1Chaos
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
—Carl Jung
Princess Stephanie’s admiration for Adolf Hitler began long before he came to power in 1933. She, and other propagandists—irrespective of nationality—reacted positively to the rise of the Nazis given the massive geopolitical, economic, and social displacement in Europe during the 1920s. In fact, Stephanie was a mere thread woven into the intricate tapestry of “new” international aristocrats who helped make Hitler’s rise to the lofty position of German chancellor possible in January 1933. The Great War had changed everything. Indeed, life after 1918 for all of Europe’s and America’s aristocrats was transformed—in some cases beyond recognition.
“Everything, apparently, had been cut loose from its moorings,” American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1920. “Democracy, socialism, nationalism, were all assuming new, strange forms. All traditions were disintegrating.”1 For a woman who wrote about the woes of Central Europe in a rather impertinent and thoroughly American way, she succinctly described in three sentences the utter chaos that reigned. A legendary journalist before the age of thirty, Thompson knew you had to watch the faces of those interviewed, understand their posture, and consider the cadence and tone of their voices. Described more than once as absentminded—“a lady who would forget her pajamas”—she knew it was her duty to report the news accurately. She saw the story behind the news story where other, more experienced journalists already felt they had plumbed the depths and moved on.
Arriving in Vienna in the spring of 1921 for the Public Ledger on a “no publish, no fee” basis, Thompson wrote “flavorful pieces about Viennese life” concentrating on the cult of its magnificent coffee (palaces with silk brocade walls had been built for it) and its tart wine. She called Vienna a beautiful city of “Germanic cleanliness and Latin ease,” picking out the soft Austrian accents, the “easygoingness, carelessness, laziness and easy tolerance” of the Viennese. Above all else, she observed the deadened atmosphere of bygone grandeur and high culture hovering just above the heads of those in the starving city.2
For Thompson, the inhabitants of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire had become constricted in their new identities on a very personal level, just as its multicultural people and nobility had become disenfranchised. On October 17, 1918, the Hungarian parliament decreed an end to the union with Austria and declared itself an independent country, in what became known as the Aster, or Chrysanthemum, Revolution. Ten days later Czechoslovakia was born. November 3 dawned with the formation of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. Three days after that, Poland proclaimed its independence in Krakow. A further eight republics were declared before the cease-fire came into effect on November 11. In less than a month, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire’s aristocratic titles and traditions had become meaningless.
Austria, after the war, was overrun by Raffkes—war profiteers—“lolling in lilac velvet and plate-glass limousines,” Thompson wrote. “They swarmed from Poland, or wriggled up from the debris left in Austria by the war, and through their special abilities managed to keep on top of the slime.” The black marketeers centered around Vienna’s coffee houses, mainly at the fabled Café Atlantis opposite the Imperial Hotel.3 It was impossible to replace clothing or shoes. Seat covers from trains were often removed by stealth as leather to resole or refurbish tattered clothing. Cobblers could only repair shoes with wood, and each loud step on Vienna’s cobbled streets became a reminder of the sheer poverty engulfing its population. There was no coal for warmth, no flour, no oil, no meat except at extortionate black-market prices. New trousers were often made from old potato sacks.4
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AS DIFFICULT AS life was in Austria, Hungary was worse. “The Magyars are a strange, mystic people,” Thompson wrote, “a people in 1921 seething with resentment.… Nowhere are capital and labor farther apart; nowhere is the Jewish question more strained. Here is the center of the monarchist fight. Here is the most vigorous irredentism. Here is a nation whose social structure has been more violently assailed than that of any European country except Russia.”5
In the Hungarian capital Budapest, rising like poisonous methane gas from the slime heap emerged Béla Kun, the son of a lapsed Jewish notary and a Jewish-born Protestant mother. His 133-day Hungarian Soviet Republic established in March 1919 nationalized most of the country’s private property, including its private industry. Initially, his communist-inspired propaganda hit home with those who were starving, homeless, unemployed, and defeated by life. Kun failed, however, to redistribute the wealth stolen from the aristocracy to the peasant classes. Within weeks, Kun’s regime became loathed by peasants, workers, industrialists, and aristocrats alike.
