by Jim Wilson
On the other side of the Atlantic, the British were not so forgiving. In September 1945 the princess was included on an official post-war blacklist of persona non grata. Her file, which was still being maintained by MI5, describes her as ‘a notorious intriguer who had in the past had extremely close relations with the Nazi leaders. She must still be regarded as a highly dangerous person.’8 British intelligence continued tracking her movements until September 1949, when a memo to the chief inspector of the Immigration Branch at the Home Office described her as being no longer of security interest, but that certain other ministries in Whitehall still had grave concerns about her.
18
JUST DESSERTS?
With Europe plunged into world war, what happened to the extraordinary cast of characters involved in this story?
Lord Rothermere had died in Bermuda in November 1940, as his predictions of a bombing blitz on London were becoming horrifically true – although history was to show that the Allied bombing of German cities far surpassed, in civilian deaths and in the devastation caused, anything the Luftwaffe achieved in their attacks on London.The greatest air armadas in history, of the type Rothermere had feared, flew from English airfields bearing RAF and USAAF roundels, not Nazi swastikas.
Having been told the news of Rothermere’s death in a telephone call from Hitler’s favourite journalist, Ward Price, Collin Brooks, Rothermere’s confidant and colleague, wrote in his diary that he felt conflicting emotions:
Chief of them was grief and self-pity. Grief that Rothermere should have died in Bermuda virtually alone; and self-pity that I no longer have the resort to his good humour, his sagacity, his kindness that has been mine for over five years … I remember only his great heart and his loneliness and his affection for me and me for him.1
What had Rothermere himself believed his relationship with Princess Stephanie had been all about? Certainly until very late in the day he had no idea of the magnitude of the deception that had been practised against him, and he had been confident in his own actions by wooing the Nazi leadership. In January 1938 he had written to the princess saying:
My mission to create a better feeling between Britain and Germany has largely succeeded. Mine was a lone voice in the wilderness four years ago, but now it is generally accepted by almost every political party in this country that good relations between Britain and Germany are essential for the peace of the world.
He added with unintentional irony a tribute to the princess: ‘You have helped much to achieve this better understanding.’2
A more objective view was expressed by a leader in the Yorkshire Post in November 1939. Referring to Rothermere’s lengthy dealings with the Nazi leaders, revealed by the notorious court case, the paper said:
The danger of these negotiations was two-fold. There was first the danger that Lord Rothermere might unwittingly give the Nazis a misleading impression of the state of opinion in this country; and there was also the danger that Lord Rothermere might – again unwittingly – allow himself to be used as a vehicle for the extremely subtle manoeuvres of Nazi propaganda … discussions with heads of foreign governments are best left to persons whose status is on both sides clearly understood. A newspaper owner has great responsibilities towards the public of his own country; he should be particularly chary of placing himself in situations liable to misinterpretation, or abuse, abroad.3
Princess Stephanie had fled to the United States to join her lover Fritz Wiedemann and, as told in the last chapter, she spent the rest of the war in internment there regarded as a dangerous alien; a spy for the Führer. The princess then manipulatively switched on her seductive charms to corrupt an official of the American government in an effort to protect herself. After her death, documents released in Washington suggested that during her internment the American Office of Strategic Studies had called on her experiences with the Nazi leaders to provide insights into the character of Hitler and others in the Nazi hierarchy.
Wiedemann, Stephanie’s lover, was thrown out of the United States and dispatched by Hitler to what was termed as a diplomatic post in China, but was almost certainly more to do with espionage than diplomacy.
What of the woman who was the catalyst in the princess’ and Lord Rothermere’s ‘flirtation’ with Hitler and his Nazi high command? American-born Annabel Kruse, my great-aunt, having tasted the peaks of 1930s highlife in Britain and on the Continent, had fallen victim to one of the deadly addictions to which some of the stylish super-rich of the period were attracted – heroin. Amongst the very wealthy, use of the drug was not uncommon. From 1933, six years after that fatal introduction of Princess Stephanie to Rothermere, Jack and Annabel were searching desperately for a cure for her drug-induced illness. They sought advice from specialists in London, New York and Paris. When more orthodox cures from qualified medical experts failed to relieve Annabel’s suffering, she turned in desperation to faith healers and ‘quacks’. It cost the couple a great deal of money, but to little effect. Annabel was sinking into a half-world, detached from much of what was going on around her. She was cared for by nurses and by her sister-in-law Lilian Kruse, languishing for days at a stretch in her antique Renaissance bed surrounded by antique furniture, Dresden mirrors and priceless tapestries.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, followed by the Depression years of the early 1930s, seriously damaged the Kruses’ finances. In the early 1930s Sunning House was sold to Rothermere, and the couple also had to give up their apartment at the Grosvenor House Hotel, the permanent suite they kept at Claridge’s and a mansion on Egham Hill standing in 50 acres of parkland. They had been forced to reduce the standard of super-rich living to which they had become accustomed, but they were still able to afford a fifty-room mansion, Ridge House, close to the Women’s Golf Course at Sunningdale. Before Annabel succumbed completely to her heroin-induced illness, she was able to furnish Ridge House in fairly lavish style.
