but the whole article, had been written by the princess, and proved an incredible success; the editorial offices received 2,000 readers’ letters in one day.

  Prominent Hungarians got in touch with Rothermere, and an extravagant programme for the restoration of the Hungarian monarchy was launched. A group of active monarchists even offered the crown of Hungary to Lord Rothermere himself, an idea that for a moment he took seriously. He soon had second thoughts, however, and put forward his son Esmond in his place, as a candidate for the vacant throne. All this greatly annoyed the princess, since she had been wondering whether her own son, though his Esterházy connections, might not be able to become King of Hungary.

  In 1928 the Hungarian parliament passed a resolution officially expressing the thanks of the Hungarian people to the British peer. The University of Szeged offered him an honorary doctorate ‘for his selfless efforts in the Hungarian cause’. However, Princess Stephanie advised him rather to send his son Esmond to Hungary, so that the people there might get to know him. Esmond was duly welcomed with great enthusiasm and even received a solemn blessing from the Primate of Hungary, Cardinal Serédi. On his father’s behalf he accepted a hand-built motor-car, whose chassis was made from reinforced silver and the radiator covered in pure beaten gold.

  However, it is important to note that neither the prime minister of the day, Count Bethlen – who still championed a Habsburg succession to the throne – nor the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, who was nurturing secret plans for a dynasty of his own, paid any attention to the Ruritanian events surrounding the young Englishman. Even the British government warned the Hungarians against dealing with Lord Rothermere.

  In 1932, Stephanie’s position in France was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The French government did not want anyone ‘messing around with the Little Entente’.1 There were rumours that the princess was the driving force behind the Hungarian campaign which was filling the newspapers. The Review of Reviews demonstrated clearly how she had set the entire operation in motion. She was put under official pressure to give up her activities with Rothermere. The press baron himself made no comment. Stephanie was even being accused of espionage, so she promptly quit Paris and moved with her mother and her dogs to London.

  If we read the unpublished memoirs of the former Berlin journalist, Bella Fromm, they shed new light on Princess Stephanie’s time in Paris.2 Fromm insists that in 1932 Stephanie was expelled from France because of her espionage activities. For quite some time she had been in touch with Otto Abetz,3 a German who was in France working for better understanding between the two nations. At that time Abetz was not yet a member of the Nazi Party and had no inkling that one day he would be Hitler’s ambassador to Vichy France. A memorandum concerning Princess Stephanie circulated by the US government on 28 October 1941 also mentions her expulsion from France on the grounds of espionage.

  Even before she left Paris in 1932, Stephanie was seriously short of money, since not even the occasional gifts of money or jewellery from Lord Rothermere were enough to maintain her extravagant lifestyle. So at the beginning of 1932 she had to ask Rothermere for a loan of £1,000. He did not give it to her.

  However, Captain Donald Malcolm, who had lost part of his fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, had moved to London, near the princess, and offered his services as her financial adviser. He advised Stephanie to negotiate a contract with Rothermere under which she would be employed as a society columnist. Malcolm drew up the contract himself, and Rothermere signed it on 27 July 1932. It was to run initially for three years, but he later renewed it for a further three. Her annual income was to be the not inconsiderable sum of £5,000 (about £125,000 in today’s terms). But that was just her retainer. For every assignment completed she would receive a further £2,000 (£50,000). This contract remained in force until early 1938, by which time the princess had collected well over £1 million in today’s money.

  In London, the exclusive Dorchester hotel was being managed by the former director of the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz. He offered the princess accommodation at the Dorchester at a reduced rent, because he thought her aristocratic credentials would further enhance the hotel’s reputation. However, after a short stay there, she decided to move into a private apartment of her own.

  Now that Stephanie von Hohenlohe was on the payroll of an influential newspaper publisher, a completely new life opened up for her. Her first assignment, in August 1932, took her to the country estate of Steenokkerzeel in Belgium, where the ex-empress Zita, widow of Karl, the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, was living with her children. For the journey she was about to undertake, Stephanie asked Rothermere to have a Rolls-Royce painted for her in black and yellow, the colours of the Habsburg coat of arms. The princess’s task was to give the former empress more details about Lord Rothermere’s plans in the cause of Hungary and at the same time to offer he
r an annual pension.

