Nazi Princess (12 page)

There is nobody in Germany with any political insight who welcomes this conflict, except perhaps some enemies of the state who may cherish the hope that it might constitute an international example which could one day be applied to Germany. But these elements must not be confused with the German people.
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Rothermere met Hitler again in September 1936, and signalled his continuing friendship with the Nazi leader that Christmas by asking the princess to take the German chancellor a personal gift of a valuable Gobelin tapestry which would attract a value of more than £85,000 in today’s money. Stephanie was happy to oblige. In a letter accompanying his gift, Rothermere wrote that he had selected the tapestry guided by the thought of Hitler the artist, rather than Hitler the ‘great leader’. He added it was a pleasure to hear from Princess Stephanie that in spite of the Führer’s tremendous workload, and the burden of responsibilities he shouldered, he was in high spirits and excellent health. Rothermere signed off his Christmas letter ‘in sincere admiration and respect’.
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A letter of thanks arrived from the Reich Chancellery at Rothermere’s villa on the French Riviera, where he escaped from the English winter whenever he could. Hitler’s letter said the ‘magnificent tapestry’ had given him great pleasure and his letter included an invitation for Rothermere to be his guest in January 1937 at the Führer’s mountain retreat, amid the spectacular mountain scenery on the Obersalzberg. It was the first occasion Rothermere had been asked to meet Hitler at his mountain retreat and it was to be an especially memorable occasion.
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In a gesture Hitler rarely offered to his guests, he sent his personal railway saloon carriage to meet Rothermere and the princess at the Austrian border. The Berghof was isolated and difficult to reach. It was poorly served by road and rail, but the railway line to Bad Reichenhall, some 20km from the Berghof, had been improved and the station enlarged to accommodate Hitler’s and Goering’s private trains. Hitler had had his home there since 1927. Goering and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy chief of staff, also had residences on the Obersalzberg. In 1939 the Nazi Party, as a 50th birthday present, gave Hitler what became known as ‘The Eagle’s Nest’, a building constructed on the very summit of the Kehlstein Mountain, high above the Berghof. Because of the exposed and rugged site on which it was built, it was one of the most costly and complicated building projects of its time; a showpiece of German engineering. However, Hitler rarely visited ‘The Eagle’s Nest’ or the Teehaus with its breathtaking views and spectacular sun terrace. He disliked the rarefied air high on top of the mountain and he had a fear of heights. Nevertheless, suppressing his own fears Hitler was proud to show off the building whenever he had prominent political guests visiting him at the Berghof.

Rothermere’s party arrived late in the evening and spent the night at the Berghof, a distinct privilege seldom granted to foreign visitors. Fellow guests at Hitler’s lair while Rothermere and his party were there were Magda and Joseph Goebbels. Hitler was immensely proud of the Berghof. Its great hall was dominated at one end by a glass wall that provided a magnificent view of the spectacular scenery. The hall’s walls were hung with Gobelin tapestries, all of them every bit as valuable as the one his guest had presented to him. There were numerous paintings by Italian masters, including nudes by Titian and Bordone which were displayed either side of the entrance to the dining room. As well as expensive paintings, the rooms were adorned with beautiful pieces of sculpture and exotic porcelain. The dining room was almost as big as the great hall, and leading from it was an enclosed winter garden, one of the few places in the Berghof where smoking was allowed. Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker. Upstairs, bedrooms and offices were arranged either side of a long corridor. Hitler’s private suite consisted of sitting room, study, bedroom and bathroom. The bathroom was clad in Italian marble and embellished with gold-plated fittings.

After experiencing a night in the splendour of the Berghof, the group breakfasted together late as Hitler rarely rose early. In the afternoon Hitler took Rothermere for a walk – downhill, because the Reich Chancellor disliked too much physical exertion. At the end of their stroll, during which the two men discussed the possibility of a German alliance with Britain, a car met them and returned them to the comfort of the Berghof. There the discussions continued on the threat of international communism and the Nazis’ attitude to the Jews. Hitler claimed that the anti-Nazi campaign in Britain was being backed by Winston Churchill on behalf of his Jewish paymasters, and asserted that it was the Jews who controlled much of the press in Britain, too – an indication perhaps of the value he placed on the mouthpiece for National Socialism Rothermere was providing for him.
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Goebbels’ diary for 7 January 1937 records the visit by Rothermere and Princess Stephanie:

Rothermere pays me great compliments … Enquires in detail about German press policy. Strongly anti-Jewish. The princess is very pushy. After lunch we retire for a chat. Question of Spain comes up. Führer won’t tolerate a hot-bed of communism in Europe any longer. Is ready to prevent any more pro-Republican volunteers from going there. His proposal on controls seems to astonish Rothermere. German prestige is thus restored. Franco will win anyway … Rothermere believes British government also pro-Franco.
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In the evening Hitler treated his guests to a showing of the film
Stosstrupp 1917
(
Shock-troops 1917
). Rothermere, who had lost two of his sons in the Great War, was deeply moved by it. Stephanie apparently wept. Hitler seemed fascinated by her, stroking her hair and giving her intimate pinches on her cheek.

