1 All quotations in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Outline for the Memoirs of Princess Hohenlohe Waldenburg, Box 5.
2 Hoover Institution Archives, Hohenlohe Box 3 – Prefatory Morning Monologue.
3 Gina Kaus was born in 1893 in Vienna, the daughter of Max and Ida Wiener. Not until her father died did she discover that she had a half-sister, Stephanie. Gina married and became a successful novelist in the 1930s, but then her books were publicly burned, along with those of many leading Jewish and anti-Nazi writers, and she emigrated to California in 1938. In postwar Germany, two of her later novels, The Devil Next Door and The Devil in Silk, became bestsellers; in 1956 the latter was made into a film starring Curt Jürgens and Lilli Palmer.
4 See Stoiber/Celovsky, Stephanie von Hohenlohe, p. 51.
5 See Charles-Roux, Coco Chanel.
1 An alliance between France and Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Rumania, which was designed to contain a resurgent Hungary.
2 From 1928 Bella Fromm, who came from a prosperous Jewish family, wrote for the Berliner Zeitung and other liberal newspapers. She had access to influential political circles in Berlin and knew everyone who mattered. Until the Nazi marginalisation of Jews began, she was extremely popular. Even when excluded from her profession, she refused for a long time to leave Germany. On advice from friends she finally emigrated to the USA, where she continued to work as a journalist. Some of her diaries were published in English in 1943.
3 Otto Abetz (1903–1958) was a schoolmaster who in 1930 co-founded the Sohlberg Club for the furtherance of understanding between the youth of Germany and France. He made frequent visits to France but in July 1939 he was expelled in connection with the trial of a secret fascist organisation known as the Cagoulards. After working in the German Foreign Ministry he was appointed in August 1940 as ambassador to the collaborationist French government in Vichy.
4 Brook-Shepherd, G. Zita, the Last Empress, London, HarperCollins, 1991, p. 229. Brook-Shepherd writes about two women being sent to see the empress: one was Steffi Richter ‘who was well known in high society … as the amie attirée of Lord Rothermere’. The other was a member of the Austrian nobility, Princess Stephanie. But these were, of course, one and the same person.
5 Brook-Shepherd, op. cit.
6 Brook-Shepherd, op. cit. From an interview given to the author by Otto von Habsburg in 1990.
1 Fromm, When Hitler Kissed my Hand.
2 Fromm, op. cit.
3 Picker, Hitler’s Table Talk.
4 Jochmann (Ed.), Monologues at the Führer’s Headquarters 1941–44.
5 Sharply censured by the League of Nations, Italy was becoming dangerously isolated. Hitler exploited this by establishing closer ties with Mussolini. Germany shipped coal and steel to Italian industry. However, at the same time Hitler secretly prolonged the war by supplying war materials to Abyssinia, in order to increase further Mussolini’s dependence on him.
6 Two weeks previously, on 25 December, Hitler had changed his personal doctor and put himself in the hands of Dr Theodor Morell. The latter treated his stomach pains with a medication containing strychnine.
7 Dodd, Martha, My Years in Germany, London, Gollancz, 1939.
8 Dodd, op. cit.
9 In December 1941 FBI agents found and photographed this badge with its swastika, as they searched her house in Alexandria, Virginia. It was in a jewel-case in her bedroom.
10 Dirksen later succeeded Ribbentrop as Germany’s ambassador in London, a post he held until the outbreak of war.
1 Schwarz, This Man Ribbentrop.
2 Kershaw, Hitler Vol II, 1936–1945: Nemesis, 2000.
3 Kershaw, op. cit.
4 Speer, A., Inside the Third Reich, p. 108.
1 2nd Viscount Elibank (1877–1951) was a career civil servant in the Colonial Office, with many senior overseas postings. On retirement he became chairman of several large companies.
2 19th Baron Sempill (1893–1965). A pioneer aviator, he joined the Royal Flying Corps (1914–19) and later headed a mission to organise the Imperial Japanese naval air service. In 1925 and 1928 he lectured to the German Aeronautical Society in Berlin. He competed in the King’s Cup round-Britain air race every year from 1924 to 1930, and was president of the Royal Aeronautical Society (1926–30).
3 At the beginning of the war, one of Astor’s sons, David (d. 2001) took over as editor of the Observer, and always took a strongly anti-Nazi position, aided by German emigrés such as Sebastian Haffner.
4 The Astors originally came from Spain, from the town of Astorga in Galicia. In the eighteenth century they moved to Germany, adopted the name Astor and went into business as butchers. The three sons born in Germany emigrated to the USA and Britain where they made huge fortunes.