  According to the memoirs of Stephanie’s son Franz, published in 1976, the princess was received at Steenokkerzeel by a brother of the empress Zita, Prince Sixtus. Stephanie informed him of Rothermere’s great interest in Hungary and of his offer to provide an annual allowance for the empress, who had now been living in exile for fourteen years. The prince viewed the whole matter with obvious distrust, and demanded that the ‘offer’ be made in writing.

  However, a very different account is given by Gordon Brook-Shepherd in his 1991 biography of the empress Zita, based on research in the Habsburg archives in Vienna.4 According to Brook-Shepherd, the princess first telephoned Steenokkerzeel and asked to speak to the empress. But Zita was away in France at the time, and Stephanie was only able to meet a lady-in-waiting, Countess Viktoria Mensdorff, one afternoon at a hotel in Brussels. She presented her letter of introduction from Lord Rothermere, as well as another letter in the same handwriting, addressed to the empress personally. Stephanie knew the huge annual provision that was being offered to the empress: £30,000, equivalent to about £750,000 today.

  The lady-in-waiting gave her the empress’s address and telephone number in the French spa town of Vichy, and the princess made her way there. To this day, it is not clear whether the offer of £30,000 a year was accepted. Countess Mensdorff supposed that the money was intended for use in winning the European press over to the monarchist cause. Of the princess, she wrote: ‘I thought she might be a flirt of L[ord] R[othermere], and that she had picked a good moment to ask for the money from him, because she mentioned how Lord Rothermere took such a great interest in His Majesty.’5

  ‘His Majesty’ was in fact the pretender to the throne, Otto von Habsburg who, many years later, put the whole matter in a clearer light: ‘The Rothermere affair rose up like a soufflé in the summer of 1932. We never got fully to the bottom of it but our feeling was that it was really somehow linked to Archduke Albrecht and his ambitions to secure the Hungarian throne for himself. If, as we suspected, this was an attempt to get Rothermere, with his great wealth and influence, on his side, then it was a grave matter, because Albrecht had always been the main challenger from within my family – backed by his mother, of course, who hated my parents. Indeed this went on into the Second World War, when we were in America, and the future of the Hungarian constitution again became critical.’6 Archduke Albrecht (1897–1955) was the only son, born after eight daughters, of Archduke Friedrich and Princess Isabella von Croy-Dülmen. After 1918, these two supported efforts to make their son Albrecht king of Hungary.

  At Rothermere’s request, Princess Stephanie’s next trip took her to Budapest to meet another of her close friends, the Regent of Hungary, Admiral Horthy. Her task was to sound out the attitude of leading members of the government there to the question of restoring the Habsburg monarchy. It was quite apparent that – apart from a few hundred royalists – no-one in Hungary wanted to see a Habsburg on the throne. Nonetheless, Rothermere held the view that the only possible successor to the throne of Hungary was Otto von Habsburg.

  On 29 October 1932 the princess was sent to Hungary for the last time on Rothermere’s orders. This time she was to arrange a meeting with the Hungarian prime minister, General Gyula Gömbös (1886–1936). Gömbös was on the conservative right wing, and her task was to warn him of the ‘red menace’ that was spreading throughout Europe. Rothermere wanted to convey to Gömbös as urgently as possible the idea that a monarchic constitution represented the mightiest bulwark against Bolshevism, and advocated that Hungary should closely emulate Mussolini’s Italy, though his grasp of Italian politics was weak. Gömbös gave the princess a letter to take back to Rothermere, thanking him for everything he had done for Hungary.

  Budapest, 4 November 1932

  Dear Lord Rothermere,

  I very much appreciate the message that you have asked Princess Hohenlohe to pass on to me. Please accept my grateful thanks; everything else I have to say on that subject, the Princess will report to you by word of mouth. In this letter I would like to thank you for everything you have done for our country up to now, and to express the hope that you will continue to do so in the future.

  Your most obedient servant

  Gömbös

  While Lord Rothermere maintained his interest in a restoration of the monarchy in Hungary, he was now also putting out feelers towards the dynasty that had ruled Prussia since the seventeenth century and the German Empire from 1871 to 1918 – the house of Hohenzollern. Thus another of Stephanie’s missions in the summer of 1932 was to Schloss Doorn in the Netherlands, now the home of the exiled German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who had abdicated in 1918. It was not difficult for Stephanie to be admitted to his presence since she was already a friend of the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, with whom she had flirted outrageously.

