Hitler's Spy Princess

by Martha Schad

  It turned out that Langer had been excessively optimistic and had underestimated his informant’s abilities. Stephanie demanded a price for her information: she was only willing to cooperate and to tell Langer everything she knew about Hitler, provided he promised to help her get out of the internment camp. Her plan was as follows: she had influential connections in Europe, she said, with whose help she could get directly in touch with Hitler. If Langer’s boss, General Donovan, were to arrange her release and take her on to the staff of the OSS, she would then act as a go-between in secret negotiations aimed at bringing the war to an end. She was also prepared to tell all she knew about the Nazi hierarchy, the way they worked and so on, and also to obtain any secret information that Langer wanted.

  Langer assured Stephanie that he had absolutely no personal influence with Donovan, and that in matters like this he was used to doing things his own way. In the end the two reached a compromise. The princess declared her willingness to cooperate on condition that Langer submitted her plan in detail to General Donovan. Langer agreed and so the interview could proceed.

  However, Langer was not only after political information. He was also interested in intimate details about Hitler’s personal life. When he asked Stephanie about Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun, his hidden mistress, Stephanie was able to pass on what her friend Wiedemann had told her, that ‘Eva quite often spent the whole night in Hitler’s bedroom in Berlin’.

  On his return to Washington Langer kept his promise. General Donovan was very amused but made no further comment. However, the episode did not end there. When about a month had passed and still nothing had happened about her release, Stephanie apparently came to the conclusion that Langer had taken her for a ride. She said of him: ‘He’s certainly no gentleman. But in Seagoville I would have talked to the Devil incarnate.’ She tried to get her revenge by telling the FBI that Langer had admitted her detention was unjustified, the charges against her were false and that she had been badly treated.

  The FBI did in fact immediately give Langer a severe talking-to, and angrily demanded an explanation as to the basis of his assertions, and what he was trying to achieve. All Langer could do was explain the purpose of his mission and emphasise that their entire conversation had taken place in the presence of a guard who could testify that he had heard Princess Hohenlohe complaining about the alleged injustices done to her. However, it emerged that the guard knew no German.

  Within the camp Stephanie von Hohenlohe was moved to a building known as the German House. ‘It is quieter and cleaner. But the Germans living here have already let me know, frankly and unambiguously, that they don’t want to have me in their midst. Even before I moved in, they were already protesting against my presence, and since then there has been no change in their attitude. This situation would alone be enough to make my life here intolerable, since in effect it condemns me to solitary confinement.’

  Suddenly she heard nothing from Schofield for quite some time. So Stephanie now went to the lengths of trying to win the favour of J. Edgar Hoover himself. Several times she offered to provide him with revelations about Schofield, but there was no reaction from Hoover.

  It was very depressing for Stephanie to find that she had to wait until autumn 1943 before a hearing by the review committee was allowed. In fact it did not take place until 1 March 1944. Stephanie acted as her own defence counsel. Large parts of her biographical statement had more than a hint of the fairy-tale about them. Yet at the end of the hearing the three-man committee unanimously recommended that the princess be released:

  We are convinced that her position is one of determined and unqualified opposition to Hitler and that she earnestly supports the Allied cause. It is our view that, once she is at liberty again, she will do everything in her power to further our war effort. She has explained her friendship with Wiedemann to our satisfaction and it is obvious to us that the friendship with this man and his wife was a long-standing one; it was essentially a social connection, based on friendship.

  Stephanie’s son Franzi was released on parole from his internment camp at the end of February 1944. In the summer of that year he volunteered for the US armed forces, was drafted on 7 September and, after his basic training, served as an ordinary GI ‘somewhere in the Pacific’.

  In April 1945 Stephanie’s mother received a letter from the Attorney-General, Francis Biddle, in which he agreed ‘to reconsider the case of your daughter in the near future and decide whether at this juncture in the war any change in her internment status is justified’.

