Cliveden House

Before Hitler Came, by a German Jew named Dietrich Bronder, claims that not only Hitler but all his leading associates were all also Jewish, including Rudolf Hess, Gregor Strasser, Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop (who maintained a close friendship with the famous Zionist Chaim Weizmann, the first head of the State of Israel), Franz Hanfstaengl, and Aufbau and Thule members Alfred Rosenberg and Karl Haushofer. The men also all held close associations with members of the Round Table, known as the Cliveden Set, who were committed to a policy of appeasement with Germany. The term appeasement most often applied to the foreign policy of the British Governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and most notably Neville Chamberlain towards Nazis and Fascist Italy between 1935-39. At the beginning of the 1930s, such concessions were widely seen as positive due to the trauma of World War I, second thoughts about the vindictive treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that fascism was a useful form of anti-communism.

Double-agent Sidney Reilly had been involved in the international scandal known as the Zinoviev Letter, a document published by the British Daily Mail four days before the general election of October 1924. The letter purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of Comintern in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which claimed the planned resumption of diplomatic and trade relations by the Labour party with Soviet Russia would indirectly hasten the overthrow of the British government. Although denounced by Soviet Russia and British Communists as a forgery produced by British intelligence agents, Conservative politicians and newspapers maintained the document was genuine. The letter helped the Conservative Party, by hastening the collapse of the Liberal Party vote that produced a Conservative landslide.[1] Stanley Baldwin formed his second government, which saw important tenures of office by Sir Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain.

Milner’s Kindergarten included Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian), Geoffrey Dawson, Edward Wood (later Lord Halifax), Lord Bob Brand, Lord Hichens, and Lionel Curtis. As a group, they continued to pursue the ideals of Milner and Rhodes by launching their famous Round Table Review of Commonwealth Affairs in November 1910, which they used as a propaganda tool. This quarterly, founded and edited by Lothian, was “designed to keep open lines of communication around the Empire, a function that might later be performed by official representatives if federation became a reality.”[2]

Lionel Curtis was seen as the motivating force in the group, while Brand, Lothian’s immediate chief in South Africa, introduced Waldorf Astor (1879 – 1952) into the group in 1910, who along Abe Bailey, became its chief financial supporters.[3] Waldorf’s cousin was John Jacob Astor IV, the Robber Baron who died on the Titanic in 1912. Waldorf’s father, William Waldorf Astor, owned the Pall Mall Gazette, and in 1911, bought The Observer at Waldorf s insistence. Dawson and Lothian also played important roles at this time. By 1912, Dawson had become editor of The Times. He later served as secretary of the Rhodes Trust (1921 – 22), and editor of the Round Table Review (1941 – 44). Besides being the founder and editor of the Round Table Review, Lothian was secretary of the Milner Group (1910 – 16), served as secretary to Lloyd George (1916 – 22), and finally the Milner Group’s leader (1925 – 40). He was also Secretary of the Rhodes Trust (1925 – 39), and became a Lord (1930).

Claud Cockbum, founder and editor of The Week, a pro-communist British weekly, coined the term the “Cliveden Set” in late 1937, when he accused a group of politicians, bankers, ship builders, newspaper editors, and other wealthy aristocrats of conspiring to influence the policy of the British Government. Nancy Astor and her husband, Waldorf Astor, held regular weekend parties at their home Cliveden, a large estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames. Astor had taken over control of The Observer, which was purchased by his father from Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, who was appointed director for propaganda under David Lloyd George and who headed the Tavistock Institute.[4] In 1930, Lord Astor became chairman of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA founded the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), which he had founded in 1919 with Lionel Curtis, who also helped found the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York.[5]

Despite her friendship with Felix Frankfurter, a frequent guest of Nancy Astor at Cliveden was von Ribbentrop, whom she had known since the early 1930s.[6] Astor, who was the first female MP in history, and a friend of George Bernard Shaw. Through her involvement with Milner’s Kindergarten, she became associated with Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, a leading advocate of appeasement. She was also a friend of Felix Frankfurter and intervened with the Nazis in Vienna to secure the release of his uncle Solomon.[7] Guests of the Astors at Cliveden included Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, von Ribbentrop, Mahatma Gandhi, Amy Johnson, F.D. Roosevelt, H.H. Asquith, T.E. Lawrence, Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, Henry Ford, the Duke of Windsor and the writers Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Wharton.[8] Those specifically associated with the Cliveden Set were mostly members of Milner’s Kindergarten, and included Lothian, Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson, Samuel Hoare, Lionel Curtis, Nevile Henderson, Robert Brand and Edward Algernon Fitzroy, who was Speaker of the Commons.

Fabian Society member H.G. Wells, who was also a guest at Cliveden, openly expressed his racism and affinity with Hitler in his 1934 Experiment in Biography:

It was made a matter of general congratulation about me that I was English… and my mind had leapt all to readily to the idea that I was a blond and blue-eyed Nordic, quite the best make of human being known… We English, by sheer native superiority, practically without trying, had possessed ourselves of an Empire on which the sun never set, and through the errors and infirmities of other races were being forced slowly but steadily—and quite modestly—toward world dominion… In those days I had ideas about Aryans extraordinarily like Mr. Hitler’s. The more I hear of him the more I am convinced that his mind is almost the twin of my thirteen-year-old mind in 1879; but heard through a megaphone and—implemented. I do not know from what books I caught my glimpse of the Great Aryan People going to and fro in the middle plains of Europe.[9]

Wallis Simpson and her husband Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, whose intended marriage caused a constitutional crisis that led to Edward’s abdication in 1936, were important agents in the Cliveden Set’s attempts to broker appeasement with Germany. Edward was the son of King. Edward was born during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria as the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary. Mary had first been engaged to George V’s brother, Prince Albert Victor, who was suspected of being Jack the Ripper, before he died of influenza in 1892.[10] George V was the son of Edward VII, Prince of Wales (1841 – 1910), a friend of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the Round Table, who together with Randolph Churchill were also implicated in the murders. George V was also a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II. George V’s mother was Alexandra of Denmark, the daughter of Christian IX of Denmark and Louise of Hesse-Kassel, who was a close friend of Marie de Riznitch, Comtesse de Keller, the wife of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the founder of synarchism.[11] Queen Mary’s mother was Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge, a granddaughter of King George III and the third child and younger daughter of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, and Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel, the niece of Illuminatus and Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren, Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel.