By the mid-1930s Jack was virtually retired, although he was then only in his mid-40s. Encouraged by Rothermere’s campaigning, his interests had moved from expensive cars and Alpine touring to aviation and, in particular, the need for the country to build up its air defences. He, like Collin Brooks, took to lobbying through the National League of Airmen. He was an avid writer of letters to The Times on rearmament and the enlistment of men from the empire into the British Armed Forces. Kruse was well informed, too. He had travelled widely and, as a director of one of Rothermere’s newspaper companies based in Paris, he was extremely well briefed on European affairs. As the dictators and their National Socialist ideas gained ground, he took a much more balanced view than his employer. On the one hand he disliked Churchill’s hawkish anti-appeasement policy, but on the other he was appalled by Rothermere’s cosy relations with Hitler. How he judged the role Princess Stephanie was playing in that relationship, and her real motives, is unrecorded. He maintained his friendship with her, but to an observant man her deceptions must have been pretty clear.
Kruse was spending more and more time in North Yorkshire at Moor Top, his bolt-hole and the place he loved perhaps more than anywhere else. His last ‘exotic’ car, purchased in 1937, was a Buick saloon. Despite returning frequently to Moor Top, Kruse still travelled extensively. He became friendly with a Russian woman, Tamara, who ran a vegetarian guest farm in the Pyrenees. As Annabel became more and more detached in her own uncomprehending world, Jack sought comfort in his friendship with Tamara. By this time Annabel, who had worshipped Jack ever since they had first met in New York, was incapable of recognising him. In the late 1930s, worn down and distraught at Annabel’s illness, he went to live at Tamara’s apartment in the Avenue des Baumettes in Nice. Sadly, his family never saw him again.
When war broke out and the German invasion of France looked inevitable, Jack and Tamara attempted to escape back to England. They hitched rides to Paris, but the fall of France overtook them and they were forced to turn back and try to find a route out via Spain. They never made it. They were caught and interne
d in Grenoble, and it was there, on 8 February 1943, that Jack was taken ill with heart disease and died at the age of 51.
As for Annabel, she languished in her ‘half world’. Through the first two years of the war she was looked after by her sister-in-law. In 1940 Ridge House was hit by a German bomb. Although it was not damaged beyond repair, Annabel and Lilian moved to Great Copse House at Eversley in Hampshire. With Jack’s money gone and his assets on the Continent confiscated, Annabel was living chiefly off the proceeds raised by the sale of her jewellery. She died at Great Copse House on 22 March 1941.
John Kruse, Jack’s son by his previous marriage who had been brought up to regard Annabel as his mother, was called up for military service on the outbreak of the Second World War. He served as a liaison officer in India and the Middle East, and returned to England at the end of hostilities to find his home bombed, Annabel and his father dead and no family business. All the wealth, luxury and classic cars he had known as a child had disappeared. He had to earn a living and he did so by driving a tar lorry for the local council during the day, and using his talent as a storyteller to write short stories at night. He succeeded in supporting his wife and young child, and embarked on a flourishing literary career which was to span four decades.
After quitting his lorry driving to take a job as clapper-board operator at Pinewood Film Studios, he quickly rose through the ranks to cameraman. The whaling scenes in Moby Dick were shot through his lens. Meanwhile, his short stories developed naturally into film scripts. His first feature film, Hell Drivers, in 1957, featured a young Sean Connery among its cast. Then television beckoned, and soon John was scripting some of the most-watched TV series of the 1960s and ’70s, including The Avengers, Shoestring, Colditz and The Persuaders!. His work culminated in the classic The Saint series, starring Roger Moore, for which he was principal writer. After leaving England with his family in 1981 to live in Spain, John wrote three novels, including the bestseller Red Omega. He then turned to another artistic talent: painting. Over the years his artistic output was seen by thousands of people in bars, restaurants and exhibitions in the area of Spain in which he lived. John Kruse died in 2004.
With the death of Lord Rothermere in November 1940, the Stody estate in Norfolk and the press baron’s other assets passed to his only remaining son and heir, Esmond Harmsworth. Collin Brooks was obliged to give up The Mount which proved to be a point of conflict between Esmond and Brooks. Before Rothermere had left England, he apparently signed ownership of The Mount over to Brooks. However, Esmond sought Brooks’ eviction. Brooks confided in his diary that, aside from sentimental attachment, ‘it’s going will be a blessing for my diminished income cannot keep paying for its upkeep’.4 The Stody estate was put up for sale by the new Lord Rothermere and purchased in the early 1940s by George Knight. He appointed my father as agent for the whole estate, and my father remained in that role throughout the war years until the early 1950s.
Collin Brooks became chairman and editor of Truth, a magazine aimed at political and society issues. He was a prolific writer with over fifty books to his name. He also appeared in many BBC programmes, including being a member of the original ‘Any Questions’ team and frequently taking part in the BBC’s Brains Trust. He died in 1959 and his long-time friend, the distinguished poet T.S. Eliot, gave the address at his memorial service in the Fleet Street church of St Bride’s.
