Hitler's Spy Princess

by Martha Schad

  (6) [-]

  (7) The Nazis’ methods should be made to look ridiculous. Their radio broadcasts and newspaper reports should be exposed as deceiving the German people.

  (8) No-one in the world is working as hard for peace as the President, no-one has the power he has to bring this peace about. America must speak and act in a warlike manner in order to impress and intimidate the Nazis. It is unpatriotic to criticize the President, since that jeopardizes his efforts to prepare the American people and the nation’s resources for the worst that may happen. Nothing helps the Nazis more and gives Hitler more personal pleasure than publicly expressed opposition to the President, strikes and other signs of disunity.

  (9) We should not put so much stress on how powerful Germany is. The Nazis are not invincible. They have been able to win so far, not because of their military skill but mainly because of their numerical superiority. While others were preparing for peace, Hitler was making his dispositions for war. If things change and armaments are more equally distributed, Hitler can be dealt a crushing defeat.

  (10) There are many signs that Hitler is gradually weakening and beginning to have doubts. That can be seen in his Russian campaign. In May 1938 a report appeared in the British press, that Czechoslovakia was mobilizing out of fear that Hitler might be planning an invasion of Russia. At the time Hitler had poured scorn on this idea in a conversation with the princess: ‘Do you think I’m a fool? I would never dream of attacking Russia, except as a desperate last resort, if the Reich was in great danger.’

  The list of Stephanie’s ideas is a fascinating blend of analysis with a little wishful thinking, and the understandable aim of presenting herself as a great protagonist of America.

  This report was locked away by Attorney-General Biddle, and was meant to be kept secret, especially from J. Edgar Hoover. But some anonymous person leaked the memo to the FBI chief, who was furious. Where was all the detailed information on espionage that the princess could have provided in the interests of national security? What is more, on 18 August Francis Biddle had told the FBI he had instructed Schofield to send the princess back to California.

  But Stephanie moved with her mother, and for part of the time her son, to a little white house in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, to be closer to her new lover, Lemuel Schofield, who wrote her a charming love-letter: ‘Everything about you is new and different and gets me excited’, he wrote on his typewriter. ‘You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met. You dress better than anyone else, and every time you come into a room, everyone else fades out of the picture … Because of you I do so many crazy things, because I’m mad about you. Now you know.’

  However, Hoover was soon on the trail of the couple and on 24 October he had someone find out the identity of the owner of 612 Beverly Drive, Alexandria, which was not difficult. Major Lemuel Schofield was frequently seen there visiting the princess, and as the house was extremely small, the old baroness, Stephanie’s mother, left the scene during these trysts and went to stay in a hotel.

  On 8 December, the day after squadrons of Japanese bombers attacked and destroyed a large part of the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Stephanie and her mother went to a movie. At the time they were staying with friends in Philadelphia. After leaving the cinema they were surrounded by FBI agents. The princess was arrested immediately, but not her mother. In FBI raids right across the country Germans, Italians and Japanese, now the enemy, were taken into custody. Although Stephanie’s passport stated that she was a Hungarian citizen, she was classified as German and taken to the internment camp in Gloucester City, New Jersey. A hearing before the complaints commission ruled against the princess.

  On 13 February 1942 the Attorney-General, Francis Biddle, signed an order for ‘the internment of Princess von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg, German citizen, resident in Alexandria, Virginia, as she is a potential danger to public security and peace in the United States’.

  While this was happening, Hoover ordered his agents to search the princess’s home from top to bottom. As none of these men knew any German, they took her mother’s handwritten cookbook, thinking it was Stephanie’s diary. Also in the house they found the Gold Medal of the Nazi Party, which Hitler had conferred on Stephanie. It was photographed and confiscated.

  The princess had to spend seven months in the Gloucester City internment camp. She wrote melodramatically about her sufferings there:

  The living conditions there were appallingly unhygienic and inadequate in every way. Twenty women occupied a single room, which was filthy, and also served as a dump for old furniture, dirty, worn-out mattresses, and mountains of dusty old papers. For weeks we had no bed-linen or hand-towels; instead we were given old rags. The floor was made of stone, icy cold and damp.

  The wind blew from all sides through the ten big windows, and most of the time the heating did not work. The doctor advised us: ‘Keep your feet off the floor if you don’t want to catch pneumonia. This is no place for women.’

  We spent our time sitting on our beds, fully clothed, with our overcoats on. There was no furniture in the room except for our beds, a table and a bench. During the night the warders made the rounds twice and shone torches in our faces, to count us. Sleep was impossible under those conditions.

  We had six drains in the room which, because of the faulty sewage system, flooded the room whenever it was high tide on the Delaware river. Sometimes the stench was unbearable.

  I had to share the room with prostitutes and sluts with venereal disease …

  For months on end our food consisted of nothing but beans, fatty meat and meat-balls. We didn’t eat the fatty meat, and just the smell of the meat-balls made us ill.

  For the first two months we weren’t allowed to leave the room. After that we were able to spend about half an hour each day, except Saturdays and Sundays, on a dirty, covered balcony.