  Of her visit to Doorn she wrote: ‘The Kaiser receives me himself. He is friendly, but not enthusiastic about the scheme. Rothermere’s brother, Lord Northcliffe, had [during the First World War] coined the phrase “Hang the Kaiser!” The Kaiser was naturally suspicious about entangling himself with a member of Northcliffe’s family.’ In a further conversation the former monarch told her: ‘My dear princess, it is very kind of Lord Rothermere to show this concern for me. But my answer today is, as it has always been, that whatever happens I need weapons and soldiers. Is his lordship prepared to support me to that extent?’

  Stephanie was of course unable to give the ex-Kaiser the reply he wanted. ‘Another polite refusal’, was how Stephanie described this failure. She went on: ‘I am convinced that my connection with the Hungarian campaign has cooled both the [former German] Kaiser and the Empress [of Austria] towards me.’

  There is no doubt that there was a time when Hitler himself considered the restoration of the monarchy in Germany a desirable aim. At a dinner in early February 1933, a few days after the Nazis seized power, Hitler told his foreign affairs adviser, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that he was considering the Kaiser’s other son, Prince August Wilhelm, as a new German Kaiser. Three years later, when Rothermere met Hitler at the Reich Chancellery, he expressed some surprise that all the leading figures in the new government were from southern Germany. Hitler retorted: ‘The Hohenzollerns were South Germans too!’

  However, with Hitler as Chancellor, the re-establishment of the imperial throne would have pointed too clearly to a consolidation of Germany’s strategic position in Europe and would thus be an apparent threat to the British notion of the ‘balance of power’ on the continent. That is why Hitler abandoned that possibility at an early stage.

  Although the reaction of the ex-Kaiser could not have been clearer, Rothermere still wanted the princess to get in touch with the Kaiser’s eldest son in Berlin. Initially ‘Crown Prince’ Wilhelm’s attitude to Nazism had been favourable, though unlike his younger brother August Wilhelm, known as ‘Brownshirt Au-Wi’, he was never an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. Nonetheless, Wilhelm had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1930, and in 1933 had joined the party’s paramilitary wing, the SA.

  Stephanie was received by the crown prince at his palace on the Unter den Linden avenue. Wilhelm seemed very impressed by Rothermere’s proposals and his offer of assistance. Since Stephanie was still concerned about the failure of her earlier mission, she now asked the crown prince to telephone Rothermere immediately.

  On her next visit she met the crown prince at the Cecilienhof palace in Potsdam, the Hohenzollern seat near Berlin. She found it hard to believe that Wilhelm commuted daily to his Berlin office, driving a racing-car along the autobahn.

  There then began a lively exchange of letters between Rothermere and the crown prince, who invited the press baron and his emissary several times to his palace in Potsdam. In the course of these visits the crown prince had to convince Lord Rothermere that is was not he who had been chosen as the saviour of Germany, but Adolf Hitler. Crown prince Wilhelm knew very well that he would never achieve anything on his own, but believed he
very well might with a man like Hitler at his side.

  At the end of one of her visits, Stephanie was handed a lengthy letter for her British patron. It is certainly surprising that the crown prince should set out his views on the political situation in the German Reich in such detail, for the eyes of a British newspaper owner. If certain passages in the letter had been published, it would have put him in an extremely difficult position. (This letter, a historical document of the highest importance, is reproduced in full in Appendix III.)

  At the time when Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote this letter, he had already turned his back on Hitler in fury. One reason for this was that the Führer had cancelled all public celebrations of his father the Kaiser’s seventy-fifth birthday, on 27 January 1934. Even the ambitious press baron rapidly lost interest in the Hohenzollern ‘operation’. He decided to plunge into a new adventure; he would no longer give his support to the scions of monarchic dynasties, but instead to a German who was a man of the people: Adolf Hitler.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hitler’s ‘Dear Princess’

  In the notes for her planned memoirs Princess Stephanie dealt very exhaustively with Anglo-German relations in the interwar period. She writes that many influential people in Britain, like Lord Rothermere, were very well disposed towards Germany. They were convinced that the Treaty of Versailles had been excessively harsh on the Germans, whose side they often took at the expense of the French. The princess seeks to explain that people like Rothermere were gripped by an obsessive fear of communism. They saw Germany as the most important bulwark against communism and the might of Russia.