Nancy and T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” shared a mutual friendship with George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte. In 1921, the future prime minister Winston Churchill became Colonial Secretary and employed Lawrence as an advisor on Arab affairs. The two men grew to admire each other and became lifelong friends. Lawrence’s major work is Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an account of his war experiences. In the preface, Lawrence acknowledged the help of his friend George Bernard Shaw’s in editing the book. Lawrence corresponded with many notable figures. He met Joseph Conrad and commented perceptively on his works. He wrote many letters sharing intimate personal details with Shaw’s wife Charlotte.[12] Nancy got to know Lawrence in the 1920s when he was serving in the RAF. They wrote many letters to one another, and Lawrence also visited Cliveden. Despite their political differences, while Nancy represented the Conservative Party in Parliament, and Shaw was a staunch communist, the pair along with Nancy’s husband Waldorf visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and were even granted a rare interview with Stalin.[13]

Nancy was also friends with US Ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy, who shared her anti-Semitic sentiments. Sr. Edward J. Renehan Jr. wrote that, “As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these ‘world problems’ (Nancy’s phrase)… Kennedy replied that he expected the ‘Jew media’ in the United States to become a problem, that ‘Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles’ were already making noises contrived to “set a match to the fuse of the world.”[14] Along the same lines, Lord Astor told Thomas Jones, the former Secretary of Lloyd George and Stanley Baldwin in the 1920s, and the newest member of Milner’s group, why America misunderstands the British attempt to reach a appeasement with Germany. Jones wrote in his diary that Astor said:

This is largely due to the intensive and widespread anti-German propaganda being conducted by those Jews and Communists. Newspapers are influenced by those firms which advertise so largely in the press and are frequently under Jewish control. One can detect Communist inspiration and promptings, of which most people are quite oblivious.[15]

Cliveden Set member Geoffrey Dawson, an original member of the Milner’s kindergarten, was editor of The Times, which had been purchased by John Jacob Astor, 1st Baron Astor of Hever, in 1922, following the death of its owner, Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, was appointed director for propaganda during World War I and head the Tavistock Institute.[16] Lord Halifax served as British Foreign Secretary between 1938 and 1940, working closely with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Dawson was also close to both British Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Chamberlain. In June 1935, Stanley Baldwin appointed Samuel Hoare as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In 1916, Hoare had been assigned to the British intelligence mission with the Russian general staff. Giles Milton, argues in Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot, that the original idea to assassinate Rasputin came from Hoare who believed that Rasputin was sabotaging the Russian war effort, and if he was murdered “the country would be freed from the sinister influence that was striking down its natural leaders and endangering the success of its armies in the field.”[17]

Harvard Club

The man who supposedly “discovered” Hitler and advanced his career in Germany was Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887 – 1975), a German businessman with key links to the Round Table conspirators and the highest echelons of power in the US, right up to the office of the American president at the time. Hanfstaengl, nicknamed “Putzi,” was born in Munich, the son of a German art publisher and an American mother. His mother was Katharine Wilhelmina Heine, daughter of William Heine, nephew-in-law of American Civil War Union Army general John Sedgwick. Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the older brother of Queen Victoria’s older brother Albert, was Hanfstaengl’s godfather.

Hanfstaengl spent most of his early years in Germany but later moved to the United States and attended Harvard University and through his membership in the Harvard Club he counted among his friends Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Delano Roosevelt, then Senator of New York, T.S. Eliot, John Reed and Walter Lippmann, who was also associated with the Tavistock Institute, where he had been appointed to handle the manipulation of American public opinion in preparation for the entry of the United States into World War I.[18] John Reed was an American socialist activist, best remembered for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, which featured an introduction by Lenin. Reed died in Russia in 1920, and was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, one of only two Americans to have been given this honor in Russia. Reed also attended meetings of the Socialist Club, over which Lippmann presided.

Hanfstaengl graduated Harvard in 1909. He moved to New York and took over the management of the American branch of his father’s business, the Franz Hanfstaengl Fine Arts Publishing House. As he says, “the famous names who visited me were legion: Pierpont Morgan, Toscanini, Henry Ford, Caruso, Santos-Dumont, Charlie Chaplin, Paderewski, and a daughter of President Wilson.”[19] It was also at Harvard that Hanfstaengl made friends with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who became president in 1933, the same year as Hitler’s rise to power. A private message was sent from Roosevelt to Hanfstaengl in Berlin, to the effect that Roosevelt hoped that Hanfstaengl would do his best to prevent any rashness and hot-headedness on the part of Hitler and that, “If things start getting awkward please get in touch with our ambassador at once.”[20]

As recounted by Andrew Nagorski in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, after his return to Germany in 1922, Warren Robbins, a Harvard classmate serving at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, called Hanfstaengl in Munich to ask him to assist Truman Smith, a young military attaché working for American ambassador Alanson B. Houghton. Smith was sent to Munich to “try to make personal contact with Hitler himself and form an estimate of his character, personality, abilities, and weaknesses.” Smith would later point out that most foreign diplomats in Berlin at the time had written off the National Socialists as “being without significance,” and described the party leader Adolf Hitler as an “uneducated madman.” Houghton, in contrast, “seems to have had, even at this early date, a premonition that the movement and its leader might play an important role in the disturbed Germany of the early twenties.” Smith quickly met a diverse group of people, recording his discussions and impressions, including Aufbau member Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, the artillery commander of the German army’s 7th Division, told Smith he hadn’t met Hitler but had the impression that the man was “an oratorical genius.” In his report filed to Washington, Smith characterized Hitler as a “a marvelous demagogue… I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man.”[21] When they finally met, Smith gave Hanfstaengl his press pass to a Nazi rally that evening. Hanfstaengl’s first impression of Hitler underwhelming. “In his heavy boots, dark suit and leather waistcoat, semi-stiff white collar and odd little mustache, he really did not look very impressive—like a waiter in a railway station restaurant,” Hanfstaengl recalled. But once Hitler took the podium, the atmosphere became “electric.”[22]

Hanfstaengl introduced himself to Hitler after the speech and began a close friendship and political association that would last through the 1920s and early 1930s. For much of the 1920s, Hanfstaengl introduced Hitler to Munich high-society and helped polish his image. Hitler was the godfather of Hanfstaengl’s son Egon. Hanfstaengl composed both Brownshirt and Hitler Youth marches patterned after his Harvard football songs and, he later claimed, devised the salute “Sieg Heil.”[23] By December 1920, when Alfred Rosenberg’s Völkisch Observer was heavily in debt, Dietrich Eckart initiated its purchase by the Nazi Party, and funds for a printing press were provided by Hanfstaengl.[24] When the Beer Hall Putsch failed, Hanfstaengl fled to Austria, but when Hitler’s car broke down he decided to seek refuge with Hanfstaengl’s wife Helen, who reportedly prevented him from committing suicide.