5 In the early 1960s Cliveden again hit the headlines, when the house was the scene of events that became known as ‘The Profumo Affair’. At Cliveden house-parties, John Profumo, a senior member of the Conservative government, met and began a relationship with Christine Keeler, whose ‘services’ were concurrently being enjoyed by the military attaché at the Soviet Embassy. Cliveden is now a luxury hotel.
6 Margaret (‘Margot’) Tennant (1862–1945) married H.H. Asquith in 1894. She had no public career, but was highly influential behind the scenes. She published an autobiography in 1922.
7 Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928) was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Liberal government (1905–8) and prime minister of a Liberal-Conservative coalition (1908–16). On his retirement in 1926 he was created 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith.
1 Wallis Warfield was born in Pennsylvania in 1896. In 1916 she married a naval officer, Earl W. Spencer. She divorced him in 1927, and the following year married Ernest A. Simpson, an American who worked in London and had taken British nationality. In October 1936 she divorced Simpson, in order to be free to marry King Edward VIII, with whom she had already had a relationship for several years.
2 See Kershaw, Ian, Hitler Vol II, p. 24.
3 Goebbels, J. Diaries, 7 January 1937.
4 Stanley Baldwin, statement to the House of Commons on the Abdication of Edward VIII, 10 December 1936.
5 Unity Mitford (d. 1948) was one of the daughters of Lord Redesdale and sister of Diana (d. 2003), wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Unity spent much of her time in Germany and was on close terms with Hitler. When war between Britain and Germany broke out, she tried to shoot herself in Munich, and eventually died of her injuries.
1 The Polish Corridor was the term given to the strip of territory linking the Polish interior with the Baltic coast at Danzig (today Gdansk). The corridor, comprising most of what was West Prussia, was ceded to Poland in 1919 and separated the German province of East Prussia from the rest of the Reich.
2 In 1936 Thomsen had been appointed First Secretary at the Washington embassy, and then in November 1938, Chargé d’Affaires. From 1943 to 1945 he was Nazi Germany’s ambassador to Sweden.
1 The eldest sister, Nancy, became a famous author, whose books, such as The Pursuit of Love, The Sun King, and Madame de Pompadour are still read. Her sister Jessica ran off at the age of eighteen with Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill. Romilly, who was then flirting with communism, fought in the Spanish Civil War and died in action in 1941. Jessica then made a career as a writer in the USA. The beautiful Diana first married and divorced Brian Guinness, the brewery heir, then had a long affair with Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. On the death of Mosley’s wife, he and Diana married. At the outbreak of war they were both imprisoned for treason, and after the war settled in France. Lady Mosley died in 2003. Pamela Mitford married an academic and spent most of her life in a castle in Ireland. The youngest sister, Deborah, married the Duke of Devonshire, with whom she runs one of Britain’s great stately homes, Chatsworth, in Derbyshire.
2 Pryce-Jones, Alan, Unity Mitford.
1 In December 1934 Hitler had secretly appointed Göring as his successor. He was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall in February 1938, and in July 1940 was given the title Reichsmarschall of the Greater German Reich.
2 At that time the western border regions of Czechoslovakia, known as Sudetenland, were largely populated by ethnic Germans. After 1918, they claimed they were being disadvantaged by the Czech government and civil unrest developed under the pro-Nazi Sudeten leader, Henlein. Hitler saw this as the perfect pretext to invade Sudetenland and later the whole of Czechoslovakia.
3 This is not correct; she was Austrian by birth, but took Hungarian citizenship when she married.
1 Stoiber, Des Führers Prinzessin (The Führer’s Princess).
1 Dr Hjalmar Schacht (1877–1970). President of the Reichsbank 1923–9, he was appointed Reich Minister of Economics by Hitler in 1933 but, never a committed Nazi, he resigned his office in 1937. Suspected of implication in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped execution.
2 Kershaw, Ian, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, London, 2000.
3 Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945) fought as a young officer in the German navy at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914. He was captured but escaped through Chile and Argentina. From 1916 onward he worked in intelligence and was appointed head of the Abwehr in January 1935. However, as early as 1938 he was in contact with anti-Hitler resistance groups, and was able to play a complex double game. Not until the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944 did he come under suspicion. He was tried and executed for treason in April 1945.