  In the New York Times of 8 August 1942 there appeared a detailed story about a Lutheran pastor in Hartford, Connecticut, who was taken to court for carrying a message for the interned Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe – though he denied that he actually delivered the message. The Reverend Schlick was called upon to hold services in the camp and the princess asked him to smuggle a message out for her.

  The pastor said that he had first met the princess, who was known to be ‘a very dangerous foreign woman’, on 8 February in the camp. Three weeks later, when he was on another visit, she gave him a letter to take to a clergyman in Philadelphia. But the Reverend Schlick got cold feet; he told the princess he could do nothing for her. During the trial the pastor was asked whether he imagined the immigration authorities knew what he was doing. After all, he had been helping a ‘dangerous foreign woman’ in the course of his duties. Schlick confirmed that he was unaware of that and apologised. It was too late to be sorry, the judge retorted. Schlick admitted that he had joined the German-American Bund in 1923, at a time when the organisation was known as ‘Friends of the New Germany’. He left the Bund in 1935, after Hitler came to power. The outcome of the trial has not been recorded.

  Thus the princess gradually became more and more desperate. In a thoroughly dejected mood she wrote on 15 December 1942 to Sir William Wiseman:

  My dear Sir William

  You will recall the lunch you invited me to in your apartment in July 1940. On that occasion I told you that certain people in Washington had misinterpreted the motive behind the meeting between you and Mr Wiedemann. And not only my own motives, but also your personal intentions. You will also recall that you were very anxious to clarify your position, both in your interest and mine, as you put it. For that reason you got in touch with a highly placed official in Washington, who arranged a meeting for you with Attorney-General Biddle. However, when you got to Washington you were told he had suddenly been taken ill, or had to leave town suddenly (I have forgotten the details now). Nonetheless, you had a long interview with the Attorney-General’s personal assistant and gave him a detailed account of yourself, yo
ur views, and the role you played in the last war (which was apparently not known), as well as about your motives and activities in this particular case. You explained that, before arranging the meeting with Mr Wiedemann, you had been to see a Mr Butler, head of the British Purchasing Commission in New York, the body which was chiefly engaged in acquiring war materials. Mr Butler (I think that was his name) in turn got in touch with the Foreign Office in London, in order to find out whether you should be involved in this matter, i.e. whether your intervention was considered useful and desirable. The answer was affirmative.

  As far as I know, you met Mr Wiedemann twice. The first meeting took place in your suite at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. I was not present, but saw you the same evening shortly before you left for New York. On that occasion you told me how affected you had been by Mr Wiedemann’s obvious keenness and sincerity, and you thanked me for making the meeting possible. You stressed that your government would not fail to show its gratitude, when the time came. The second and last meeting took place some months later, again at a dinner in your hotel suite. That time I was there. You gave a detailed report to the Washington official. You even showed him a telegram you had received from official quarters in London, thanking you for your useful work and acknowledging your valuable reports. You offered to disclose these reports, if desired. You went on to emphasise that my article on the subject was in no way a hostile act, that, on the contrary, my activities had been extremely praiseworthy, and that my intention had been exclusively to serve Britain and the cause of democracy. You said – and I quote: ‘If you made a mistake, then so did I.’

  I am reminding you of all this, because my reason for writing is to ask you to write an affidavit for me, confirming it all. I also think it would be a good thing if you mentioned that, when you visited London in the summer of 1940, you met Lord Rothermere’s son; that he had come to see you because he was interested in my book, and that he asked you to support his father in his efforts to avoid any publicity. When, after returning to New York, you saw Lord Rothermere on several occasions, you reported to me about how hostile and embittered he felt towards me. You warned me of his attempts to discredit me, and you told me he was seeking the co-operation and support of influential people in America, to lend more weight to the whole thing.

  I will not prolong this letter by describing my feelings, especially my dismay at the fact that you, knowing my difficult situation and all the background and detailed circumstances, have not felt obliged to submit such a statement on your own initiative – you should at least be familiar with the Queensberry Rules! To avoid any further hesitation on your part, I would like in any case to stress that it is only the consideration I owe my son, that might persuade me to take any further steps.

  Stephanie Hohenlohe

  Sir William never replied.

  The only visitor Stephanie had was her mother. Although she was only supposed to stay for half an hour at the most, she arrived in the morning and did not leave until the evening. What is more, the old lady drove up in the chauffeur-driven official car belonging to the man she hoped would soon be her son-in-law, Lemuel Schofield. This meant that, despite all orders from above, Schofield was still in regular contact with Stephanie. When Hoover and Roosevelt heard about this, all hell broke loose. The president wrote to Hoover on 17 June 1942: ‘Once more I have to bother you about that Hohenlohe woman. This time I am told that her son has been in a detention camp but has written to his mother that Uncle Lem (Schofield) has arranged to get him out in a short time. I really think that this whole affair verges not merely on the ridiculous but on the disgraceful. Is that woman really at Ellis Island? F.D.R.’