  This ‘near future’ eventually turned out to be VE Day (Victory in Europe). Stephanie von Hohenlohe was the last detainee allowed to leave Seagoville on 9 May 1945. She had been kept locked up until the very last moment. And that was done on the orders of President Roosevelt, who had been constantly irritated by the princess. To make matters worse, the princess had complained to the president’s wife, Eleanor, about the graft and corruption in the ‘Washington bureaucracy’.

  By the day of the German surrender, 8 May 1945, the Third Reich lay in ashes and rubble, Hitler had committed suicide, and the woman who was allegedly such a great threat to the United States as a Nazi spy was free once more after four years of internment.

  At the end of her long incarceration, she drove with her mother to California, where the temperate climate was a pleasant contrast to the terrible Texas heat. However, she was still under the supervision of the Alien Control Commission and was being watched by the immigration authorities. As an enemy alien she was placed under the guardianship of a wealthy Beverly Hills real-estate agent named Harry H. Bennett.

  Among the few friends she still had was the man who was as deeply in love with her as ever – Major Lemuel Schofield. She now needed him again urgently, as the immigration authorities had given notice that she was to be deported on 9 April 1946. Schofield visited her frequently in California and asked her to move to New York, to be near him. He was once again back in a successful law practice in New York and wanted to have Stephanie close to him, as he had started proceedings to divorce his wife. He also hoped that, as just one among millions of New Yorkers, Stephanie could live in complete freedom from the unwelcome attentions of the press. The princess agreed to come to New York, though not to give up her little house in Beverly Hills.

  Yet it was not long before the press had its claws in her again. The columnist Robert Ruark, writing in his ‘Society Notes’ of 26 March 1947, gave free rein to his caustic pen:

  Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst plays a not insignificant role in New York society today. This is no less interesting than if I were to report that Joachim von Ribbentrop had been seen dancing at the Stork Club, or that Eva Braun was staying as a guest at the Long Island home of Mr and Mrs Bigname. Compared to this Hohenlohe hustler, Mata Hari was definitely bottom of the range, and Edda Mussolini a raw beginner, a tool of the fascists, who couldn’t say ‘no’. In her field, the Hohenlohe girl was absolutely top-notch; she was so good that only a short time ago she was released from one of our top-security prisons for spies.

  And now here she is, dolled up like a duchess, popping up under the aegis of one of society’s most venerable names, at all the lorgnette-and-liqueur evenings. Unless she has moved since I last saw her, the princess is holed up in the Gotham hotel.

  Before the war, la Hohenlohe was a close friend of Adolf Hitler and his most trusted female spy. Wherever there were dark dealings afoot, you could be sure to find the princess, described by insiders as ‘Hitler’s Madame de Steel’ [sic]. It was Hohenlohe who arranged the famous meeting between Hitler and Lord Rothermere. She set up the Sudetenland talks between Viscount Runciman and Konrad Henlein, the German Gauleiter in Czechoslovakia. The outcome of those talks, as I recall, was the glowing fuse before the world blew up.

  This gaudy butterfly of New York society is the same girl who persuaded Hitler to send Fritz Weidemann [sic] to London as his special envoy, and who maintained an intimate relat
ionship with Fritz, when he continued his espionage activities over here.

  I am not suggesting that this charming creature should be stood up against the nearest wall and shot, because I am not basically vindictive by nature. But in Nuremberg we have strung up a number of her old buddies for similar misdeeds, and, judged on her connections with high-ranking Nazis, Hohenlohe is a legitimate candidate for anyone’s noose.

  I also know that no less than 42 countries refused to accept her, when we tried to deport her at the beginning of the war. That’s why we had to lock her up in a concentration-camp until the shooting was over. But surely we should be able to do something better than pay court to her at Park Avenue parties.

  Maybe we could offer her to the Russians, for whom she would doubtless be extremely effective as a sharp-eared international party-girl. But I doubt whether the Russians would take her, even if we were to throw in a top-class basketball-player and their highly controversial claim on Greece. Stephanie has far too noxious a reputation as a Nazi, and she makes trouble wherever she goes. At 50, she may already be too old to switch ideologies, no matter how basically similar they may be.

