Authors: Jim Wilson
In February and March 1938 the princess was again visiting the United States, once more at the expense of the Nazi regime. During her absence across the Atlantic, her Austrian homeland was appropriated and absorbed into the German Reich, when on 12 March Hitler ordered units of the Wehrmacht to invade in the coup that became known as the Anschluss. By then Hitler had assumed for himself the powers of Minister of War and Supreme Warlord, dismissing many of the aristocratic and military ‘old guard’ and replacing them with his own appointees. Rothermere’s congratulatory letters and telegrams continued to arrive, supporting Hitler’s policies, excusing even the worst excesses of Nazi rule. Commenting in a memorandum she wrote later on the dismissal of Hitler’s Minister for War, General von Blomberg – along with others of the conservative and moderate element in the Nazi Party – Stephanie noted that Wiedemann had warned her ‘the warmongers are now in control and war is now inevitable’. Wiedemann had added: ‘If your old fool of an English Lord still supports Hitler after this he is committing high treason.’
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But the ‘old fool’, Rothermere, maintained his friendly correspondence with Berlin.
Ward Price, Rothermere’s central Europe correspondent, who always accompanied Rothermere and the princess when they visited Hitler, had the reputation of being Fleet Street’s most enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. He was on close terms with all of the leading Nazi hierarchy. He even began affecting the use of a monocle, aping some of the senior Nazis grouped around the Führer. When German troops entered Vienna, Ward Price was there, standing close to Hitler as the Führer addressed the crowds. In Prague he argued that Czechoslovakia should succumb to Germany’s demands. He was a welcome guest at Goering’s vast mansion, Carinhall, where in 1937 he spent a day with Goering on his estate. Price was even invited to play with the field marshal’s huge miniature model railway laid out in the attics at Carinhall. The field marshal, as excited and enthusiastic as a child, knelt to direct the electric-powered model trains deftly around the extensive tracks. In the ceiling above the layout, a system of wires allowed model aeroplanes to fly across the room dropping miniature bombs on the railway below. For Goering it conjured up his own exploits as a pilot in the First World War. Afterwards, on Goering’s behalf, Price conveyed a chilling message to the British government. Enquiring why Britain had driven Germany into the ranks of her enemies, Goering had said: ‘The sands of possible reconciliation are fast running out.’
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The Times
’ Vienna correspondent, describing the Anschluss in a private message to his editor, took a very different line to Rothermere and the
Daily Mail
. He cabled: ‘In my wildest nightmares I had not foreseen anything so perfectly organised, so brutal, so ruthless, so strong. When this machine goes into action it will blight everything it encounters like a swarm of locusts.’ He warned that the Nazis’ ultimate object was ‘precisely the destruction of England … Their real hatred is for England.’
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The same newspaper’s representative in Prague conveyed a similar warning. He wrote that he was convinced Nazi Germany had a long-term programme which it was determined to carry out. He had little doubt that Hitler intended both the break-up of Czechoslovakia and to challenge the British Empire. ‘The Nazis have to be confronted,’ he said.
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But at home, leading politicians remained wedded to a policy of appeasement.
Having returned to England, in the summer of 1938 Princess Stephanie received a highly sensitive private assignment from the Reich Chancellor, asking her to find out if one of his ‘intimate’ friends could safely visit England to undertake unofficial conversations at senior government level. Hitler was contemplating authorising Goering to travel to England to negotiate on his behalf, but he wanted an assurance that Goering would not be humiliated by being subjected to open insult and demonstrations if he crossed the Channel and stepped onto British soil. Stephanie was summoned to Carinhall, Goering’s mansion. It was the first time she had met the flamboyant reichsmarschall. Stephanie recalled the meeting in a memorandum written some years later. Goering, she wrote, was ‘the leader of the peace party’ among the Nazi hierarchy. ‘But he qualified his policy with opportunism and was certainly not espoused to peace at any price.’ This position was far removed from Ribbentrop’s, by then German Foreign Minister, who was ‘the open leader of an absolute unconditional war movement’. His stance was: ‘War against England at any time, at any price, in any circumstances.’
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Goering, Stephanie wrote, was the economic dictator of Germany – the logical and actual heir presumptive of Adolf Hitler. ‘There is no other man of whom the Führer speaks with so much respect, admiration and gratitude.’
