Nazi Princess Read Online Free PDF

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
    After that public attack, the princess sought refuge out of the public eye on Schofield’s farm, Anderson Place near Phoenixville in Pennsylvania, although she retained an apartment at the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia. They lived on the farm as man and wife until Schofield died in 1954. She must have felt her reinstatement into American society was complete when in 1953 she was named by the New York Dress Institute as one of the Ten Best Dressed Women in America. The Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin described her as dividing her time between fashionable society in Paris and Salzburg when not in her apartment at the Barclay Hotel on Rittenden Square, Philadelphia. 8
    Stephanie’s new image was shattered some months after Schofield’s death, however, when sensational claims were printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in August 1955, headlined: ‘Wealthy Princess filed no Tax Returns for Three Years Agents Find’. The report described her as ‘a resident alien and international cosmopolite who occupies a sumptuous suite at the Barclay’. The princess’ apartment, the news report said, could be called a ‘royal suite … Its walls are hung with priceless tapestries and paintings by famous artists, among them those of Thomas Gainsborough.’ 9 The newspaper was wrong about Princess Stephanie’s tax returns, but right about her late lover’s tax debts. Schofield had failed to file returns for the last six years of his life, leaving a tax and penalty liability that approached $1 million, effectively wiping out his entire estate.
    In the early 1950s Stephanie applied to become a US citizen. In a letter to the authorities, Schofield had written: ‘There never was a scintilla of evidence that her presence in this country was hostile or adverse to the best interests of the United States.’ 10 Her persuasive powers produced a sworn affidavit in support of her bid for naturalisation, in which she was described as ‘a person of great education, intelligent and of exemplary moral character’. Before the death of her lover she made a couple of trips with