Nazi Princess

by Jim Wilson

  The BUF was initially anti-communist and protectionist. It supported strong state intervention in the economy. Rothermere described the BUF in his article as ‘A well organised party of the right ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method Hitler and Mussolini have displayed’. The Daily Mail’s supportive articles boosted Blackshirt recruitment. The Home Office expressed concern that the BUF was growing in numbers and influence, and attracting ‘a better class of recruits’. In 1934 MI5 estimated it had between 35,000 and 40,000 active members, although this figure might have been somewhat higher than was factually correct.7 The influx included a smattering of senior service officers, prominent businessmen, and even debutantes; all of them hooked by the patriotic side of Mosley’s appeal. But the drive for members extended across the class divide. It reached out to the middle classes, to working-class Tories and even to some Labour voters. One Conservative MP, Col. Thomas Moore, writing in the Daily Mail in April 1934, declared: ‘Surely there cannot be any fundamental difference of outlook between the Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives?’8 A number of prominent people contributed anonymously to BUF funds, believing it was a movement that had the ability to secure a national renaissance. It was even rumoured that the Prince of Wales made a donation. However, despite Mosley’s strong appeal to certain elements in British society, the BUF did not contest a single seat in the 1935 election, which was strange given Mosley’s belief that the Conservatives were the representatives of a failed past and needed to be swept away. His objective, not helped by the violence his Blackshirts demonstrated in London’s East End and in some other big towns and cities in the Midlands and the North, was to challenge the existing political Establishment in Britain. In fact, despite Mosley’s ambition to take extreme right-wing politics from the streets into the House of Commons, the only fascist candidate to stand for Parliament in the late 1930s was at a by-election in Hythe, Kent, in 1939. That candidate was Harry St John Philby, ironically the father of Kim Philby, the most prominent, and from the Soviet view most successful, of the notorious Cambridge spy-ring recruited by the Russians to work within the British Establishment.

  Another of Rothermere’s newspapers, the London Evening News, found a more popular and subtle way of supporting the Blackshirts. It procured 500 seats for a Blackshirt rally at the Royal Albert Hall and offered them as prizes to readers who sent in the most convincing reasons why they liked the Blackshirts. A further Rothermere title, the Sunday Dispatch, even sponsored a Blackshirt beauty competition to find the most attractive BUF supporter. Embarrassingly, there were no entries! Mosley himself was forced to explain this away by saying that these were serious young women, dedicated to the cause of their country rather than ‘aspirants to the Gaiety Theatre chorus line’.9 The Daily Mirror weighed in with its support even though Rothermere had disposed of his shares in the newspaper in 1931. It declared:

  Timid alarmists all this week have been whimpering that the rapid growth in numbers of the British Blackshirts is preparing the way for a system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps.

  Very few of these panic-mongers have any personal knowledge of the countries that are already under Blackshirt government. The notion that a permanent reign of terror exists there has been evolved entirely from their own morbid imaginations, fed by sensational propaganda from opponents of the party in power.

  As a purely British organisation, the Blackshirts will respect the principles of tolerance which are traditional in British politics. They have no prejudice either of class or race. Their recruits are drawn from all social grades and every political party.10

  Meanwhile, George Ward Price, the Daily Mail’s European correspondent who by 1934 had built up a unique rapport with Hitler, was a close friend of Mosley’s and a leading figure in the January Club, conceived the idea for Mosley and Rothermere to go into business together by forming a company, in May 1934, called New Epoch Products Ltd. The plan was for the company to manufacture a range of goods, including cigarettes, which would be distributed via the 500 or so Blackshirt chapters that had been formed throughout the country.