  In a further letter the president again expressed his anger: ‘If the immigration authorities do not stop once and for all showing favour to Hohenlohe, I will be forced to order an enquiry. The facts will not be very palatable and will go right back to her first arrest and her intimacy with Schofield. I am aware that she is interned in the Gloucester centre, but by all accounts she enjoys special privileges there. The same is apparently true in the case of her son, who is being held on Ellis Island. To be honest, this is all turning into a scandal that requires extremely drastic and immediate action. F.D.R.’

  On 16 February 1942, Prince Franz was arrested while visiting friends in Katonah, NY. The New York press now began sniping at him. ‘We hear from Ellis Island that Prince Hohenlohe was arrested Monday night. He was immediately taken to the immigration office, where he is now awaiting interrogation by the Aliens Office. His mother, Princess Hohenlohe, is a close friend of Captain Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s Number One, who was an envoy in America before the war. She is said to be in custody in an internment camp for enemy aliens in western Pennsylvania.’

  Prince Franz was held at Ellis Island until 10 July 1942, when the hearing finally took place in New York. Five weeks later he was transferred to Camp McAlester in Oklahoma. His next sojourn was at Camp Kennedy in Texas. On 1 May 1942 he had written to his mother from Ellis Island:

  Lemmy [referring to Lemuel Schofield] came here for the weekend and found me in good health. I think it’s very nice of him to visit me here. We are allowed to go for a walk twice a day in the yard. It was of course me who asked him to come, not because I had anything particular to say to him, I simply wanted very much to see him again. He said he was very sorry to find me locked up here and he hoped I would be out soon. Despite all their efforts, the FBI haven’t been able to come up with anything against me. He asked me if I needed anything and what he could do for me. But Mrs Parks supplies me with everything imaginable, from fruit and flowers to stamps and toiletries, so at the moment I don’t need anything.

  After President Roosevelt had intervened once again, Attorney-General Biddle had no choice but to take action. He transferred the princess to Camp Seagoville, 12 miles from Dallas, Texas, where there was no-one for miles around who could have been any help to her. But Biddle had miscalculated. Schofield resigned from his government position and was now working for a thriving law firm. This meant he was free to look after his mistress all the time.

  Being transported from Gloucester to Seagoville between 25 and 27 July was a humiliating experience for Stephanie. Four warders accompanied her, never once letting go of her wrists and ankles. ‘It was only the horror of the strait-jacket and the morphine injection which they threatened me with if I didn’t behave, that made me give in and go quietly.’

  Stephanie was not allowed to say goodbye either to her mother or to the other women inmates. She was hauled out of bed, given no opportunity to wash or do her hair, and placed on a stretcher. ‘Dressed in nothing but my bloodstained nightdress, I was carried past all the men, who needless to say made coarse remarks about me.’

  When she arrived in Seagoville, Stephanie had with her a large black suitcase, a travelling-bag, a handbag and $1,145 in cash. Fortunately she was well treated since, just before giving up his official post, Schofield had been to the camp and given the governor official instructions to grant special privileges to his beloved princess, such as permission to use a telephone outside the camp. He also obtained permission for Stephanie’s mother to visit her outside official visiting hours. For, as soon as the baroness heard that her daughter was being moved, she left the cool east coast for the oppressive summer heat of Texas and immediately booked into the Jefferson hotel for several weeks.

  In 1942 the psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer made contact with the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence service in the war years. This organisation had created a new department, that of the Coordinator of Information. It was headed by Colonel (later General) William J. Donovan – better known as ‘Wild Bill’. One of the tasks of the new department was to organise and manage psychological warfare. Langer took an interest in this. True, he had never dealt with this problem himself, but during the First World War in Europe – in which he had served – he had been very unimpressed by the efforts at that time to wage psychological warfare.

  A
fter some departmental restructuring Langer was given the job of assembling material on Hitler as a man, which was more reliable than that put out by German propaganda and fed to foreign correspondents. The work appealed to Langer, though he had to admit that Hitler’s psyche and the fascination he exerted over the German people were a complete mystery to him. Therefore Langer set off across the USA and Canada in search of people who at one time had had more than superficial contact with Hitler. He did indeed find a number of such people and talked to them at length, since he hoped that in this way he might gain important first-hand information for his study. For the most part these conversations proved interesting and revealing, yielding insights that at the time would not otherwise have been available.

  It was in the summer of 1942 that Walter C. Langer arrived at Seagoville, far out on the Texas prairie, to interview Princess Stephanie in her internment camp. She seized the opportunity to deny having any sympathy with the Nazis; she also roundly condemned the FBI and all its agents both for the ‘unjust’ charges against her and for the humiliating treatment she had been subjected to. The truth was, she insisted, that she had done her utmost to deter Hitler from his aggressive policy, because she was always convinced that such a policy was bound to lead directly to a war.

  Langer had been warned in advance that the princess was a very plausible individual, and not to be trusted. So he listened patiently to her tirades and hoped that, once she had got all this off her chest, they would get to the actual purpose of his visit. It is worth mentioning that, as there was a guard present, the interview was conducted in German.