As for Princess Stephanie’s female rivals for Hitler’s attention, the Mitford sisters: Unity was shattered by the outbreak of war between the two countries she loved. She could not bear to live with her loyalties so torn and a few hours after the war broke out she sat on a park bench in Munich’s Englischer Garten and put a bullet through her head. For days she lay unconscious in hospital in Munich, her life hanging in the balance. Eventually, Hitler arranged for her to be moved to a hospital in Switzerland, which remained a neutral country. The Führer was personally shocked and full of regret at her fate. ‘She lost her nerve just when for the first time I could really have used her,’ he was recorded as saying. In January 1940 her mother and one of her sisters, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, travelled to Switzerland to bring her home. She could not walk, and could only talk with difficulty. Above all, she appeared to her family as a stranger, a totally changed personality and in need of constant care. Unity never fully recovered and died in 1948.
Her sister Diana, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, was interned with her husband for much of the duration of the war. MI5 believed there was evidence that Mosley thought he would be able to seize power if Hitler successfully carried through with Operation Sealion, the Nazi plan to invade Britain. Had this happened the British authorities feared the Germans would have put into action Operation Willi: replacing George VI with the Duke of Windsor as king, his wife Wallis as queen and Mosley as prime minister. Goebbels, writing in his diary in January 1940, expressed that hope: ‘The Mosley people keeping their heads down at the moment. Their only, but perhaps their big chance.’5 But that opportunity never came.
Sir Oswald lived on after the war and formed yet another new party, the Union Movement, which failed to gain anywhere near the support he had achieved with the BUF in the 1930s. He and Lady Mosley took up residence in France, only a few miles from the Windsors’ home, and all four became close companions, dining together twice a week. Sir Oswald died in December 1980. His wife Diana survived for more than twenty years longer, dying in Paris in 2003 in her 90s, still sticking to her fascist views. In an interview in 1986 she was insistent that from the 1930s right up until their deaths, the Windsors shared her and her husband’s views on politics.
Hitler’s adjutant and former senior officer, Fritz Wiedemann, having been captured by the Americans following the Japanese surrender, was interrogated and then held in detention. He was moved back to Germany under guard and required to give evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in October 1945. But the extensive FBI file on Wiedemann and Princess Stephanie was never considered at Nuremberg. It was never asked for by the trial authorities. Wiedemann was credited with being part of the plot in which the chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Franz Canaris, had hoped to remove Hitler, which enabled Wiedemann to escape much of the evidence that he might have been confronted with. The tribunal hearings over, he was kept in detention until May 1948, one of only 6,656 Nazis who faced conviction for crimes following the fall of the Third Reich. He died at the age of 78 in Fuchsgrub in January 1970.
Wiedemann’s lover and co-conspirator, Princess Stephanie, outlived him by two years – but of all this cast of extraordinary characters she was the survivor. After her release from internment by the American authorities at the end of the war, she set about totally reinventing herself. As she had succeeded in doing all her life, she clawed her way back into high society in the States. She used a series of wealthy male friends, whom she either charmed or seduced, as her source of funding, and she exploited her title and her notoriety as her entry ticket to American society. First she had to contend with continuing newspaper criticism and attempts by the American immigration authorities to eject her. In March 1947 she was living in New York with her lover, Major Lemuel Schofield, who had remained infatuated with her throughout the time she was held in internment as an enemy alien. Yet her past refused to fade. In July 1947 The San Francisco Examiner published a story saying that she was being feted in Long Island and Connecticut society. ‘The Princess is pretty well known locally,’ the newspaper reported. ‘Not favourably. She was once an ardent and well-subsidised Nazi good-will ambassador. She still is an outspoken admirer of certain Nazis. How forgiving and forgetful we get!’6
She was trying to live down her colourful past and reinvent herself, but it was short-lived. A leading newspaper columnist, Robert Ruark, with a column syndicated throughout the States, noted in March 1947 that the princess – who by then was playing a not-insignificant role in New York society – was the same Princess Hohenlohe who had been released from one of America’s ‘top security prisons for spies’.
His column went on to remind his readers that she had been a close friend of Hitler and ‘his most trusted female spy’. She had arranged the famous meetings between the Führer and Lord Rothermere, and had set up the Sudetenland talks between Viscount Runciman and the German gauleiter in Czechoslovakia, Konrad Henlein, the outcome of which was the ‘glowing fuse before the world blew up’. The column continued that in Nuremberg the Allies had strung up a number of ‘her old buddies’ for similar misdeeds, and it suggested she was a legitimate candidate for similar treatment. Finally, Ruark asked how New York society could nurture a one-time member of the Nazi hierarchy to its bosom. After this attack she was seen dancing at the classy New York Stork Club which prompted Ruark to publish another jibe. Soon American society would see Ribbentrop parading in similar circumstances, he wrote. Although, of course, Ribbentrop had paid the price with his life at Nuremberg.7