  It was New Epoch Products of which my father, as a young chartered accountant of 25, became company secretary. Jack Kruse knew my father, James ‘Jimmy’ Wilson, well through his marriage to Annabel Wilson, my father’s aunt. They were ‘family’, and got on well together socially. On occasions my father accompanied Kruse on Alpine and Monte Carlo rallies. He shared Kruse’s interest in fast sports and touring cars, and had even driven some of Kruse’s iconic cars when Kruse toured on the Continent. My father had frequently visited Jack and Annabel in London and at their North Yorkshire home, Moor Top near Castleton. It was natural that Jack Kruse should introduce my father to Rothermere, Kruse’s employer and close colleague. Rothermere perhaps saw in my father a substitute for one of the two sons he had lost during the war. It was through the circle around the newspaper baron, and in particular the Kruses, that my father also met and became on friendly terms with Princess Stephanie. My father had worked for an agency, based in London’s Leicester Square, dealing with writers’ and publishers’ contracts, and in that role he came into contact with the princess. Rothermere was particularly generous to my father and he appointed him to a key role in his new company. Rothermere invested £70,000 (equivalent today to around £2.4 million) in a factory and all the necessary plant. With an eye on business as well as politics, he saw the project as an opportunity to use spare capacity from his Canadian paper mills, normally used in producing his newspapers, in cigarette production. For a time the factory prospered, but the commercial relationship with Mosley did not last for long. It faltered after the notorious Olympia riot that marked out the Blackshirts as an unsavoury, un-British intervention into the politics of the time and all but sealed the prospects of National Socialism taking root in any serious way in the UK.

  Almost certainly the catalyst for Rothermere’s disillusion with the BUF came as a result of the massive rally Mosley held at Olympia in June 1934. It was planned along the lines of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies and Mosley set out to make it the largest, most spectacular public gathering in the history of British politics. Fifteen thousand gathered to hear the leader of the Blackshirts, and as with the huge rallies Hitler and the Nazis organised in Germany, the proceedings were carefully stage-managed on an impressively theatrical level. Instead of swastikas there was a profusion of Blackshirt banners bearing the ‘bolt of lightning’ symbol Mosley had chosen to emulate the Nazi swastika. Opponents sarcastically dubbed it ‘the flash in the pan’. Union Jacks fluttered everywhere, amid the black uniforms of Mosley’s followers. But the strutting and bogus ceremonial were provocative to those opposed to Mosley’s brand of fascism. The communists, who were there in numbers, were determined to express their opposition. The proceedings were delayed by at least half an hour by violent protests outside the building. When Mosley arrived, he paraded the 200yds down the central aisle of Olympia towards a raised platform at the end of the hall. The Blackshirt leader was flanked by his bodyguards and preceded by a procession of uniformed BUF members bearing fascist banners. This attempt to whip the crowd into a frenzy, in much the same way as at Hitler’s rallies, failed to work. The communists had infiltrated around 2,500 agitators into the hall, and as Mosley began to speak, a well-organised campaign of disruption began. Agitators shouted slogans like ‘Fascism means murder’ and ‘Down with the Blackshirts’. There was chaos in the hall, and savage fighting broke out. The Blackshirt stewards were brutal in their efforts to suppress the uproar and expel the agitators. Outside the auditorium, 200 Blackshirts patrolled the corridors, beating up those already ejected from the main hall. Many ejected from their seats were handled quite brutally and suffered injuries. Fifty needed hospital treatment and five were detained as a result of the beatings they received.

  The potent combination of pageantry and violence at a political rally was totally foreign
to Britain and the British middle classes viewed it with distaste and alarm. Among the crowd that night was Collin Brooks, former editor of Rothermere’s Sunday Dispatch, and, at the time of the Mosley rally, a confidant and assistant to the press baron. He wrote in his diary:

  The advertised time of the great oration was eight o’clock. At 8.45 the searchlights were directed to the far end, the Blackshirts lined the centre corridor – and trumpets brayed as a great mass of Union Jacks surmounted by Roman plates passed towards the platform. Everybody thought this was Mosley and stood and cheered and saluted. Only it wasn’t Mosley. He came some few minutes later at the head of his chiefs of staff. In consequence the second greeting was an anti-climax. He mounted to the high platform and gave the salute – a figure so high and so remote in that huge place that he looked like a doll from Marks and Spencer’s penny bazaar. He then began – and alas the speakers hadn’t properly tuned in and every word was mangled. Not that it mattered – for then began the Roman circus. The first interrupter raised his voice to shout some interjection. The mob of storm troopers hurled itself at him. He was battered and biffed and bashed and dragged out – while the tentative sympathisers all about him, many of whom were rolled down and trodden on, grew sick and began to think of escape. From that moment it was a shambles. Free fights all over the show. The Fascist technique is really the most brutal thing I have ever seen, which is saying something. There is no pause to hear what the interrupter is saying: there is no tap on the shoulder and a request to leave quietly: there is only the mass assault. Once a man’s arms are pinioned his face is common property to all adjacent punchers.11

  Brooks observed that one protestor had climbed into the high beams in the roof of the hall after being chased by six Fascist bouncers, risking a fatal fall onto the frightened audience below. His diary continued:

  [The] breaking of glass off-stage added to the trepidation of old ladies and parsons in the audience who had come to support the ‘patriots’. More free fights – more bashing and lashing and kickings – and a steady withdrawal of the ordinary audience. We left with Mosley still speaking and the loud speakers still preventing our hearing a word he said, and by that time the place was half empty. Outside, of course, were the one thousand police expecting more trouble, but I didn’t wait to see the aftermath. One of our party had gone there very sympathetic to the fascists and very anti-Red. As we parted he said ‘My God, if it’s to be a choice between the Reds and these toughs, I’m all for the Reds’.12

  In his diary Brooks commented that the whole thing was a fiasco and had probably done more to rally opinion to the National Government than anything else since 1931. His view was that the personal appeal of fascism had been drowned out by the display of un-British behaviour. To answer communist brutality with fascist brutality in the middle of an orderly audience of peaceful citizens was to undermine the whole theory of the modern state, and the government seemed to have realised that.

  They had indeed. It was the bloody rally at Olympia that was the catalyst for the 1936 Public Order Act which banned the wearing of uniforms during political rallies and marches, and required police consent to be obtained for any political marches to take place. Nevertheless, the Daily Mail’s Ward Price, who regarded Mosley as a more eloquent and persuasive speaker than Hitler, Mussolini or Goebbels, chose to put a different gloss on the rally in the next day’s paper.

  If the Blackshirt movement had any need of justification, the Red Hooligans who savagely and systematically tried to wreck Sir Oswald Mosley’s huge and magnificently successful meeting at Olympia last night would have supplied it. They got what they deserved. Olympia has been the scene of many assemblies and many great fights (the sporting version) but never had it offered the spectacle of so many fights mixed up with a meeting.13

  That was one view, but it was not the conclusion most shared, and it led to the BUF largely being publicly discredited.

  The anti-fascist disruption of the Olympia rally was debated in the House of Commons and there was surprising support for the BUF among some Conservative MPs.14 Michael Beaumont, Conservative member for Aylesbury, said of the British Fascists: ‘a lot were respectable, reasonable and intelligent people’. Another Conservative, H.K. Hayles, member for Hanley, said the BUF contained ‘some of the most cultured members of our society’. But MI5 took a more proportionate view. Their report to the Home Office in October 1934 said:

  It is becoming increasingly clear that at Olympia Mosley suffered a check which is likely to prove decisive. He suffered it, not at the hands of the Communists who staged the provocations and now claim the victory, but at the hands of Conservative MPs, the Conservative press and all those organs of public opinion which made him abandon the policy of using his ‘Defence Force’ to overwhelm interrupters.15

  The riot at Olympia finished Rothermere’s brief support for the Blackshirts, but opposition to the fascists became even stronger following an event in Germany two weeks later. On 30 June 1934 the brutal violence that came to be known as The Night of the Long Knives marked out the true terror of National Socialism. Hitler’s colleague and long-time supporter Ernst Röhm, together with some seventy-seven of his SA followers, were butchered in the most chilling circumstances. It became clear that Hitler was personally implicated. When the full horror of what had happened at Hotel Hanslbauer at Wiessee dawned, it was clear that fascism was not just a political campaign for economic reform and national re-dedication; it was an organisation capable of orchestrating terror on a horrific scale. In Britain, Mosley and the BUF never really recovered from the backlash.