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In complete contrast, Goering’s opinion of the new German Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, was that he was incompetent, stupid and stood in the way of any deal with Britain. Hence the plan for a visit by Goering as negotiator; a visit that needed to be kept secret from Ribbentrop.
Although the princess knew Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, she recognised how arrangements for such a sensitive visit would need to be handled diplomatically, and so she turned for help to her friend Lady Ethel Snowden, widow of Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929. Ethel Snowden was no stranger to Nazi Germany. She had attended the last three Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies in company with the princess. She had also written many articles for the
Daily Mail
, most of them enthusiastically supporting the National Socialists. Moreover, Goebbels admired her; he had written about her in his diary in September 1937, calling her a ‘lady with guts’. His diary entry observed that in London her spirit and courage was misunderstood.
Ethel Snowden agreed to help, and used her political contacts to get privileged access. She called on Halifax at his private house in London’s Eaton Square early one morning, and personally passed on the message proposing a possible meeting with a highly placed Nazi leader. Halifax told a colleague that Lady Snowden had been approached ‘through a personage who was in a very intimate relationship with Hitler and whom I understand to be Princess Hohenlohe’. In his diary for 6 July 1938, Halifax also noted:
Lady Snowden came to see me early in the morning. She informed me that, through someone on the closest terms with Hitler – I took this to mean Princess Hohenlohe – she had received a message with the following burden: Hitler wanted to find out whether H.M. Government would welcome it if he were to send one of his closest confidants, as I understand it, to England for the purpose of conducting unofficial talks. Lady Snowden gave me to understand that this referred to Field-Marshal Goering, and they wished to find out whether he could come to England without being too severely and publicly insulted, and what attitude H.M. Government would take generally to such a visit.
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A few days before Ethel Snowden’s call at the Foreign Secretary’s home, Princess Stephanie had received a cable from Fritz Wiedemann summoning her to Berlin. On arrival there she had been immediately driven to Hermann Goering’s mansion. Goering told her he was keen to visit Britain. He said Hitler was not bluffing when he threatened war. The one chance he could see of avoiding conflict was if he could speak with the British Foreign Secretary in London. He asked Stephanie to make all the urgent arrangements necessary for the high-level meeting. He genuinely believed war could still be avoided, but only if he could get some time alone, face to face, with Lord Halifax. Wiedemann, he said, would travel in secret to London to prepare the ground, and that Ribbentrop must know nothing about the proposed meeting. The German Foreign Minister was no friend of either Wiedemann or the princess, as Hitler well knew, and Goering was an arch-rival of Ribbentrop’s in foreign affairs within the Nazi hierarchy.
Halifax was concerned and somewhat suspicious of the unorthodox nature of the approach, and he privately noted that Wiedemann and Princess Stephanie were not the go-betweens he would have chosen to deal with. He described the princess as a ‘well known adventuress, not to say blackmailer’.
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Halifax had good reason to be suspicious. The previous year Sir Walford Selby, the British ambassador in Vienna, Stephanie’s birthplace, had warned the Foreign Office that she was an ‘international adventuress’ who was ‘known to be Hitler’s agent’.
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However, having weighed up the prospect, and sought permission from Prime Minister Chamberlain, Halifax agreed to meet Wiedemann – but only on the strict understanding that the sole purpose of the meeting was to discuss the visit of a high-ranking Nazi figure for wide-ranging talks on Anglo-German relations. Halifax intimated that he understood the emissary he would be meeting would be Field Marshal Goering. But if Goering did come, Halifax said, there was no way his presence in England would remain secret. The flamboyant Goering was an unlikely figure to be ‘smuggled’ into London without the press finding out. In any case, that was not the way Goering would have been prepared to act. He would have wanted the status and the red-carpet treatment that he would have considered were his due.
The meeting between Halifax and Wiedemann took place on 18 July at Halifax’s private residence in Belgravia. Wiedemann confirmed he had come with Hitler’s knowledge to explore the possibility of a very senior Nazi leader entering into a full discussion on Anglo-German relations. Halifax gave a cautious welcome in principle, but he said the timing of such a visit would need to be carefully chosen as it would inevitably attract wide public attention and comment. He added that there was a danger that a face-to-face discussion might do more harm than good. Wiedemann assured Halifax that Hitler had always regarded England with admiration and friendship, but he also felt that on a number of occasions Hitler’s friendship had been rebuffed and this had caused serious resentment in Germany.