His indiscriminate terror and bloodthirsty treatment of Hungarians came under the microscope of the Allies during the peace talks in Paris. In response to international criticism, Kun absurdly demanded that Hungary’s old borders be restored, especially in Upper Hungary. By the end of his first month in power, an ill-equipped and poorly trained Hungarian “Red Army” was at war with the Kingdom of Romania and the newly established Czechoslovakia, both aided militarily by France. Kun was obliged to accept a French-backed ultimatum and fled the country on August 1, 1919.6
Briefly—for twenty-three days—Archduke Joseph August of Austria declared himself regent, appointing his own prime minister. But the Allies would not countenance a Habsburg at the head of any government. Emperor Charles IV of Hungary, who had briefly ascended the Austro-Hungarian throne on Franz Joseph’s death in November 1916, attempted to keep the empire together as a federal union, but failed. Eventually, Admiral Miklós Horthy was asked by parliament to become regent for the vacant throne. The Hungarian White Terror followed for two years, during which many Jews were slaughtered. Eventually, Horthy would become Hitler’s puppet.
These monumental changes occurred in less than a year. “On the outskirts of Budapest,” Dorothy Thompson wrote, “one cannot find many people who are worrying about St. Stephen’s crown.”7 Hungary was a truncated nation strangled by bedlam. Soon enough, Horthy would enlist Princess Stephanie to right the wrongs done to their country.
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CENTRAL EUROPE REELED from the political, economic, and social changes. The crop failures and the war forced many well-to-do Austrians to sell part or all of their estates to make ends meet. New jobs and purposes in life needed to be found. Austrians were almost as dazed by the loss of their right to have a Habsburg emperor as they were by uncertainty over how they might possibly rebuild their past lives. The diplomatic corps had always provided a haven for many aristocrats, where a plethora of ambassadors and consuls proudly displayed their von or zu before their double- or triple-barreled family names. Nobles still cherished their defunct titles of Erzherzogl (Archduke), Herzog (Duke), Graf (Count), Freiherr (Baron), Ritter (Knight), or Edel (Elder). They clung to a life that no longer existed, in a country that was unrecognizable as their own.
The population had to opt for one of the myriad nationalities on offer so they could henceforth be called Italian, Czechoslovak, Yugoslav, Hungarian, Austrian, or Romanian. (Even these new nationalities hid other national identities such as German, Moravian, Slovakian, and Bohemian.) It was the dizzying world changing apace.
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PRINCESS STEPHANIE WAS one of Adolf Hitler’s most avid “aristocratic” propagandists. She was born as the lowly Stephanie Julianne Richter in September 1891. The Vienna of her childhood was envied as Europe’s most splendid capital of high culture. As if vying to match Vienna’s grandness, Stephanie constantly reinvented her youth, when she was, in fact, only the love child of Ludmilla Richter and a moneylender called Max Wiener.
Years earlier, Ludmilla (née Kuranda) had converted from Judaism to Catholicism when she married the lawyer Dr. Johann Richter. Yet throughout his wife’s pregnancy with Stephanie, Richter languished in a Viennese prison, convicted of embezzling money from an underage client.8 With her husband in jail, Ludmilla reputedly sold her favors to Wiener to make ends meet. Biographers have assumed that when Richter was released, he was all too happy to accept a lump sum from Wiener in exchange for giving the baby girl his last name.9 Though Stephanie was fully Jewish biologically, she never saw the inside of any synagogue, and never celebrated any Jewish festivals. Nor would she ever say that she was Jewish. Until the advent of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, no one else would have considered her Jewish either.