Hanfstaengl was intimately associated with Aleister Crowley’s friend and co-conspirator, Hanns Ewers, who worked the secretive Propaganda Kabinett of Max Warburg’s associate Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, with George Sylvester Viereck and Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg.[25] Ewers was also an associate of Guido von List Lanz von Liebenfels.[26] Ewers wrote a screenplay about the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel that was produced by Hanfstaengl. Ewers was a long-time friend of Wessel, a Berlin leader of the SA. After his murder in 1930, he was made into a martyr for the Nazi cause by Joseph Goebbels. Hitler himself asked Ewers to write the book about Wessel, titled Einer von vielen.[27] During the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ewers became involved with the Nazi Party, attracted by its nationalism, its Nietzschean moral philosophy, and its cult of Teutonic culture, and joined the NSDAP in 1931. Despite his involvement with the Nazi, Ewers’ main character in his horror novels, Frank Braun, is depicted as having a Jewish mistress, Lotte Levi, who is also a patriotic German. This was one of the factors which ended Ewers’ popularity with the Nazi leadership. With the addition to his homosexual tendencies, he soon lost favor with party leaders. In 1934, most of his works were banned in Germany, and his assets and were property seized. Alfred Rosenberg was his main adversary in the party, but after submitting many petitions Ewers eventually secured the rescission of the ban.

Mitford Sisters

Hanfstaengl was a friend of Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford (1914 – 1948) was one of the six infamous Mitford sisters, who achieved contemporary notoriety for their controversial and stylish lifestyles and politics. The Mitford family is an aristocratic English family, who trace their origins in Northumberland back to the time of the Norman conquest. Their principal line had its seats at Mitford, Northumberland. While their feuds were made very public, in private the sisters got along very well.[28] They were caricatured by The Times journalist Ben Macintyre as “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur.”[29]

The Mitford family were extensively interwoven with that of the Churchills. The sisters’ father was David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878 – 1958). David’s father Bertram, called “Bertie”, was a diplomat and traveler who held minor office in Benjamin Disraeli’s second ministry, from 1874 to 1880. In 1874, Bertie married Clementina, the second daughter of David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie (1826 – 1881). Blanche Ogilvy, Clementina’s elder sister, became the wife of Sir Henry Montague Hozier, a soldier turned businessman. Their four children included daughters Clementine (“Clemmie”), who in 1908 married Winston Churchill, and Nellie who married Bertram Romilly. However, Bertie had an affair with Clementine’s mother and may have been her real father, making the Mitford sisters cousins to Winston and Clementine Churchill’s son Randolph. [30] Bertie’s eldest son Clement married Clementine’s cousin Helen Hozier. Clementine’s nephew Esmond Romilly would marry Jessica Mitford. Jessica renounced her privileged background at an early age and became an adherent of communism. Jessica became a well-known writer, the author of The American Way of Death in 1963. She later married Robert Treuhaft, a Jewish-American civil rights lawyer.

While Jessica turned to the left, Unity and her sister Diana turned to fascism. The Churchill’s eldest daughter Diana was a flower girl at Diana Mitford’s wedding to Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and she was often invited for extended visits or parties at Clementine and Winston Churchill’s country house. Diana however divorced Guinness for Sir Oswald Mosley, with whom she was having an affair. Mosley, was a devotee of Aleister Crowley and the founder of the British Union of Fascists.[31] Mosley’s closest ally was a disciple of Crowley, Major-General J.F.C Fuller (1878 –1966). While serving in the First Oxfordshire Light Infantry, Fuller had entered and won a contest to write the best review of Crowley’s poetic works, after which it turned out that he was the only entrant. This essay was later published in book form in 1907 as The Star in the West. After this he became an enthusiastic supporter of Crowley, joining his magical order, the A∴A∴., within which he became a leading member, editing order documents and its journal, The Equinox.

In 1920, Mosley married Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of Round Tabler, Lord Curzon. When his father died in 1928, Mosley became Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats. In 1931 Mosley went on a study tour of the “new movements” of Italy’s Benito Mussolini and other fascists, and returned convinced that it was the way forward for him and for Britain. He was determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. Diana and Oswald married in secret in Germany in 1936, in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, where Hitler was one of the guests. Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists, negotiating with Hitler, through Diana, for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany.

Diana became well acquainted with Winifred Wagner and Magda Goebbels. Johanna Maria Magdalena “Magda” Goebbels (1901 – 1945) was the wife of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. A prominent member of the Nazi Party, she was a close ally, companion and political supporter of Adolf Hitler. When she was eight-years-old, Magda’s mother married Jewish businessman and leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer and moved with him to Brussels in 1908. Friedländer’s residency card, found in Berlin archives, stated that Magda was his biological daughter.[30] Friedländer was later killed in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

While in Berlin, Magda became very close friends with a young Jewish girl who lived near the Friedlanders in Berlin. The Jewish girl, Lisa, became her closest friend, through whom she met Lisa’s older brother Victor Arlosoroff (1899 – 1933), who would become one of the most important leaders of Labor Zionism. Victor and Magda became lovers, and she wore a Star of David given to her by him, and together they attended Zionist meetings.[33] Magda continued to carry on the affair, even after she married Dr Günther Quandt, successful industrialist. By the time she had divorced Quandt, Victor had had left for Palestine to join the Jewish Agency and work for the establishment of a state of Israel.[34] Magda later married Goebbels in 1931, with Hitler as his best man.

Randolph Churchill relentlessly criticized his cousin Unity Mitford for her crush on Hitler. Unity, who was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, Canada, where her family owned gold mines, was famous for her adulation of and friendship with Hitler. After meeting Unity and Diana, Hitler described them as the perfect examples of Aryan women.[35] Her middle name was Valkyrie, after the war maidens in the opera of Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, and a friend Unity’s grandfather, Lord Redesdale. Redesdale had also translated books by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose racial theories influenced Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Pryce Jones reports that “She [Mitford] saw him, it seemed, more than a hundred times, no other English person could have anything like that access to Hitler.”[36] Hitler’s inner circle, however, suspected she was a British spy. Nevertheless, when Hitler announced the Anschluss in 1938, Unity appeared with him on the balcony in Vienna.