4 Hans Oster (1888–1945) was chief assistant to Admiral Canaris in the Abwehr. Ever since the purges of 1934, Oster had been strongly anti-Nazi but was protected by Canaris, who used him to make contact with Britain during the Czech crisis. Oster also tried to warn Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands of impending invasion. He was arrested after the July 1944 Bomb Plot and executed with Canaris in the last days of the war.
5 Ulrich von Hassell (1881–1944), an aristocratic diplomat, was ambassador to Rome from 1932 to 1938. When dismissed by Hitler for disagreeing with his policies, Hassell joined senior generals and civil servants in a plot to arrest Hitler and put him on trial in the summer of 1938. After the July 1944 Bomb Plot Hassell was arrested and hanged.
1 Once Hitler was in power, he was anxious to remove senior political and military figures who were not in sympathy with his ambitions. Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Minister of Defence from 1933 to 1938, was opposed to Hitler’s re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1935 and his invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In that year Blomberg married a new young wife, and Göring, as chief of police, managed to find evidence that she had once appeared in a pornographic photograph. Blomberg was forced to resign. At the same time, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General von Fritsch, was framed in a homosexual scandal and also made to resign. Hitler then took over both posts himself.
1 Rudolf Kommer, like Stephanie, came from Vienna’s Jewish community. He died in 1943 and since he had no living relatives, his property went to the US government. The manuscript on which he worked with Stephanie disappeared.
2 Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) was appointed president of the Danzig senate in 1933 under the Nazi regime, but resigned a year later. In 1936 he emigrated to Switzerland and wrote a number of books attacking Hitler, including Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, Zürich/London, 1939. In 1940 he emigrated to the USA and took up farming.
3 Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was an early promoter of Hitler. However, in 1936 he denounced Nazi ideology and from 1940 to 1945 was held in the concentration camps of Oranienburg, Buchenwald and Dachau. Afterwards he wrote a book entitled I Paid Hitler.
4 Kommer’s thoughts are not easy to interpret here. The bombing of cities by German aircraft had certainly begun by this date, for example the destruction of Warsaw and Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe, but the London blitz did not begin until the autumn of 1940, and the saturation bombing of Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, etc. later still. Kommer must have been extraordinarily far-sighted to predict, in May 1940, an Allied alliance even being formed, let alone Germany’s destruction and dismemberment.
5 Dr Heinrich Bruening (1885–1970), a centre-party politician, was Reich Chancellor under the late Weimar republic, from 1930 to 1932. In 1934, when Hitler began eliminating his opponents, he fled to Holland and then the USA. There, in 1939, he became Professor of Government at Harvard. He taught at Cologne University 1952–5 but died in the USA.
6 Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf (1896–1944) was a member of the Nazi Party and was elected to the Reichstag in 1933. He was appointed chief of police in 1935, but in 1938 joined the military anti-Hitler group. He was executed in 1944 for complicity in the July Bomb Plot.
7 Franz Halder (1884–1972), a career army officer, was appointed army chief-of-staff in 1938 and was instrumental in planning the invasions of Poland, western Europe and Russia. Yet he made cautious approaches to the anti-Hitler resistance without openly defying Hitler. In the Russian campaign Hitler increasingly took charge of operations and Halder was dismissed in September 1942. In 1944 he was arrested in connection with the Bomb Plot and imprisoned in Dachau for the rest of the war.
1 Wiedemann was called to give evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal (7 October 1945). He was in detention until 3 May 1948. He published his memoirs in 1964, and died at the age of 78 in Fuchsgrub on 24 January 1970.
2 Gerd Bucerius (1906–95) was an influential figure in the postwar German media. In 1946 he was co-founder of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, and from 1951 onward was the majority shareholder of Stern magazine.
3 Henri Nannen (1913–96), another key figure in the German media scene, was for many years editor-in-chief and then publisher of Stern, which grew to be Europe’s top-selling magazine.
4 Roy Jenkins (1920–2003), later Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, was Home Secretary, then Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government of 1964–70. In 1981 he was one of the ‘Gang of Four’ who formed the breakaway Social Democratic Party; this later merged with the Liberals. Later Jenkins was appointed President of the European Commission.
5 Axel Springer (1912–85) was a major publisher who, in the 1960s, became the figurehead of German conservatism. He owned, among other things, the tabloid Bild and the broadsheet Die Welt.
6 Ernst Cramer was one of Axel Springer’s closest associates and is still active in the Springer publishing concern.
1 Aspasía of Miletus, beautiful and intelligent, was only 20 when Pericles, the ruler of Athens, fell in love with her in 445 BC. Pericles was already 50 at the time, and had divorced his wife a few years earlier.