  But what I simply cannot understand is how New York society, which is normally so impervious to titled tramps, can nurture a one-time member of the Nazi hierarchy in its bosom. For the strongest of stomachs, there is a point where it gets too much, even when a name is listed in the Almanach de Gotha.

  To be honest, if Hitler had not committed suicide, it would come as no surprise in my present distraught condition, if he were suddenly to turn up in Carnegie Hall on the arm of some beauty …

  On 23 June 1947 the princess appeared with Schofield before the immigration authorities in New York. Under oath she stated that her son Franzi, as a member of the US armed forces, had been granted American citizenship in Tokyo on 16 July 1946. She also asked the board to take into consideration the fact that the small income Franz earned as a translator at the United Nations would be insufficient to maintain both himself and his grandmother, if Stephanie were forced to leave America. Stephanie told the authorities that she could not return to Hungary because, after an absence of ten years, her Hungarian citizenship had lapsed. Nor could His Majesty’s Government allow her to return to the United Kingdom.

  The new head of the immigration authority was himself at a loss as to what to do. Then in May 1950 the Attorney-General’s office ordered another hearing, this time in Philadelphia. After studying all the papers in the case of Stephanie von Hohenlohe, the view was reached that since her entry to the USA in 1939 she had not engaged in hostile activities of any kind. Her internment as an enemy alien had, it was stated, been dictated by the exceptional circumstances of war, and for ten years she had been pursued on false grounds as a ‘Nazi spy’.

  By now the princess had been living for some time at Schofield’s farm, Anderson Place, near Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. She had convinced Schofield that a life in the country would be healthier for him too. Stephanie put the rather run-down farmhouse back into shape, and there now began a tranquil period of her life, at least for the next three years, until the death of her mother. The baroness was walking down the road one evening to go to the mailbox when she was hit by a car and severely injured; she died soon afterwards.

  In 1953 Stephanie took part in the Easter Fashion parade, and was delighted to find that her name featured in the New York Dress Institute’s list of ‘best-dressed women’. At last there were gratifying press reports about her: ‘Austrian-born Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe, who divides her time between Salzburg, Paris, and her apartment on Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, definitely belongs in the list of best-dressed women. Before she came to the United States in 1941 [sic, in fact 1939], her name was constantly among the Paris fashion trend-setters. At the Easter Parade the princess will be wearing an original Paris model, a black-and-white chequered woollen dress by Chanel, and with it a white straw-hat from Mr John.’

  After an absence of eleven years, Stephanie returned to Europe to show ‘Brad’, as she called Schofield, her Austrian homeland. The following year the couple travelled to Europe again, this time with Schofield’s two daughters. They had a chauffeur who drove them through France, Germany, Austria and Italy. Schofield’s daughter Helen later married the internationally respected Hungarian historian, John Lukacs, and Stephanie was a witness at the ceremony.

  On the second trip Stephanie could not resist revisiting her beloved Schloss Leopoldskron. It brought back many memories. But her home was now Anderson Place, Schofield’s beautiful farm. Sadly, this happiness only lasted until 1954, when Schofield suffered a heart attack and died. He was only sixty-two.

  The death of the celebrated attorney had major consequences. The Philadelphia Reporter published a lengthy story which created an uproar in the city, with its revelation that the late Lemuel B. Schofield had been evading taxes for the past six years and that the sum owed to the Internal Revenue Service, including interest, was in the region of one million dollars. The tax inspectors went to work and checked out other ‘prominent citizens’ who had known the attorney: his family, his business partners and, of course, the woman in his life. In the course of their investigations the IRS established that since her arrival in the USA, Stephanie had earned no money at all, but that for the years 1951, 1952 and 1953 she had made no tax declaration. An initial inspection revealed unpaid taxes of $250,000.

