Authors: Jim Wilson
It may have seemed to some in Berlin that Hitler had completely fallen out with, downgraded and sidelined his old friend and personal adjutant by dispatching him to the relatively obscure post of Consul General in San Francisco, California. But the truth appears to be very different. Wiedemann’s mission was of the greatest importance to the Nazi high command. His role, as the American
Time Magazine
reported in January 1939, was to calm US-German relations and to sell the Nazi regime to an unsympathetic America.
Time Magazine
had described him as Hitler’s ‘Man Friday’; burly and competent, with black wavy hair and chiselled, handsome features. He is shrewd, the report said, intelligent and seemingly popular in society.
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The US Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jnr, received a report on 2 January 1940 that said the German Consul General in New York had intimated that Wiedemann had indeed been given the job of keeping America out of the war, and that his posting to San Francisco should not be taken that he was persona non grata with Hitler, as had been suggested.
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A significant percentage of Americans wanted nothing to do with a new European war. In their view, America’s entry into the First World War had been a costly mistake, and neutrality and isolationism was a more sensible position for America to take. Any threat lay 3,000 miles away. Wiedemann, the Nazi hierarchy calculated, had fertile ground on which to work. Goebbels had noted in his diary that public opinion in the US was in a state of ferment and the isolationists were very active.
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It was not difficult in the circumstances for Wiedemann to encourage the spread of anti-war feeling, and, where there were pro-German activists, to go even further by cultivating positive support for the Third Reich.
He achieved it partly through the Auslands-Organisation, which was referred to cryptically by its adherents as AO; this was the foreign arm of the Nazi Party which embraced all Germans and pro-German supporters abroad. Although this was kept carefully concealed, the organisation was under the direct control in Germany of Walter Schellenberg, the Nazi Gestapo counter-intelligence boss, and Ernst Bohle, a Secretary of State at the Nazi Foreign Ministry, who had been born in Bradford. In England, MI5 concluded that AO was a ‘ready-made instrument for intelligence, espionage and ultimately for sabotage purposes’. The leading agents for AO in the States were Wiedemann and now Princess Stephanie.
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With the support of Himmler and backed by money from I.G. Farben, the huge Nazi industrial trust, Wiedemann and Stephanie were the key figures helping to knit the organisation together in the States, travelling across the country to build and widen support.
As Consul General in San Francisco, Wiedemann was head of a network that covered not just the US but the whole Pacific basin and included countries in South America. Between them the couple’s social position enabled them to exercise influence on prominent figures, and with their support persuade others to sympathise with the Nazi cause. With war now raging in Europe, the most important task of AO was to keep America out of the conflict and unite German-American businesses and industrial companies to the Fatherland. To do this Wiedemann established the German-American Business League. Among its rules were that member companies would purchase only from Germany, they would strictly boycott Jewish firms and employ only Aryans. The organisation spread to enrol the owners of over 1,000 small companies. The network stirred up anti-Jewish feeling, paid for radio airtime supporting German propaganda and publicised German goods. Just after the outbreak of war in Europe, Wiedemann gave a speech to the League in which he told members:
You are citizens of the United States, which has allied itself with an enemy of the German nation. The time will come when you may have to decide which side to take. I would caution that I cannot advise you what to do, but you should be governed by your conscience. One duty lies with the Mother country, the other with the adopted country. Blood is thicker than ink … Germany is the land of your fathers and regardless of the consequences, you should not disregard the traditional heritage which is yours.
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There were other damaging allegations circulating. A woman employed by Wiedemann, Alice Crockett, the divorced wife of an American general, accused him of being head of the Nazi espionage network in the USA. Wiedemann, trusting in her friendship and loyalty, had arranged for her to undertake an official trip to Berlin on his behalf in May 1939 to meet Hitler and Himmler. It was on her return that she made the sensational allegations, reporting Wiedemann’s secret activities to the FBI.