Unity was a friend of Pamela Harriman (née Digby; 1920 – 1997), the great-great niece of Jane Digby, who “coaxed Unity into taking her to tea with Hitler” in 1937 in Munich.[39] Pamela, then seventeen, was there attending boarding school. In 1939, while working at the Foreign Office in London doing French-to-English translations, Pamela met Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. As he was heading off to war and, convinced he would die, and having already been turned down by eight other woman, Randolph proposed to her immediately after dinner. Pamela accepted and they had a son named Winston, reflecting Pamela’s warm relationship with her father-in-law. Shortly after giving birth, Pamela and the newborn were photographed by Cecil Beaton for Life magazine, its first cover of a mother with baby. She moved into 10 Downing Street when Churchill became Prime Minister, Lord Beaverbrook became her mentor, Franklin Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins became her friend, and she had an affair with W. Averell Harriman, through whom she became a back-channel to US-British negotiations.[40]

When she lived in Munich before the war, Unity had befriended Ernst Hanfstaengl and lived in his sister Erna’s house. Some authorities suggest that Hitler was romantically involved with Erna, or had romantic affections for her.[41] Some authorities suggest that Hitler was romantically involved with Erna, or had romantic affections for her.[42] Unity shot herself in the head days after Britain declared war on Germany, but failed to kill herself and eventually died of pneumococcal meningitis at West Highland Cottage Hospital, Oban. However, investigative journalist Martin Bright, as revealed in an article in The New Statesman, has discovered evidence suggesting that Unity may have faked her injuries to hide the fact that she was carrying Hitler’s child.[43]

Nazi Princess

In Paris, Diana and Oswald Mosley were long-term neighbors and close friends of American socialite divorcée Wallis Simpson. Wallis’ first divorce was to Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a U.S. Navy aviator, after she reportedly had an affair in China with Count Galeazzo Ciano, later Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, and became pregnant, leading to a botched abortion that left her infertile.[44] At the time Wallis began her affair with Edward, then Prince of Wales, she was married to Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive.

Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg told the FBI that Wallis and leading Nazi Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador to Britain in the 1930s, had been lovers in London.[45] Ribbentrop, a protégé of Ernst Hanfstaengl, was also close friends with Aufbau member Karl Haushofer, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Klee, Romano Guardini and Rainer Maria Rilke.[46] During the 1930s, Gestapo officer Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim (1896 –1988) had become chief assistant to Ribbentrop. Then it was discovered that Dürckheim was of Jewish descent: his maternal great-grandmother was the daughter of the Jewish banker Salomon Oppenheim, and he was also related to Mayer Amschel Rothschild.[47] He was therefore considered a Mischling, and had become “politically embarrassing.” Ribbentrop decided to send him to Japan, where he coordinated the dissemination of Nazi propaganda in Japan, likening German military ideals to Japanese bushido and encouraging the idea that Japan and Germany would share the world.[48] Dürckheim was arrested by the Allies during their occupation of Japan and served more than a year in prison as a member of the Gestapo.[49]

Wallis was also a friend of Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe (1891 – 1972), known as the “Nazi Princess,” who was also a member of the Cliveden Set.[50] Born Stephany Julienne Richter as a commoner, allegedly of Jewish family background, Stephanie became an Austrian princess by her marriage to the diplomat Prince Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, a member of the princely Hohenlohe family, who had been head of Austro-Hungarian intelligence in that country in World War I.[51] Stephanie relocated to London after her divorce from the prince, where she is suspected of having acted as a spy for Germany during the 1930s.[52] Her close friends included Margot Asquith, the widow of the former prime minister H.H. Asquith, Lady Ethel Snowden, the wife of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lady Londonderry and her husband Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry.[53]

Stephanie had developed friendships with powerful and influential men, including Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, an Anglo-Irish tycoon who took over ownership of the influential Daily Mail and Daily Mirror from his brother, Alfred Harmsworth, the later Viscount Northcliffe, who had been director for propaganda under David Lloyd George during World War II and who was appointed head of the Tavistock Institute.[54] Rothermere was an early admirer of Hitler, and in the early 1930s, he advocated an alliance with Germany. For a time in 1934, the Rothermere papers the only major papers to championed Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. On January 15, 1934, the Daily Mail published an editorial written by Rothermere titled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” praising Oswald Mosley for his “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine.”[55] According to Louis P. Lochner, Tycoons and Tyrant: German Industry from Hitler to Adenauer, Rothermere provided funds to Hitler via Ernst Hanfstaengel. Adrian Addison, the author of Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail, claims that Rothermere “began to fully embrace the Nazi cause.”[56]

In November 1933, Rothermere gave Stephanie the task of establishing personal contact with Hitler.[57] Stephanie went to Berlin and began an affair with Fritz Wiedemann, one of Hitler’s personal aides. Wiedemann reported back to Hitler that Stephanie was Rothermere’s mistress, and Hitler decided that she could be of use to the government. The following month, Wiedemann arranged for Stephanie to have her first meeting with Hitler, when she delivered a personal message from Rothermere. According to Stephanie, the day Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1930, Rothermere told some of his staff: “Remember this day. Hitler is going to rule Germany. The man will make history and I predict that he will change the face of Europe.”[58]

Stephanie also developed a friendship also with von Ribbentrop. During visits to Germany, she had become closely acquainted with members of the Nazi hierarchy, including Adolf Hitler, who called her his “dear princess.” She developed a close friendship with Hermann Göring, and Heinrich Himmler declared her an “honorary Aryan.” In a 1938 MI6 report, British intelligence said of her, “She is frequently summoned by the Führer who appreciates her intelligence and good advice. She is perhaps the only woman who can exercise any influence on him.”[59] During the 1930s, she was awarded the Gold Medal of the Nazi Party for her services.

In August 1935, Stephanie was invited by Hitler, along with her friend, Fabian Society member Ethel Snowden, to attend the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally. She later wrote about the “tribal excitement of Nuremberg… a shrine of Nazidom… an orgy of dedication to the Nazi creed.” Snowden wrote an account of the rally in the Daily Mail. Soon afterwards an MI5 agent recorded that Princess Stephanie and Lady Snowden had formed “a most intimate friendship.”[60] Stephanie’s attendance at the rally upset Unity Mitford. Princess Carmencita Wrede claims that Unity was very jealous of Hitler’s relationship with Princess Stephanie: “She complained that Stephanie Hohenlohe was Jewish, and how she had told Hitler, Here you are, anti-Jewish yet you have a Jew around you the whole time, this Princess Hohenlohe. Hitler said nothing. She simply hated the Hohenlohe for a rusée, going to tell Lord Rothermere what Hitler was up to. I asked her why she got so upset about it and the answer was short: jealousy again.”[61] Likewise, Ernst Hanfstaengel warned Hitler that Stephanie was a “professional blackmailer and a full-blooded Jewess.”[62]