Stephanie claimed to have led a sheltered childhood and was brought into Vienna’s high society by the childless Princess Franziska “Fanny” von Metternich. It was a bald lie. In fact, her uncle Robert Kuranda was her benefactor. Aged sixteen, Robert upped sticks and made his way to South Africa to fight as a mercenary in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 with the cavalry regiment Seventeenth Lancers, also known as the Duke of Cambridge’s Own.* When the regiment returned to India, Kuranda switched sides and fought for the Boers, until the British were in the ascendant, and he switched sides again. In 1884, as the land agent for Alois Hugh Nelmapius (one of the first men to mine gold successfully in the Transvaal), Kuranda was shown some “quartz” on a farm. And so, he bought the farm—more than likely in his own name. It became the first diamond mine at Doornfontein (modern-day Johannesburg).10 Kuranda was a diamond millionaire overnight, along with his great friends Solomon “Solly” Joel and Solly’s uncle, Barney Barnato, who had recently merged his company with that of Cecil Rhodes to form De Beers Consolidated Mines.11
When Ludmilla told her brother about her love child, and that her husband had not returned home after his release from prison, Robert ensured their futures. As that new breed of diamond millionaire, he could also facilitate their entry into high society. More than likely, it was Robert who arranged for Princess Fanny to teach Stephanie the ways ladies adopted in Viennese society. Other virginal young women bred to become aristocratic wives of forlorn kings and pauper princes made a fine art of gossip, usually telling tales of cuckolded husbands at their contessen soirées. Yet Stephanie was never invited to these evenings. Even by the age of fifteen, there was nothing virginal about Stephanie. But as she was determined to marry a prince, she concentrated on meeting him instead by mastering country pursuits such as horseback riding, hunting, fishing, and shooting. By sixteen, Stephanie had already had affairs with Count Rudolfo Collerado-Mansfeld and the Polish count Josef “Gizy” Gizycki, a tall, dark, athletic man with jet-black hair, black eyes, and a “long nose and cruel nostrils,” Stephanie recalled. At the time, however, Gizycki was married to the future American publisher Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson.*
By 1911 Stephanie had become the mistress of Archduke Franz Salvator of Austria-Tuscany. Franz Salvator, however, was married to Archduchess Marie Valerie, the third daughter and fourth child of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and his empress Elisabeth. There was, of course, never any question of Franz Salvator marrying Stephanie, nor leaving the imperial archduchess.
That said, Stephanie became pregnant in the spring of 1914, and something had to be done. It was Emperor Franz Joseph himself who arranged her “shotgun wedding” to Prince Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst. The prince had met Stephanie several times at court but little more. He was chosen as the sacrificial husband because he had a title, little money, and was an inveterate gambler. Naturally, he was compelled by his emperor to agree to the sham marriage. Stephanie, so the legend goes, paid off his debts (probably with money from Archduke Franz Salvator) in return for a “good show” to Viennese society.
Royal consent was required, which the Austrian emperor gave; but the Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst clan were much aggrieved. Stephanie was unsuitable. To spare the Hohenlohe blushes, the couple were quietly married in London on May 12, 1914, at the Roman Catholic cathedral in Westminster. Only Stephanie’s mother was present as a witness, with the other required witness hired (as was the custom) at short notice. The newlyweds adjourned to separate hotels after the ceremony. Stephanie was twenty-three, and finally married to her prince. Her son, Franzi, was born that December.
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AFTER THE GREAT War, Princess Stephanie found herself a Hungarian national—a choice made for her in 1919 by her princely husband, since his family’s main estate was within Hungary’s borders. She spoke no Hungarian and had never lived in the country. By July 1920, Friedrich Franz had met someone else, and having done his duty to Stephanie, demanded a divorce. This time, there was no Franz Salvator to rescue her, even though the archduke had survived the war. As with all the Austro-Hungarian nobility, his “right to rule” had been rescinded. Stephanie was left no option but to agree. Ten days after the divorce was granted, Friedrich Franz married Countess Emanuela Batthyány, who had left her husband and three children to become the prince’s second wife.12*
Princess Stephanie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst was a single, divorced mother, marginalized as a citizen of a country where she did not speak the language. Nonetheless, Stephanie would prove to be resourceful in maintaining the style to which she wished to become accustomed, as so many “upper-class” and former aristocratic Europeans were forced to do.
2The “Big Lie”
I have resolved to be the destroyer of Marxism.