  Rothermere began to face pressure from his Jewish advertisers over the Daily Mail’s pro-Blackshirt campaign. Important businesses were threatening to withdraw their support from his papers which would have represented a serious commercial blow to him. He wrote to Mosley listing his reasons for cutting off his relationship with the BUF: he deplored the term fascist; he feared the growing anti-Semitism of the movement; he disliked the policy of a corporate state run by officials and industrialists in place of Parliament; and he now believed a dictatorship would not work in Britain.16 But his disillusion with Mosley and the Blackshirts did not curtail his pursuit of closer relations with Hitler.

  In August 1934 he received an intriguing letter from Princess Stephanie, designed to draw him deeper into an ever-closer relationship with Hitler:

  I have seen both your friends and have much of interest to tell you … Please let me impress upon you that you ought to see H now. I know he already has some doubts as to your sincerity. I hope you have not forgotten that you assured him in your last letter you would see him in the latter part of August … He intends to discuss his present and future plans with you, and I think it is, for the first time, more in your interests than his, for you to see him.17

  In the way she phrased the letter, and baited the hook, it seems Stephanie was well aware of Rothermere’s thinking following the Olympia riot and the horrifying events in Germany. The message she conveyed seemed more concerned with fulfilling Hitler’s interests than serving Rothermere’s. It disclosed an intoxicating mix of double-dealing, and in her increasingly intimate relationship with Hitler’s right-hand man, Fritz Wiedemann, sexual attraction was now added to the excitement of political intrigue. In London the British secret service, at the request of the Foreign Office, asked the Home Office to renew the warrant which allowed them to intercept and read the princess’ correspondence. In January 1935 the Foreign Office expressed further concerns over her activities, asking the Home Secretary to restrict her visits to the UK. Documents in her MI5 file indicate that the Home Office foresaw ‘considerable difficulties with taking such a move because of the milieu in which the princess moved in this country’.18 In other words, the intelligence services knew that she had powerful friends in the Establishment who could exercise influence in her favour.

  A document in her MI5 file, prominently marked ‘most secret’, states that she first came to the notice of British intellige
nce as a visitor to the country in 1928, ‘exercising considerable influence on Lord Rothermere’.19 One of those instrumental in introducing her to Rothermere, the files note, was an individual named Andre Rostin, ‘not of good repute and strongly suspected of being a German secret agent’. It may well have been Rostin who first advised Princess Stephanie to find a way of getting close to Rothermere, suggesting that the perfect conduit would be her friendship with my Great-Aunt Annabel. In her son’s biography of her, he makes it clear that it was through Annabel Kruse that she met the press baron. But neither Prince Franz Hohenlohe nor Stephanie herself would have wanted to credit a known German agent as having any hand, however minor, in her subsequent alliance with the newspaper proprietor. Her MI5 files go on to record that British agents were conscious of her wooing wealthy and influential members of the British aristocracy. In 1933/34, the file states, she became acquainted with Lady Oxford, Lady Cunard and Lady Snowden, with whom she had formed ‘a most intimate friendship’. Through introductions by these individuals, the file records, she had ‘wormed her way into society circles in London’.

  9

  NAZI PARTY GOLD

  A personal invitation to the princess from the Führer to attend the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally arrived in London in 1935. It was the occasion on which Hitler announced the notorious Nuremberg Laws, which launched legislation restricting the basic human rights of German Jews; laws that led inevitably to the concentration camps and the gas chambers. Others who received personal invitations to the huge Nazi jamboree included Lady Ethel Snowden, wife of Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929, and an intimate friend of Stephanie. Lady Snowden was also a writer and journalist who had frequently contributed articles for the Daily Mail at Rothermere’s request.