Prince Philip

Another member of the Hohenlohe family was Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1897 – 1960), who was he first child of Ernst II, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1863 – 1950) and his wife, Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1878 – 1942, daughter of Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia. Through his maternal grandparents, he was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and of Tsar Alexander II. Gottfried married Princess Margarita of Greece and Denmark, the sister of Prince Philip, husband of the reigning Queen Elizabeth II of England, the Prince of Wales’ niece. Philip’s father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was a grandson of Christian IX of Denmark and Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Prince Andrew’s mother Olga Constantinovna of Russia, granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I, a niece of Tsar Alexander II and first cousin of Tsar Alexander III. Philip’s mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, a daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, King Edward VII’s niece. Andrew and Alice were closely related to the ruling houses of the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Denmark, and Greece, and their wedding was one of the great gatherings of the descendants of Queen Victoria and Christian IX of Denmark held before World War I.[63]

Genealogy of Prince Philip

(see Genealogy of the House of Hesse-Kassel)

• King George II of England (1683 – 1760) + Caroline of Ansbach

  • Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707 – 1751)

    • King George III (1738 – 1820) + Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

      • Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (1767 – 1820) + Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld

        • QUEEN VICTORIA + Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819 – 1861, grandson of Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1745 – 1804), friend of Adam Weishaupt)

          • Victoria, Princess Royal + Frederick III, German Emperor

            • Kaiser Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859 – 1941)

            • Princess Margaret of Prussia + Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse (see below)

          • Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1844 – 1900) + Maria Alexandrovna (sister of Alexander III)

            • Alfred, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

            • Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha + Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich of Russia (Sovereign Military Order of Malta)

            • Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha + Ernst II, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (member of Nazi party)

          • King Edward VII (1841 – 1910) + Alexandra, Queen of the United Kingdom (see below)

          • Princess Alice + Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine (see above)

            • Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine + Prince Louis of Battenberg

              • Princess Alice of Battenberg (diagnosed with schizophrenia for claiming to communicate with Christ and Buddha and treated by Freud) + Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (see below)

            • Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse (funded founding of Count Hermann Keyserling’s School of Wisdom)

            • Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) (1872 – 1918) + Tsar Nicholas II Romanov (see above)

            • Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine + Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia (son of Alexander II)

  • Princess Louise of Great Britain (1724 – 1751) + King Frederick V of Denmark (1723 – 1766)

    • Sophia Magdalena of Denmark + Gustav III (1746 – 1792, patron of Swedenborg and Grand Master of Swedish Rite of Freemasonry)

    • Christian VII of Denmark (1749 – 1808) + Caroline Matilda of Great Britain (d. of Frederick, Prince of Wales, by Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha)

      • Frederick VI of Denmark (1768 – 1839) + Marie of Hesse-Kassel (see below)

    • Princess Louise of Denmark (1750–1831) + Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (see below)

    • Frederick, Hereditary Prince of Denmark + Duchess Sophia Frederica of Mecklenburg-Schwerin

      • Princess Charlotte of Denmark + Prince William of Hesse-Kassel (see below)

  • Princess Mary of Great Britain (1723 – 1772) + Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (descendant of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, friend of Martin Luther, and Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, member of the Fruitbearing Society, leading figure behind Rosicrucian movement and close friend of Frederick V of the Palatinate. See the Genealogy of the Landgraves of Hesse)

    • William I, Elector of Hesse (1743 – 1821) - (hired Mayer Amschel Rothschild who founded Rothschild dynasty)

    • Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel (Member of Illuminati and Asiatic Brethren, friend of Comte St. Germain) + Princess Louise of Denmark (see above)

      • Marie of Hesse-Kassel + Frederick VI of Denmark (see above)

        • Princess Vilhelmine Marie of Denmark + Frederick VII of Denmark (succeeded by Christian IX)

      • Princess Louise Caroline of Hesse-Kassel + Frederick William, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg

        • Christian IX of Denmark + Louise of Hesse-Kassel (1817 – 1898, friend of Marie de Riznitch, Comtesse de Keller who married Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, founder of synarchism)

    • Frederick of Hesse-Kassel (1747 – 1837) + Princess Caroline of Nassau-Usingen

      • Prince William of Hesse-Kassel (1787 – 1867) + Princess Charlotte of Denmark (see above)

        • Louise of Hesse-Kassel + Christian IX of Denmark (see above)

          • Frederick VIII of Denmark + Princess Louise of Sweden

          • Alexandra, Queen of the United Kingdom + King Edward VII (see above)

            • Prince Albert Victor (1864 – 1892, aka “Jack the Ripper”)

            • George V (1865 – 1936) + Mary of Teck

              • Edward VIII (PRINCE OF WALES) + Wallis Simpson

              • George VI + Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon

                • Elizabeth II + PRINCE PHILIP, Duke of Edinburgh (see below)

                • Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon

              • Prince George, Duke of Kent + Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark (see below)

          • George I of Greece + Olga Constantinovna of Russia

            • Constantine I of Greece + Sophia of Prussia

              • Paul of Greece + Frederica of Hanover (see above)

                • Queen Sofía of Spain + Juan Carlos I of Spain (Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece)

            • Prince George of Greece and Denmark + Marie Bonaparte (closely linked with Freud)

            • Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark + + Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia (granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II)

              • Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark + Prince Paul of Yugoslavia

                • Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia (Grand Patroness of the Order of the Fleur de Lys) + Howard Oxenberg

                  • Catherine Oxenberg (star of Dynasty) + Robert Evans (producer of Rosemary’s Baby, involved with Roy Radin, head of satanic cult that connects Process Chuch and David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam)

                  • Catherine Oxenberg + William Weitz Shaffer (convicted drug smuggler)

                    • India Riven Oxenberg (involved in NXIVM, an American cult that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labor and racketeering, co-founded by Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman)

                  • Christina Oxenberg + Damian Elwes (brother of Carey Elwes, best known for roles in The Princess Bride)

              • Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark + Prince George, Duke of Kent (see above)

                • Prince Edward, Duke of Kent (Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England)

                • Prince Michael of Kent (Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons)

            • Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark + Princess Alice of Battenberg (see above)

              • Princess Margarita of Greece and Denmark + Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (both joined the Nazi party)

              • Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark + Berthold, Margrave of Baden (Nazi Wehrmacht)

              • Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark + Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse (both joined the Nazi party)

              • Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark + Prince Christoph of Hesse (see below)

              • PRINCE PHILIP, Duke of Edinburgh + Queen Elizabeth II

          • Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark) + Tsar Alexander III (Order of the Golden Fleece)

            • Tsar Nicholas II (Order of the Golden Fleece) + Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) (see below)

        • Prince Frederick William of Hesse-Kassel + Princess Anna of Prussia

          • Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse + Princess Margaret of Prussia (see above)

            • Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse (joined Nazi Party and SA)

            • Prince Christoph of Hesse (Oberführer in the Nazi SS) + Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (see above)

Prince Philip served in the British navy during World War II, while all four of his sisters were married to Germans, three of whom had Nazi connections. His sister Cécile married Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, and both joined the Nazi party. Of Philip’s brothers-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, who married Philip’s sister Theodora, was invalided out of the Wehrmacht in 1940 after an injury in France. Members of the Nazi party from 1937, Gottfried and Margarita used their family connections to promote a rapprochement of Nazism within the United Kingdom, though without success. Gottfried was a German soldier in World War II, becoming severely injured at the Russian front. He was dismissed from the army after the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944.