—Adolf Hitler at his trial for treason, 1924
Many believe the rise of fascism was a direct response to the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Russian civil wars. When Czar Nicholas II was deposed in the February 1917 revolution, the Allies hoped that the new Soviet government under Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Duma (parliament), would be more democratic than the Romanov totalitarian state.* Within six months, Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 October revolution toppled Kerensky’s provisional Soviet government, making hopes for democracy futile.
During these critical six months in 1917, the war raged on in the east. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, which removed Russia (now called the Soviet Union) from the war, had been hailed as a victory for the kaiser’s imperial army.• Once Lenin successfully secured power for communism, a human wave of aristocratic White Russian émigrés flooded into Europe’s capitals, bringing with them their notions of superiority and opulence, knowledge of how to reach accommodation within a totalitarian state, and unremitting anti-Semitism. Many White Russian émigrés would become key propagandists for Hitler.
They instilled their visceral hatred for the communists into the Nazi creed, believing that “the myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot” was behind the toppling of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires. This was the first big lie. It was the White émigrés who exported their revulsion of Jews and the fake pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.1 What is easily forgotten today is that many of these White émigrés were Russian by nationality, but Baltic German, Lithuanian, Latvian, or Ukrainian by heritage and culture. Among the White émigré adventurers who most influenced Hitler in those early days were Alfred Rosenberg (later the ideologue of the Nazi Party) and Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (who championed Hitler’s drive toward the east and other foreign policy decisions) through their völkisch organization, the Aufbau Vereinigung. Other members of the Aufbau included General Erich Ludendorff and Hitler’s friend and publisher, Max Amann.
In truth, most Germans felt cheated by the peace, with many aristocrats and frontline soldiers alike hoping for a resurgence of pan-Germanism. As early as 1920, outlawed underground paramilitary organizations were formed throughout Germany from the enormous remnant of the imperial army.2 Those who were attracted to bolshevism were labeled the enemies of German reconstruction. A speaker at a paramilitary rally in Regensburg encapsulated the right’s position: “Friend and foe shall know that in future one must take a position and show his colors, whether left—Bolshevism—or right Reconstruction. There is no middle position.”3 Reconstruction soon equated Nazism. It was the Allied inability to understand the German viewpoint that led to the immediate failure of the peace. Given this history, it is no wonder that, without effective leadership throughout the Weimar era and the Gothic mindset that refused to be vanquished, a Hitler would rise into the vacuum at the top.
The communist-inspired Spartacist uprising of 1919 predictably led to armed outrages by Freikorps* groups aimed at defending Germany against communism. Wildcat strikes and bloodthirsty atrocities became a common feature of life throughout Germany in the ensuing months. The murders and reprisals continued until May 1919.4 And yet the Freikorps violence was often mistaken by many Germans as the intervention of their disbanded imperial army acting to protect the nation from bolshevism. Few recognized they were simply dangerous vigilantes.
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SO WHERE WERE the German aristocracy and diplomats who might have found a middle way? For most, the new Weimar Republic made them wonder if they still had a place in this alien country. Their royal, princely, and noble properties had been “restructured.” The Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and the Von Hesses at Kassel (also related to the British royal family) were forced to cede vast swathes of their lands to the German state. What lands remained for their benefit had to be administered at arms’ length through independent foundations. Their German bank accounts were frozen, and only their art, jewels, and internationally convertible investments could be relied on to rebuild their fortunes.5 Since property had always been the hallmark of royalty and nobility, the German aristocrats, just like their Austrian and Hungarian counterparts, suffered a nosedive in their wealth, social standing, political power, and economic future. Most stared helplessly at a bleak horizon.
In fact, Weimar had been foisted onto the vanquished nation. It represented a new Germany with a dead imperial past, dead traditions, and no road map toward democracy. The German nobility had been devastated by the war of 1914–18, and like the Hungarians and Austrians, they were deeply aggrieved by the transformations they had been made to endure.6* Many German officers on the Western Front (most of noble birth) and the majority of common frontline soldiers—like Corporal Adolf Hitler—believed Germany had not lost in the West. With just short of six million men demobilized, and an approved German standing army of only one hundred thousand soldiers, the mind boggles that the Allies believed these men would not take up arms to rectify what they saw as an unjust peace.