As a result of the meeting at the Berghof and the discussions that took place there, Hitler and Goebbels agreed that Rothermere’s continued supporting voice in Britain on behalf of the Nazis via his newspapers was of valuable service to the German Reich. The relationship should be encouraged as actively as possible, and the British peer should be treated well to ensure he continued to write favourably of an Anglo-German alliance and remained a strong supporter of the Führer. However, on the orders of the Reich propaganda chief, little was published in the German press about Rothermere’s visit.
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Stephanie left the Berghof delighted with what had been achieved and honoured that she had been personally presented with another signed photograph of Hitler in a silver frame, in this case inscribed ‘In memory of your visit to Berchtesgaden’. Rothermere returned to his villa by the Mediterranean, while Stephanie remained for a few days in Munich. Again Hitler showered her with favours. A massive bunch of roses arrived at her hotel, along with a personal message that as a further token of his friendship and admiration, he wanted to present her with a sheepdog puppy. She christened the puppy Wolf, after Hitler’s own favourite Alsatian dog.

Later, from her apartment at Bryanston Court, London, Stephanie wrote a personal letter of thanks. ‘You are a charming host,’ she told Hitler. ‘Your beautiful and excellently run home in that magnificent setting all leave me with a wonderful and lasting impression. It is no empty phrase when I say, Herr Reich Chancellor, that I enjoyed every minute of my stay with you.’ Thanking Hitler for the gift of the dog, she wrote: ‘It has given me great pleasure, not only because I love dogs – but also because, to me, dogs symbolise loyalty and friendship – which in this instance pleases me all the more.’
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By January 1937, when the visit to the Berghof took place, Stephanie was deeply in love with Fritz Wiedemann. The previous year, when she was staying at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, Wiedemann had visited her there. Both of them were aged 45. Although married for eighteen years and the father of three children, Fritz Wiedemann missed no opportunity to lavish his charms on her. He was 6ft tall, dark and muscular, with beetling eyebrows and friendly eyes. Some said he exuded eroticism. He was extremely charming and well educated. But, according to the daughter of the American ambassador to Berlin, Martha Dodd, who attended many parties given by leading Nazis, he had the shrewdness and cunning of an animal and could behave completely without delicacy or subtlety. ‘Certainly, Wiedemann was a dangerous man to cross,’ she wrote, ‘for despite his social naiveté and clumsiness he was as ruthless a fighter and schemer as some of his compatriots.’
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Stephanie was extremely keen to cement her relationship with Wiedemann. She knew how close he was to Hitler and the influence he was able to exert on his leader. Devious as ever, she advised Rothermere to send Wiedemann a gift and Rothermere duly instructed her to go to Cartier, select a gold cigarette case, have it engraved with Wiedemann’s name, charge it to his account and take it to Berlin. In response, Rothermere received a handwritten letter of thanks from Wiedemann.
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Rothermere’s keenness to maintain good relations with Hitler extended to another expensive gift. In May 1937 he sent a precious jade bowl to the Nazi leader. Again, it was Princess Stephanie who delivered it personally. In his letter expressing ‘heartfelt thanks’, Hitler said he would display the bowl in his rooms at the Obersalzberg as a lasting token of Rothermere’s ‘friendship and esteem’. He added that he was following closely Rothermere’s efforts to establish a true Anglo-German friendship. ‘Your leading articles published within the last few weeks, which I have read with great interest, contain everything that corresponds to my own thoughts as well.’
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Later in 1937, Princess Stephanie received a personal honour from a grateful Reich Chancellor – proof of the value the Führer placed on her work for the Nazi regime. On Hitler’s orders she was awarded the Honorary Cross of the German Red Cross as a token of her ‘tireless activities on behalf of the German Reich’. Wiedemann travelled to Paris, where Stephanie was staying at the Ritz Hotel, and personally decorated her with the medal, which was accompanied by a document confirming Hitler’s personal authorisation of the award. But this honour was totally eclipsed the following year, 1938, when she was cabled in Paris by Wiedemann summoning her urgently to Berlin ‘as the Chief wants to speak to you’. On 10 June 1938 she had an audience lasting several hours in the Reich Chancellery. It was an extraordinary event; at a solemn ceremony Hitler pinned on her, a Jewess, the Nazi Party’s Gold Medal of Honour. In the Third Reich it was a badge that elevated the recipient to the level of ‘Nazi royalty’. It was rarely awarded and reserved for a small group of people, mainly long-standing Nazi Party members who had given outstanding service to the National Socialist movement. It was regarded as the mark of a so-called true patriot. The princess, born a Jew, was now a de facto member of the Nazi Party – ‘an honorary Aryan’, as Heinrich Himmler declared her. The honour meant she had been acknowledged personally by Hitler as a significant contributor to the Third Reich. Three years later, in 1941, when she was in internment in America, FBI agents searched her house in Alexandria, Virginia, and found and photographed the medal with its gold swastika symbol. It was in a jewel case in her bedroom, close to her signed photographs of the Führer. It is unlikely that Rothermere ever knew of this extraordinary meeting in Berlin, or the honour bestowed by Hitler on Princess Stephanie. Had he known about it, the implications to him must surely have been obvious. Her loyalty as his ambassador had been fatally compromised. But her loyalty to Hitler was plain to see.