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Crockett alleged that the Nazi regime had transferred a massive sum of over $5 million to fund espionage and set up a spy ring across the United States. She further claimed that among those employed in this intrigue was Princess Stephanie and that Nazi networks existed on the east coast controlled by an office in New York. The FBI may well have been aware of some of these allegations, but Alice Crockett’s visit to Berlin opened their eyes to the extent of German influence that Wiedemann and his colleagues were masterminding, and some of the details she brought back were a shock to Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss.
From his residence in California, Wiedemann made many trips to Mexico. It was suspected one of his tasks was to discover ways of gaining the support of Central American states to block the Panama Canal to American shipping in the event of America being drawn into the war. The Germans were not alone in establishing an espionage network in the United States, however. With Britain standing alone and vulnerable, Churchill was desperate to involve American strength and arms in the war. Britain set up a rival network to the Nazis with a view to engineering a situation where America would be drawn into the conflict. Covert initiatives such as false rumours and the creation of false documents were employed. A document emerged purporting to show secret Nazi plans to invade South America and therefore pose an immediate threat to the United States.
Foremost among those working on behalf of British intelligence was a Canadian citizen called William Stephenson, known by the codename ‘Intrepid’. A personal friend of Churchill, he had been mentored by Sir William Wiseman who had led British intelligence in the US during the First World War. He operated his secret network, known as BSC (British Security Co-ordination), from offices in New York’s Rockefeller Centre.
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A prime aim was to organise American public opinion in favour of aid to Britain, and ultimately to get the United States into the war so Britain was no longer alone in facing Nazism. One of his fellow agents was none other than Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, who we have already met in connection with Jack Kruse and his ‘Stately Super-car’. The trigger, which some commentators have suggested persuaded Hitler to declare war on the United States on 11 December 1941, was a forged document which ‘Intrepid’ is credited with planting into Hitler’s hands; it purported to show that Roosevelt was planning a pre-emptive strike against Germany without a formal declaration of war by the US Congress.
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In 1945 Stephenson was knighted at the request of Churchill for his secret work in both North and South America. He also received the highest US civilian award, the Presidential Medal for Merit, having been credited with a key role in the creation of the CIA.
Princess Stephanie, it will be recalled, in London in 1938 had tried, with Wiedemann’s help, to arrange a peace mission direct with the then British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Now, two years later, another meeting was being set up to trigger new negotiations and Lord Halifax was again a key player. Despite Churchill’s determination as Prime Minister that Britain would never surrender, there remained an element inside the British Cabinet that were prepared, even now, to attempt to negotiate for peace if the time and terms seemed right. Among them was Foreign Secretary Halifax. Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, was also one of the peace plotters and had opened up a dialogue with Hans Thomson, the German charge d’affaires in Washington. On 6 June 1940 Sir William Wiseman, a former Cambridge boxing blue, lunched with Halifax in London. Wiseman had been sent by the first director of the Secret Intelligence Service, Mansfield Cumming, to establish the agency’s office in New York during the First World War. He had acted as a liaison link between President Woodrow Wilson and the British government, and was referred to by those ‘in the know’ as the President’s ‘confidential Englishman’. He was a man who always seemed to move mysteriously in international circles and was widely credited with playing a major role in getting the US into the First World War. Wiseman remained living in the States after the Armistice and had joined Kuhn, Loeb & Co., the second greatest US private banking house, but he retained his British passport, his family titles and his connections to British intelligence.
Halifax briefed Wiseman to assist Lothian and help him to find some way of starting peace negotiations that would be effective. Before the outbreak of war a substantial number of the British Establishment (prime movers in political, aristocratic and financial circles), many egged on by the princess’ activities, were totally opposed to the coming conflict. When, despite their efforts, war broke out, these people continued to believe that it should be resolved as quickly as possible through a negotiated peace. This belief did not necessarily make them pro-Nazi, although some certainly were. In November, as the Blitz was hitting Britain hard and the Battle of Britain had just been won, Wiseman, now back in the States, was contacted by Princess Stephanie. They had two meetings. The second and most important took place in Wiseman’s suite at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco on 27 November 1940, at which Wiedemann was also present. The three had a lengthy conversation which lasted from 7.30 p.m. until the early hours of the following morning. The FBI was suspicious of Wiseman’s activities and had him under surveillance. Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss, had received a note from Brigadier General Sherman Miles which inferred Wiseman was a member of the same group of Englishmen in America who had attempted to negotiate with the Nazis in the past.