2 In Aristophanes’ comedy of the same name, Lysistrata persuades the women of Athens to withhold their sexual favours until their menfolk renounce war.
3 According to the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, the Amazons did exist and lived in the Caucasus region. They got their name, meaning ‘without breasts’, from the fact or legend that they cut off their breasts in order to fire their longbows more effectively.
4 Powerful Italian wife of the French king, Henri II, in the early sixteenth century.
5 Madame Sans-Gêne was a comedy by Sardou about intrigue at Napoleon’s court, first performed in 1893. Its chief character is Madame Lefebvre, wife of one of Napoleon’s marshals. Originally a laundress, she was nicknamed ‘Madame Sans-Gêne’, meaning ‘thick-skinned’ or ‘inconsiderate’.
6 Owner of the most famous hotel and restaurant in Vienna.
7 She was married to H.H. Asquith (1852–1928), British prime minister 1908–16.
8 Nancy, Viscountess Astor, was the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons, in December 1919.
9 Wife of Philip Snowden (1864–1937), who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–31. Created 1st Viscount Snowden.
10 Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) and her husband Sidney (1859–1947) were joint authors of influential books on left-wing politics, such as The History of Trade Unionism, 1894. Sidney Webb held various cabinet posts in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–31.
11 Wife of US President Woodrow Wilson (in office 1913–21), the architect of the 1918 peace settlement in Europe.
12 Three American women whom Stephanie had met: Miss Perkins was probably a society figure, Mrs (Eleanor) Roosevelt, wife of President F.D. Roosevelt, and Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who interviewed Hitler in 1931.
13 Influential society hostesses in London in the 1930s.
14 The republics and kingdoms established by the Treaty of Versailles to replace the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, etc.
15 The Treaties of St Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920) were subsidiary to the Treaty of Versailles, and signed by the Allies and Austria and Hungary respectively.
16 Historically, under the (German) Holy Roman Empire, a ‘mediatised’ prince or state was one reduced from being an immediate vassal of the Empire to one owing allegiance to a monarch (in this case, the King of Hungary) who in turn was subordinate to the Emperor.
17 Admiral Horthy was the Regent of Hungary after 1918, and Gömbös the prime minister.
1 The Saar is a German-speaking territory to which France laid claim unsuccessfully in the nineteenth century. It was ceded to France under the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, and was thus under French rule when this letter was written. However, a plebiscite in 1935 resulted in the return of the Saar to the German Reich. After the Second World War, the Saar came under the French zone of occupation, but following the creation of the German Federal Republic, the Saarlanders voted once again to be part of Germany.
2 This is Hitler’s indirect way of blaming the Jews for promoting war for financial ends – a frequent theme in his speeches and writings.
3 The Maginot Line was a series of massive underground defences built along France’s northern frontier in the 1920s. Ironically, in 1940, the German army simply bypassed this obstacle by invading France through the supposedly impassable forests and mountains of the Ardennes.
4 About half of this is represented by the river Rhine.
5 Formerly in East Prussia, Königsberg was captured by the Russians in 1945 and is now Kaliningrad, in the Russian enclave on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania.
6 In the Saar plebiscite held on 13 January 1935, 91% of the votes cast were in favour of rejoining Germany.
7 Hitler is referring to the ‘general election’ held on 12 November 1933 to vote for an all-Nazi list of candidates for the Reichstag. The list received 92% of the poll. Simultaneously Hitler asked the electorate to ratify his decision, of 14 October, to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference. Of the 96% who voted, 95% supported the withdrawal.
1 General von Seeckt was in charge of the Reichswehr (regular army) during the Weimar years. He secretly and illegally built up its strength and weaponry. Gustav Stresemann, Heinrich Bruening and Kurt von Schleicher all briefly served as Chancellor during the Weimar Republic, 1918–33.
2 The Stahlhelm (steel helmet) was a militant, right-wing, but non-Nazi ex-servicemen’s organisation founded in 1918 and dissolved in 1933.
3 Paul von Hindenburg was aged 85 in 1932, when he stood for re-election as President of Germany. Hitler stood against him and in the second round of voting polled 13.4 million votes against Hindenburg’s 19.4 million. Hitler had increased his poll by 2.1 million compared with the first round. Within a few months Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler as his Chancellor. When Hindenburg died in 1934, the presidency was abolished.
4 Hitler, of course, had no intention of reviving the monarchy. His Potsdam speech was simply intended to win over the predominantly Prussian senior officers in the army.