Prince Christoph of Hesse (1901 – 1943), who married Prince Philip’s sister Sophie, who was his cousin, fought on the German side and was a member of the Nazi Party and the Waffen-SS. Christoph was the fifth son of Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse and Princess Margaret of Prussia, the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Christoph’s mother was the daughter of Emperor Frederick III and of Victoria, Princess Royal. Christoph was a director in the Third Reich’s Ministry of Air Forces, Commander of the Air Reserves, and held the rank of Oberführer in the SS. His brother Philipp, Prince and Landgrave of Hesse (1896 – 1980), joined Hitler’s SA. After she married Christoph, Sophie met Hitler at Goering’s wedding in 1935 and they later invited him to their home. In a previously unpublished memoir, written in her old age, Sophie recounted, “I have to say here, that, although Chri [Christoph] and I changed our political view fundamentally some years later, we were impressed by this charming and seemingly modest man, and by his plans to change and improve the situation in Germany.”[64]

Duke and Duchess of Windsor

On 20 January 1936, George V died at Sandringham and the Prince of Wales ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. Constitutionally, the King was required to be in communion with the Church of England, but his proposed marriage conflicted with the Church’s teachings against the remarriage of divorced people if their former spouse was still alive. Refusing to abandon his relationship with Wallis, Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication on December 10, 1936. Edward left Britain for Austria, where he stayed at Schloss Enzesfeld, the home of Baron Eugène Daniel von Rothschild (1884 – 1976) and Baroness “Kitty” de Rothschild. Eugène’s mother was Bettina Caroline (1858 – 1892), the niece of Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild, and the niece of Edmond James de Rothschild. Wallis and Edward married on June 3, 1937, at the Château de Candé. At the request of Britain’s Queen Mary, Hermann Göring granted safe passage to Eugène’s brother Baron Louis de Rothschild of Vienna.[65] Wedding Guests included Randolph Churchill, Baron Eugène and Kitty Rothschild, and the best man, Major Fruity Metcalfe, who was Oswald Mosley’s brother-in-law and a member of the January Club, a right-wing association affiliated with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.[66]

The Château de Candé was lent to the Duke and Duchess by French millionaire Charles Bedaux. Bedaux’s wedding present was a statue entitled “Love,” by Anny Hoefken-Hempel, the lover of Hjalmar Schacht, who had introduced Bedaux to Fritz Wiedemann. In 1938, according to Charles Higham, author of Trading with the Enemy, Wiedemann appointed Bedaux as head of I.G. commercial operations on behalf of what he called The Fraternity. At his office on the fifty-third floor of the Chrysler Building in New York, Bedaux was often met with his friends Lammot du Pont, Standard Oil President Walter Teagle, and Hermann Schmitz the CEO of IG Farben.[67] Bedaux was selected by Heinrich Himmler to ensure the Duke’s political and economic commitment.[68] Bedaux later arranged a visit for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Germany in October 1937, paid by the Third Reich, where they publicly met Hitler.[69] The Duke and Duchess also visited Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s estate. At the same time, the Duchess took afternoon tea with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. During a dinner with Joachim von Ribbentrop in Berlin, they also met Albert Speer and Joseph and Magda Goebbels who were very impressed. Joseph later wrote in his diary, “The Duke is wonderful—a nice sympathetic fellow who is open and clear and with a healthy understanding of people… It is a shame he is no longer King. With him, we would have entered into an alliance.”[70]

On October 19, in Nuremberg, Wallis and Edward had dinner with the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1884 – 1954), who was a male-line grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Duke was a first cousin of King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Wilhelm II showed such interest in his young cousin’s upbringing that Charles Edward was known amongst the Imperial Court as "the Emperor’s seventh son.”[71] Charles Edward joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became a member of the SA, rising to the rank of Obergruppenführer by 1936. He also served as a member of the Reichstag representing the Nazi Party from 1936-45.

The visit tended to corroborate the strong suspicions of many in government and society that the Duchess was a German agent.[72] Edward gave a Nazi salute when he was greeted by SS Death-Head’s Division at the Nazi training school in Pomerania. Edward gave a second salute when the couple then met Hitler himself at the Berghof in Obersalzberg on October 22, who addressed Wallis as “Royal Highness.” Wallis was apparently struck by the “inner force” of the Führer.[73] According to Hitler’s translator, he said of Wallis, “She would have made a good Queen.”[74] On the Prince of Wales, Albert Speer quoted Hitler directly saying: “I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.”[75]

Years later, Diana Mosley claimed that the Duke and Duchess shared her and her husband's views that Hitler should have been given a free hand to destroy Communism.[76] The former Austrian ambassador, Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, who was also a second cousin once removed and friend of George V, believed that Edward favored German fascism as a bulwark against communism, and even that he initially favored an alliance with Germany.[77] The Duke and Duchess’ visit attracted the interest of the FBI. In September 1940 a report to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said, “for some time the British Government has known that the Duchess of Windsor was exceedingly pro-German in her sympathies and connections and there is strong reason to believe that this is the reason why she was considered so obnoxious to the British Government that they refused to permit Edward to marry her and maintain the throne.”[78]

Munich Agreement

According to MI5 the list of people she had been associating with over the last few years included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Prince George, Duke of Kent, Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Lady Ethel Snowden, and Cliveden Set member Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian.[79] As a prominent Zionist leader, Walter Rothschild was presented with the famous Balfour Declaration which pledged to a Jewish national home in Palestine. A Round Table member, Lothian was private secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George between 1916 and 1921. Lothian believed that Germany had been treated unfairly and harshly by the Treaty of Versailles and, after its signing, he became a steadfast advocate of revising the Treaty in Germany’s favor throughout the 1920s until March 1939, a policy known as appeasement. The term appeasement most often applied to the foreign policy of the British Governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and most notably Neville Chamberlain towards Nazis and Fascist Italy between 1935-39. At the beginning of the 1930s, such concessions were widely seen as positive due to the trauma of World War I, second thoughts about the vindictive treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that fascism was a useful form of anti-communism.