Unknown to Wiseman and the princess, the FBI had bugged Wiseman’s apartment and recorded the entire conversation, which amounted to a detailed discussion of possible peace negotiations. Stephanie promised she could get any proposals direct to Hitler, and Wiseman made it clear he represented a group of Englishmen who believed a satisfactory peace arrangement could still be concluded between Britain and Germany. The next day Wiseman met Wiedemann and disclosed that Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, represented a group which had members in both Houses of the British Parliament and felt strongly that a negotiated peace was both possible and desirable. The FBI leaked the contents of these undercover meetings to British intelligence. The result was that Wiseman lost the backing he had originally had from influential sources in London.
At the Wiseman meeting, Princess Stephanie had put forward an audacious plan. She said she was prepared to travel to Berlin via Switzerland to intercede directly with Hitler. She was sure the Führer would meet her given the affection in which he had held for her in the past. If she failed to see Hitler, she would negotiate with Himmler. Stephanie believed that if her talks in Berlin were successful it would be possible for a Nazi emissary to see Lord Halifax, in London or in a neutral city, to confirm arrangements for a ceasefire and an alliance between Britain and Germany. The princess had not changed her allegiance. It was her firm conviction that a pact between Britain and Germany against communism and the Soviet menace was in the best interests of Germany and the surest way of furthering Hitler’s objectives. Among comments overheard by the FBI were those of Sir William Wiseman saying Hitler needed to know that the amount of damage the Nazis could do to America was nothing compared to the damage the Americans would inflict on Germany if they were provoked to enter the war. Following this meeting, Hoover ensured the FBI kept tight surveillance on all three participants and he sent a summary of what had occurred at the Mark Hopkins Hotel to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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The FBI informed the President that during the meeting the princess had done most of the talking. She said Hitler was genuinely fond of her and would listen to her. She thought she could impress on the Reich Chancellor that at the opportune time, if he aligned himself with Britain, such an alliance would bring lasting peace. She considered there were several powerful arguments that would convince the Führer: that Hitler had not been able to defeat Britain in the air (the Luftwaffe had failed to destroy the RAF in the Battle of Britain) and the planned invasion of Britain had been postponed; the alliance with Russia and Italy could deliver little in comparison to an alliance with Britain; and finally, the overwhelming military and economic strength of America should stand as a warning to the Third Reich, if it too was drawn into the war. Anyone who supposed the German Reich was stronger than the United States was fooling themselves. She pointed out that America had already technically breached its neutrality by providing Britain with fifty destroyers, and Churchill was pressing the American President for further financial and material assistance.
The discussions between Stephanie, Wiedemann and the former British intelligence chief came to nothing. In any case, their proposals were never likely to gain the support of Churchill and the majority of the British Cabinet. Following that meeting, when the princess phoned Wiseman to elicit further help, in particular to get him to provide an affidavit to support her bid to have her American visa renewed, Wiseman was very keen to sever the relationship.
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After the Wiseman talks the FBI stepped up their monitoring of the princess’ movements and her attempts at further intrigues. A remarkable memorandum compiled by the FBI, and sent to the President’s office at the end of October 1941, said Princess Stephanie had been suspected by the French, British and American authorities of being a spy for the Nazis. She was known to have very close connections with high officials of the Third Reich, and it described her as ‘extremely intelligent, dangerous and clever’. As an espionage agent, the memorandum concluded, she was ‘worse than ten thousand men’. The FBI said she was reputedly immoral and capable of resorting to any means, including seduction and bribery, to achieve her ends. That opinion was absolutely accurate, as was soon to be proved.
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