The “peace” festered and infected German thinking. To paraphrase the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, from the “disorder a secret order” was born. In Mein Kampf, first published in July 1925, Hitler blamed the Jews for spreading the lie that General Erich Ludendorff lost the war in the West. In retaliation, he advocated that only “the big lie” could work against Germany’s enemies since “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility” that would prove irresistible to the masses, who more readily “fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.”7 It became a compelling argument to a defeated nation.
Yet France remained vengeful, with some good reason. Not only had it been invaded in 1871 by Bismarck’s newly unified Germany and lost Alsace-Lorraine but also most of the war of 1914–18 had been fought on French soil. From the British and American viewpoints, Germany had begun the war using the excuse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo to promote pan-Germanism to dominate Europe. They also continued to fight in the East long after Russia had quit the field of battle. And so the Allies compelled the leaders of Weimar to sign the Versailles peace treaty giving Germans the “sole fault” or Alleinschulde for the hostilities. Any future “military freedom” (Wehrfreiheit) or self-determination for Germany was out of the question.
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AND WHAT ABOUT Germany’s powerful industrialists? The mightiest of them all, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, only saw the devastation of smashed and idle equipment on his factory floors in 1920. He proclaimed, “If Germany should ever be reborn, it should shake off the chains of Versailles.” Krupp loathed the Allies. They had made sure his company, known as “the anvil of the Reich,” would be prohibited from making any more armaments and cannons. “The machines were destroyed, the tools were smashed, but the men remained.… Their skill had to be maintained at all costs,” Krupp said. “Although for the time being all indications were against it—one day a change would come.”8
As Germany’s premier armaments manufacturer, Krupp said, “Everything within me revolted against the idea … that the German people would be enslaved forever.”9 Krupp refused to accept the peace, and, contrary to popular myth, was instrumental in rearming Germany almost immediately after the Versailles diktat was signed. The Krupp empire, Weimar’s Chancellor Karl Joseph Wirth,* and General Hans von Seeckt, the genius commander of the Reichswehr nicknamed “The Sphinx,” were the triumvirate that made Krupp’s vision for an armed future possible.
Krupp’s German resurrection, however, required deception on a massive scale. Allied “snoopers” checked Krupp’s every move, just as military experts monitored the size of the Reichswehr to one hundred thousand soldiers. And yet Krupp successfully undertook his mission for rearmament within a year of the Versailles Treaty’s signature. After World War II it became apparent that, as General Telford Taylor said, “Truly, there was a deep continuity from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, as the Krupps and the Generals knew.”10•
Had Krupp forged weapons in secret? Not exactly. American intelligence officers reported that Krupp had filed “twenty-six patents for artillery control devices, eighteen for electrical fire control apparatus, nine for fuses and shells, seventeen for field guns, and fourteen for heavy cannon which could only be moved by rail.” The American secretary of war even told the press. The problem was that by May 1921 America, like Britain, had revised its thinking. The terms imposed on Germany were overly harsh. So the British and American governments turned a blind eye, as did their press.
It was simple for Krupp to take advantage of the chaos that reigned on the Continent. In 1921 he acquired a controlling stake in the Swedish steel firm Aktiebolaget Bofors, which became his primary weapons-manufacturing unit for the next fourteen years. Krupp hedged his bets on the outcome of the war, too, with his most extensive foreign holdings located in the Netherlands, shrouded by his wholly owned enterprise Blessing and Company. Literally, as the kaiser was forced to abdicate, Blessing bought Krupp’s stockpiles from Essen, Magdeburg, and Düsseldorf, saving all manner of military weaponry for another day. Then Krupp began to shuffle corporate names and ownerships like playing cards and placed his best engineers outside Germany. All Krupp needed was a new powerful leader to change everything … so things could stay as they once had been.11 Even so, Krupp was slow to join the Nazi Party.
Copyright © 2023 by Susan Ronald
