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him to her old haunts in Europe, visiting France, Austria, Germany and Italy. On one of these she could not resist revisiting Schloss Leopoldskron to recall the days she had spent there as chatelaine courtesy of Adolf Hitler. In Germany she also renewed her friendship with Fritz Wiedemann, no doubt to talk over past memories of the Third Reich and the Führer.
    With her financial support and her home gone, and little or no benefit from Schofield’s estate, Princess Stephanie did what she had proved she could always do in a crisis – she seduced another wealthy man. This time it was multi-millionaire Albert Monroe Greenfield, the richest man in Philadelphia. She went to live with him at his ranch at Cobble Close, New Jersey, and his riches and reputation gave her new opportunities to be welcomed in American society. In 1957 she was guest of honour at the influential Women’s Press Club of New York.
    In 1959 she moved back to Europe, settling in Geneva in an apartment with a living room that looked out in one direction on Lake Geneva and on the other to Mont Blanc. There she signed a contract with the magazine Quick to act as a consultant, much as she had done years before for Rothermere, setting up contacts with important and newsworthy people, using her title and her network of friends to open doors. She became a personal friend of President Richard Nixon and, using her influence, her contacts and her fatal charm, she arranged interviews with successive American Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In an extraordinary turnaround from Nazi spy to American socialite, she was even invited to Johnson’s presidential inauguration ceremony in Washington in January 1965. 11 An ex-prisoner of the United States, denounced as a danger to democracy and to American liberty, she was now an honoured guest of the President.
    Two years later she signed a contract with Stern magazine in Germany – which became Europe’s highest-selling magazine – to develop story opportunities. In this role she arranged high-profile interviews with President Johnson, Vice-President Hubert Humphreys and Supreme Court Judge Earl Warren, who had been in charge of the commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. Further interview successes followed, notably with Grace Kelly when she became Princess Grace of Monaco, the wife of the Shah of Iran and Lady Bird Johnson, wife of the US President. She also worked for another influential publisher, Axel Springer, who owned, among other publications, the tabloid newspaper Bild and the broadsheet Die Welt , two of the most influential organs in West Germany in the 1960s. Perhaps fittingly, given Stephanie’s own Jewish heritage, Springer was intent on making a significant contribution towards reparation of the terrible wrongs done to the Jews in Europe under the Nazis. The princess reverted to the role she had played so successfully between Rothermere and Hitler, as fixer, go-between and manipulator. But this time the part she played did not include, as had been the case in pre-war Europe of the 1930s, the role of spy.
    It took longer for the British government to forgive. In 1962 the British Consulate in Geneva refused her application for a visa to return to Britain. At that time Sir Frank Soskice, a friend of the late Lord Rothermere and one of the law team who represented him in the celebrated court case in 1939, was Home Secretary. In 1966, twenty-seven years after she had left England on the understanding she would never be granted permission to return, she wrote from Geneva to Soskice’s successor, Roy Jenkins, begging for the opportunity to explain personally why the ban on her returning to London, if only as a visitor, should be lifted. Her letter asked him not to pay any attention to her MI5 file. ‘It is made up for the major part,’ she wrote, ‘of newspaper stories, gossip, hearsay and a great deal of deliberate distortion.’ She said she did not want to return to