Lord Rothermere also had several meetings with Hitler and conspired behind the scenes in support of appeasement. Rothermere made his first visit to Hitler in December 1934. That evening, Hitler held his first major dinner party he had given for foreign visitors at his official residence in Berlin since he had taken office. The high-level guests included Goebbels, Göring and von Ribbentrop.[80] On December 20, 1934, Rothermere returned the hospitality, hosting a dinner at Berlin’s famous Hotel Adlon with Princess Stephanie. Twenty-five guests attended including Hitler, Germany’s Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, and Göring accompanied by the actress Emmy Sonnemann.

Also invited was British banker Ernest Tennant, a friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Ambassador to Britain.[81] Tennant was one of the principal founders of the Anglo-German Fellowship, a membership organization which existed from 1935, in response to the Duke of Windsor’s speech, which called for a closer understanding of Germany in order to safeguard peace in Europe.[82] Members included Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, Prince von Bismarck, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, and Geoffrey Dawson of the Cliveden Set.[83] Corporate members included such leading organizations as Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop Rubber, Thomas Cook & Son, the Midland Bank and Lazard Brothers amongst others.[84] The Fellowship and its sister organization in Berlin, the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft, hosted grand dinners at which Rudolf Hess, von Ribbentrop, General Werner von Blomberg, the Duke of Brunswick and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, would be guests of honor.[85] Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, was a grandson of George V of Hanover, whom the Prussians had deposed from the Hanoverian throne in 1866, and Christian IX of Denmark. Through his mother, he was a first cousin of Nicholas II of Russia. He married, Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II. After his abdication in 1936, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited the couple at Cumberland Castle in Gmunden, Austria.[86] The spies Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, seeking to disguise their Communist affiliations, joined the Fellowship, recognizing that it was widely perceived as allied to the far right. Of German descent himself, like his wife, Tiarks was also listed as a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.[87]

Throughout 1936, several members, including Dawson, Lord Astor, and Thomas Jones, traveled to Germany to meet with Hitler, Ribbentrop, Hermann Goring, and Werner von Blomberg. In September 1936, Dawson and David Lloyd George met with Ribbentrop, Hitler, and Rudolf Hess in a series of meetings where they reiterated their desire for peace with Germany. While the Milner Group was busy giving Hitler the false impression that England was ready to make an alliance with Germany, they also were attempting to further influence their own government to this policy. According to Carrol Quigley, “It goes without saying that the whole inner core of the group, and their chief publications, such as The Times and The Round Table, approved the policy of appeasement completely and prodded it along with calculated indiscretions when it was felt necessary to do so.”[88] When Chamberlain became Prime Minister, the Cliveden Set again used their connections as a means of influence. Several times in 1937-38, Chamberlain stayed at Cliveden and many other times he dined there.[89]

In 1938, Hitler asked Stephanie to meet in Germany with Göring, who told her “that it was no bluff, that Hitler would soon declare war,” and that only he could prevent this if he had a meeting with Lord Halifax.[90] Lord Halifax was a signatory to the April 1919 Lowther Petition calling for harsh peace terms against Germany in the Treaty of Versailles then being negotiated. In October 1925, Lord Halifax became Viceroy of India. Lord Halifax and Lothian were participants in the Round Table Conferences of 1930–32 organized by the British Government and Indian political personalities to discuss constitutional reforms in India. Lord Irwin made a controversial statement declaring that India should be eventually granted Dominionship. The culmination of events were settled by the Gandhi–Irwin Pact of 1931, after which the Civil Disobedience Movement and the boycott of British goods were suspended in exchange for a Second Round Table Conference. Discussions led to the passing of the Government of India Act 1935.

Because there were some senior figures in the Nazi Party who were against negotiations with Britain, Stephanie kept the arrangement a secret from von Ribbentrop. On her return to London, Stephanie asked her friend Lady Snowden to arrange a meeting with Lord Halifax.[91] Although Lord Halifax was initially suspicious of Stephanie, after obtaining permission from Chamberlain, he agreed to meet with Hitler’s representative, Fritz Wiedemann.[92] It has been claimed that Halifax told Wiedemann that the British government was sympathetic to Hitler and that he had a vision that “Hitler would ride in triumph through the streets of London in the royal carriage along with King George VI.”[93]

On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler at his home in Berchtesgaden. Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia unless Britain supported Germany’s plans to annex the Sudetenland. Chamberlain informed Hitler that his proposals were unacceptable. Cliveden Set member Nevile Henderson pleaded with Chamberlain to go on negotiating with Hitler. Henderson believed that the Treaty of Versailles was far too harsh on Germany, and if only the terms of Versailles were revised in Germany’s favor, then another world war could be prevented.[94] Henderson had regular meetings with Joseph Goebbels and became Hermann Göring’s best friend.[95] Henderson accepted Göring’s invitation to attend the 1937 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. Before leaving for Germany, Henderson read a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. On March 16, 1938, Henderson had written to Lord Halifax, setting out his view that “British interests and the standard of morality can only be combined if we insist upon the fullest possible equality for the Sudeten minority of Czechoslovakia.”[96] The meeting ended with Hitler, Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier of France and Mussolini signing the Munich Agreement which transferred the Sudetenland to Germany. In return, Hitler promised not to make any further territorial demands in Europe. After the signing of the Munich Agreement, Wiedemann sent a letter to Rothermere stating: “You know that the Führer greatly appreciates the work the princess did to straighten relations between our countries… it was her groundwork which made the Munich agreement possible.”[97] Chamberlain returned to England announcing his infamous “peace for our time” speech outside 10 Downing Street while waving the Munich Agreement: “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”[98]

War or Peace in America?

Stephanie von Hohenlohe and Wiedemann visited the United States in 1937, where they linked up to Fraternity friends such as Sosthenes Behn, Walter Teagle, and Edsel Ford. According to Martha Schad, the author of Hitler’s Spy Princess, Hitler discovered that Wiedemann was having an affair with Stephanie: “Early in January 1939 the game of hide-and-seek around the Princess Stephanie and Fritz Wiedemann came to an abrupt end. Hitler found out that Wiedemann was Stephanie’s lover.”[99] Hitler deported Wiedemann to San Francisco as consul general, where he was head of the Orient Gruppe, the SD network that encompassed the whole Pacific basin, including the North and South American coastal states, Thailand, Malaya, Hong Kong, mainland China, Formosa, and Japan while at the same time collaborating with the British and Americans.[100]