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Halifax told Hitler’s adjutant that the present time might not be altogether favourable, unless there was a peaceful resolution of the position of Czechoslovakia. Was Wiedemann in a position to give him any assurances on that, he asked? Wiedemann initially said he had not been charged with a political mission, and therefore was not in a position to discuss Czechoslovakia or to negotiate. When he saw Halifax was put off by this response, Wiedemann changed tack and gave a solemn undertaking that the German government was not planning any kind of action involving force, unless they were given no option to act through some unforeseen incident. The brief meeting ended on good terms, with Wiedemann recalling his time in the trenches during the Great War as Hitler’s senior officer.
Halifax noted in a memorandum:
The Prime Minister and I have thought about the meeting I had with Capt Wiedemann. Of especial importance to us are the steps which the Germans and the British might possibly take, not only to create the best possible relationship between the two countries, but also to calm down the international situation in order to achieve an improvement of general economic and political problems … Our hopes have recently been shattered by the conduct of the German press, which it seems to us, has not hesitated to incite public opinion in a dangerous manner over every incident that occurs in Czechoslovakia or on the frontiers.
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Although the Foreign Office was cautiously optimistic about the visit, the low-profile episode quickly rebounded on the British Foreign Secretary. Wiedemann had been spotted by journalists arriving at Croydon airport. The next day the
Daily Herald
came out with a banner headline revealing the secret meeting. Once the news was out, there were diplomatic responses across Europe. The French government said the idea of Wiedemann being received by Lord Halifax had been ‘cooked up’ by Princess Hohenlohe, who was extremely well known to the secret services of all the ‘Great Powers’. While ‘pretending to serve the interests of Britain’, she was actually ‘chiefly committed to the interests of Germany’.
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The Czech ambassador in London wrote to his government in Prague:
If there is any decency left in this world, then there will be a big scandal when it is revealed what part was played in Wiedemann’s visit by Steffi Hohenlohe, née Richter. This world-renowned secret agent, spy and confidence trickster, who is wholly Jewish, today provides the focus of Hitler’s propaganda in London.
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Sir Walford Selby, British ambassador to Austria, warned the government that the princess’ suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London had become a base for Nazi sympathisers and an ‘outpost of German espionage’, and that she had been behind much of the German propaganda circulating in London since she had first moved to England.
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A rather different view came from Herbert von Dirksen, Germany’s ambassador in London in 1938. In his autobiography he recalled what he described as the most important political event of the summer of 1938:
It was an attempt at rapprochement, undertaken from the German side which sheds the brightest of lights on the methods of Hitlerian diplomacy – its multi-tracked approach, its by-passing of official channels, its dishonesty and lack of consistency, as well as the complete inability to attune itself to the mentality of the other side.
He wrote that the motivation for the London mission had come from two sources: Goering’s desire for prestige and his wish to maintain peace through an understanding with Britain; and an initiative by a clever woman.
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Ribbentrop, who had been purposely kept out of the loop, reacted with fury when news of the meeting reached Berlin. He protested vehemently about this interference in foreign affairs that had been arranged entirely without his knowledge, and it appears he succeeded in changing Hitler’s mind about pursuing a high-level Anglo-German meeting. When Wiedemann returned to Berchtesgaden to report back to Hitler, he was kept waiting at the Berghof for several hours while Hitler entertained Unity Mitford. Later, Wiedemann was given just five minutes in Hitler’s presence, during which Hitler angrily ruled out a visit by Goering to London and refused to discuss the subject further. Wiedemann was ordered to compile a lengthy report for Ribbentrop. In it he made the extraordinary claim that Halifax had asked him to convey to Hitler that before he (Halifax) died, he would like to see, as the culmination of his work, the Führer entering London at the side of the English king, amid the acclamation of the English people.
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It is hard to believe Halifax could have made such a comment to Wiedemann, but Halifax’s biographer records that in 1957, when the
Manchester Guardian
enquired about the incident, Halifax, then aged 75, ‘decided to absent himself from his Yorkshire home for the day and consistently refused to take calls from the press about it’.
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