  The princess now had the guile to make a voluntary declaration, and in fact managed to show she did not have a single dollar of back taxes to pay. She claimed that her famously luxurious lifestyle was ‘financed by the sale of jewellery, works of art and antiques,’ which had been in safe keeping during her internment, some in Britain and some with her mother. In this way she had made ‘a few hundred dollars a month’. This could well be true. And in any case, during the years which the IRS were scrutinising, she had been living with a wealthy lawyer.

  In mourning after Schofield’s death, the princess left that part of her life behind her, and moved to another beautiful farm, Cobble Close, near Red Bank, New Jersey. The property had originally belonged to Herbert N. Straus, owner of Macy’s, the world’s largest department store. Living nearby was another multimillionaire, Albert Monroe Greenfield, the richest man in Philadelphia. With him as an agreeable new lover, Stephanie would spend the next three years at Cobble Close. Then her life took a completely new direction.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The International Journalist

  In the autumn of 1955 the princess, now sixty-four, began earning money again. She was given a job as special correspondent for the Washington Diplomat, an ‘international society magazine’. Now and again she was described sotto voce as a ‘super-spy’, or as ‘Hitler’s mistress’, but that no longer annoyed her. Her work involved a lot of travelling, both to Europe and to the American west coast. Someone who became a close friend was Lady Lawford, wife of an English general, Sir Sidney Lawford, and mother of the actor Peter Lawford who, in 1954, had married Pat Kennedy, the sister of Jack and Bobby. The Women’s Press Club of New York was proud to welcome Stephanie as a member.

  The new admirer in her life was ‘Del’ Wilson, a US Air Force general. A good-looking giant of a man, he had been married several times and had just divorced again. He was several years younger than the princess, and she turned down his proposal of marriage.

  She eventually left her farm in New Jersey and moved to an apartment on East 72nd Street, in a fashionable area of Manhattan.

  At the age of sixty-eight, the princess returned permanently to Europe and settled in Geneva, where her son Franz was working for a Swiss bank. To begin with, mother and son shared a small apartment in the rue du Bourg-de-Four. She then moved to a larger flat in the rue Alfred-Vincent, in a building wedged between the Hôtel d’Angleterre and the Hôtel Beau Rivage. The address that Stephanie gave herself was, however, grander: 15 quai de Mont-Blanc, since from her large terrace she could see both the mountain peak and Lake Geneva.

&
nbsp; By this time, Fritz Wiedemann had reappeared, having survived the war and de-Nazification.1 She had often met him on trips to Europe and he had told her of his plan to write his memoirs. The two got together on this and the result was Wiedemann’s book, Der Mann, der Feldherr werden wollte (‘The Man who Wanted to Command’) – a work which makes no reference whatever to their relationship and the years they spent together.

  Since the princess, despite being nearly seventy, was still extremely agile, she now decided to build a new career in Europe. She had heard on the grapevine that the editor-in-chief of Quick, the popular German illustrated magazine, was looking for journalistic contacts in the USA. She offered her services and in September 1962 was given a very well-paid contract as ‘consultant’ to the Th. Martens company, publishers of Quick. Her job would consist of setting up contacts with important and newsworthy people, and coming up with ideas for interviews and lead stories. With her unique network of acquaintances, she was to open as many doors as possible for reporters and photographers. Her remuneration was set at $1,000 per month, plus expenses. And she would be entitled to a special bonus if she arranged something really spectacular.

  In New York she met for the second time a man whom she knew from her Vienna days and who gave a new direction to her life. This was Drew Pearson, mentioned in Chapter 1 as the son-in-law of Count Gisycki. He was now the highest-paid and most famous columnist in America. On Pearson’s 65th birthday in December 1962 Stephanie sent him a bouquet of carnations. She then met him for tea and told him that she too was now working as a journalist. Drew Pearson quickly noticed what a remarkable memory the princess possessed – and anyway he knew all about her life history – so he considered some form of collaboration with her in the future. His political column, The Washington Merry-Go-Round, was syndicated in 600 newspapers and played an important role in forming American opinion.