5 Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who flew to Britain in 1941, apparently on a self-appointed peace mission, and was disowned by Hitler; Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s longest-serving colleague, head of the SA storm-troopers, murdered on Hitler’s orders in 1934; Hermann Göring, the pleasure-loving chief of the Luftwaffe, who tried to replace Hitler in the last days of the war; Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda chief, who committed suicide with his wife and children, beside Hitler in April 1945; Walter Darré, agrarian ideologue, who ran the wartime food programme, but was dismissed for black-marketeering; Baldur von Schirach, upper-class student of partly American parentage, who built up the Hitler Youth movement, but later fell from Hitler’s favour.
6 King George V and Queen Mary.
1 On 3 October 1935, in defiance of the League of Nations covenant, Mussolini’s Italy invaded the ancient African kingdom of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). The League imposed partial economic sanctions on Italy, but they were timidly enforced. They did not cause Italy to halt the invasion, but had the effect of driving Mussolini into the arms of Hitler. The Germans were delighted with this turn of events. If Italy got bogged down in Africa, it would be less able to oppose Germany’s annexation of Austria (hitherto protected by Italy), and if Italy triumphed it would weaken the position of France and Britain. Either way, Germany would benefit.
2 This unusual word is probably a direct translation of the German ‘apodiktisch’, used in philosophy to denote a necessary and hence absolute truth.
3 Hitler’s version of history is typically distorted. The blockade of German ports was highly effective and in 1918 Germany was close to starvation. The German army was conclusively defeated for a combination of reasons: the increased effectiveness of American troops, the use of tanks by the British, but most of all by the German army’s lack of food and supplies. This caused the last German offensive to stall, when German troops started looting well-stocked French shops. Furthermore, there was no ‘revolution’ as such in Germany, though there were strikes in some cities, and a naval mutiny in Kiel, in the last weeks of the war. Political reform was urged on the Kaiser and his government by parliamentary parties of the centre and left joining forces in the Reichstag. Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was forced to resign in July 1917, over a year before Germany finally sued for peace.
4 The Treaty of Versailles, among other things, deprived Germany of its shortlived colonies in Africa and the Pacific.
5 Earlier in 1935, Hitler had blatantly flouted the military restrictions imposed on Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, among other things by introducing compulsory military service. This provoked the British, French and Italians to meet at Stresa on 11 April. They issued a statement condemning Germany’s action and reiterating their support of Austria’s independence and of the Treaty of Locarno (1925) under which Weimar Germany undertook to respect existing European frontiers.
6 Hitler is referring to US President Woodrow Wilson (in office 1913–21), who was instrumental in the creation of the League of Nations. He had indeed been a professor at Princeton University.
7 Sir Samuel Hoare was appointed Foreign Secretary in Baldwin’s National Government that was elected in June 1935. In September he made a powerful speech at the League of Nations, warning Italy against any invasion of Abyssinia, an independent country and member of the League. However, there was nervousness about splitting the Stresa Front, linking Italy, France and Britain. The Hoare–Laval Pact, negotiated shortly afterwards with France, effectively gave Italy carte blanche in Abyssinia. There was a public outcry in Britain and Hoare resigned early in December.
8 This bilateral treaty, signed in June 1935, allowed Germany to increase the size of its navy to 35% of that of the British navy, with submarines to at least 45% of the British strength, or to parity in the event of a threat from the Soviet Union.
1 Herbert Scholz was a German, and an ambitious Nazi careerist. He had doubtless been placed in that post in order to keep an eye on Horthy. We do not know the date of Stephanie’s 1938 visit to Hungary, but we do know that on 23 November 1938, she asked Fritz Wiedemann to write to Scholz and send him a gift, because she wanted her son Franz to get a job in I.G. Farben, the company whose Finance Director was Scholz’s father-in-law (see Chapter 10).
2 Horthy did his best to maintain civilised government in Hungary, and was relatively benign towards the Jewish population, but during the war he was progressively undermined by the Nazis. Hungary had its own Nazi-type organisation, the Arrow Cross. By 1944, Horthy was trapped between a pro-Nazi prime minister, Sztójay, and a German ‘plenipotentiary’, Veesenmayer. As if this was not enough, the Nazis kidnapped his son in order to blackmail Horthy into doing their bidding, including the mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Horthy chose to resign and spent the rest of the war under German ‘protection’ in Bavaria.
3 Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) was leader of the Conservative Party 1921–2 and Foreign Secretary 1925–9. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his prominence in negotiating the Treaty of Locarno in 1925.
4 Chamberlain would have been 72 years old then and no longer in office as Britain’s Foreign Secretary.