Many surrounding Hitler and in his inner circle were far from pleased that the princess had been favoured in this very prominent way by their leader. Hitler had devoted four hours in a one-to-one meeting with her, an almost unheard-of audience in the circumstances. Even Goering expressed his surprise to her. As Stephanie sarcastically recorded, using Hitler’s first name:

Everyone of their clique [the leading Nazis] yearned to have the Führer, or at least his ear exclusively to himself. Every visit of mine to the Reich Chancellery seemed to them an impudent encroachment upon their sacred privileges, and every hour that Adolf wasted upon me was an hour which he might have spent to so much greater advantage in their devoted company.
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Long after the war had ended and years after Hitler’s grim suicide in the claustrophobic madness of the Berlin bunker, Stephanie set down her impressions of Hitler in what seems like an effort to distance herself from her Nazi relationships in the 1930s. ‘When I saw Adolf Hitler for the first time,’ she wrote in a lengthy memorandum now in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in California, ‘I remember distinctly how astonished I was at the insignificance of his appearance. A suburban schoolteacher, or better, some small employee, that is exactly what he looked like.’
¹⁴
No one could have seen anything extraordinary or outstanding about him:

His manners are exceedingly courteous, especially to women. At least that is how he has always been towards me. Whenever I arrived or left he always kissed my hand, often taking one of mine into both of his and shaking it for a time to emphasise the sincerity of the pleasure it gave him to see one, at the same time looking deep into my eyes.

Stephanie’s notes comment on Hitler’s ‘truly Chaplin-like moustache’ emphasising his small mouth, but she describes his very light blue eyes as ‘beautiful, with a slightly far-away expression’. She says his best feature were his hands, ‘truly the sensitive hands of an artist’. She wrote:

He hardly ever smiles, except when making a sarcastic remark. He can be, he often is, very bitter. I think I can truthfully say that with the exception of his very intimate circle I am one of the few persons with whom he held normal conversations. By that I mean one where both parties speak in turn; a conversation of two human beings. Usually this is not the case. He either makes a speech and one has to listen, or else he sits there with a dead serious face, never opening his mouth … He once told me when I expressed my astonishment at his never learning English that the reason he would not be able to learn any other language outside of German was his complete mastery of the latter, which was an all time job. But I have never found that Hitler speaks or writes German as well as he claims or thinks. I have had many occasions to read letters of his, where all he did was revel in heavily involved Teutonic sentences. A single sentence often attains as much as eight or ten lines. The same is true of all his speeches … In 1938 during the September crisis Hitler sent for Unity Mitford. When she arrived he told her that in view of the gravity of the situation he wanted her to leave Germany. Though it would seem that such a gesture was prompted only by friendly concern towards one of his most ardent admirers, his intention was of a different nature. His real purpose in sending for Unity Mitford was to make her return to England and impress her people and all those she would naturally talk to with the gravity of the situation. This is an example of his cunning and supreme ability to make use of even the slightest incident. He is a master at the understanding of, and playing upon, the psychology of people, which I consider his greatest gift and asset. In January 1939 I was staying at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin when Hitler gave his opening speech at the Reichstag in which, denouncing all political pessimists and the war prophets, he shouted to his audience the words: ‘I prophesy a long peace.’ Naturally such a statement made by Hitler was taken up by every newspaper the world over and spread in headlines around the globe. Hitler, reading the result and the favourable echo his pronouncement had created, declared in private: ‘This was the best piece of bluff I have pulled in a long time!’