Fleeing from Britain after war was declared in 1939, Stephanie joined Wiedemann in San Francisco, where she was put under surveillance by the US government. When she arrived in the port of New York, the FBI was already there because the head of the secret service, Edgar J. Hoover, assumed that she and her friend Wiedemann would spy on Nazi Germany.[101] After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, she was arrested by the FBI and interned in the United States as an enemy alien. According to the Schad, on November 27, 1940, Stephanie and Wiedemann met Sir William Wiseman—the former head of the British Secret Service in Washington, and now a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company—who was working on behalf of a group headed by Lord Halifax, the new ambassador for Britain in the United States.[102] Brigadier General Sherman Miles, Chief of Military Intelligence, suggested that Wiseman was a member of the same group of Englishmen that had negotiated with the Nazis in the past through men like Axel Wenner-Gren, Torkild Rieber and James D. Mooney, an American engineer and corporate executive at General Motors, which was run by the Du Pont family.[103]

In April 1939, Mooney had met with the Emil Puhl of the BIS and the Reichsbank, and Helmuth Wohlthat, who was working for Hermann Göring on a four-year plan for the German economy. A month later, Mooney met Nazi officials in Germany and discussed various issues concerning GM’s Adam-Opel facility. Mooney arranged for a meeting in London between Wohlthat and ambassador Joseph Kennedy. The purpose was to discuss possible loans in exchange for more open trade conditions. In December 1939 and January 1940, Mooney met with President Roosevelt and obtained authority for informal discussions with the Nazis to better understand their aims. In March 1940, Mooney met first with Hitler and then with Göring. He presented Roosevelt’s views to both men and recorded their replies.[104]

Wenner-Gren was a Swedish entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in the world during the 1930s. Wenner-Gren was reported to be a friend of Göring, whose first wife was Swedish, and in the late 1930s convinced himself that he could avert the coming world war by acting as a conduit between Göring and the British and American governments. His efforts proved unsuccessful, with all parties regarding him as a self-promoting nuisance without much influence on the plans of the Nazi regime.[105] A dejected Wenner-Gren retired to his estate in the Bahamas, where he resumed his friendship with the island’s governor Edward, Duke of Windsor. In February 1941, the right-wing journalist Fulton Oursler published an interview in Liberty magazine with the Duke at Government House in the Bahamas. The Duke declared his approval of appeasement and said, “It [the peace] cannot be another Versailles. Whatever happens, whatever the outcome, a New Order is going to come into the world… It will be buttressed with police power… When peace comes this time, there is going to be a New Order of Social Justice.”[106] The Windsors visited James Mooney in Detroit in November 1941, the month before the Attack on Pearl Harbor.[107]

In 1939, on the advice of von Ribbentrop, Charles Bedaux met Gerhardt Alois Westrick, an agent of The Fraternity and an associate of Allen Dulles, and hired him as his lawyer.[108] In 1940, Westrick traveled via San Francisco, where he handed $5 million of Farben-ITT money on ITT chief Sosthenes Behn’s and Ribbentrop’s joint authorization to Wiedemann.[109] Westrick also met with Torkild Rieber, a Norwegian immigrant to the United States who became chairman of Texaco. Rieber met Göring in 1940 and was given a message from Hitler to President Roosevelt, inviting him to support Berlin’s plan for a European Union, led by Germany, which would open its doors to the United States. Roosevelt rejected the offer. On June 26, 1940, one day after the surrender of France, Westrick sponsored a celebratory dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Attendees included Rieber, Behn, Mooney, Edsel Ford, as well as Philip Dakin Wagoner of Underwood and William Weiss of Sterling Products.[110] Criticism of the dinner was published by the Chicago Daily News, Time, Life, and the New York Herald Tribune. Early in August 1940, the recently founded PM Magazine published a series of articles that attacked Mooney for his contacts with the Nazis. The magazine accused him of pro-German views and criticized a speech he had made, later printed as an article in the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “War or Peace in America?”[111]

Wiseman then went on to have a meeting with Herbert Bayard Swope, the famous journalist, who conveyed a message from Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of several important newspapers, that he was trying to arrange a meeting with Lord Halifax. Over the next few days Wiseman had a series of discussions with several high-level diplomats, including Lytle Hull of the State Department, a cousin of Cordell Hull.[112] Hoover reported to President Roosevelt that the object of this encounter was to work out a plan for persuading Hitler to make a separate peace with Britain. “The Princess stated that she had not seen Hitler since January 1939. Wiseman then suggested that Hitler might think she was going to Germany on behalf of the British. In reply to this remark, the Princess stated she would have to take that chance but that Hitler was genuinely fond of her and that he would look forward to her coming, and she thought Hitler would listen to her.”[113] When the FBI leaked the contents of these undercover meetings to British intelligence, Wiseman was warned not to have any more contacts with Princess Stephanie and Wiedemann.[114] There were several meetings between Wiseman and former President Herbert Hoover, Herbert Bayard Swope, and “others, apparently on the matter of the negotiated peace.”[115] In May 1945, Princess Stephanie was released on parole and returned to Germany, where she cultivated influential connections in post-war German society.

The Link

In the summer of 1937, according to MI-6 files in the Ministry of Defence in London, Charles Bedaux met with the Duke of Windsor, Bedaux’s close friend Errol Flynn, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann in a secret encounter at the Hotel Meurice in Paris. At the meeting, the Duke promised to help Hess in contacting the Duke of Hamilton (1903 – 1973), who was a member of the Cliveden Set and the Anglo-German Fellowship.[116] The Duke of Hamilton had a direct link with Himmler and Baron Kurt von Schröder of the Schröder Bank and the Worms Bank through their common membership in Frank Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament Movement.[117]

In 1936, Hamilton had attended the Summer Olympics in Berlin. In Berlin, he attended numerous functions, including a grand dinner for the British contingent hosted by Joachim von Ribbentrop, where he was introduced to Hitler and other leading members of the Nazi government. Hamilton had previously met Ribbentrop in London as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James’. Hamilton was invited by Hermann Göring to inspect the newly reinstated Luftwaffe, for his professional interest in aviation.

Hess chose Hamilton because he was a friend of Karl Haushofer, who was also a close friend of fellow Thule and Aufbau members General Ludendorff and Dietrich Eckart.[118] In 1923, when Hitler and Hess were imprisoned after the Munich Putsch, they were visited by Haushofer who spent six hours visiting the two, bringing along a copy of Friedrich Ratzel’s Political Geography and Clausewitz’s On War. In Germany, Hamilton had met Karl’s son Albrecht Haushofer. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Haushofer’s wife and children were categorized as Mischlinge, the German legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons deemed to have both “Aryan” and Jewish ancestry. His son, Albrecht, was issued a German Blood Certificate through his protégé Rudolf Hess’ help. Albrecht had studied alongside Hess at Munich University. Hess and Albrecht shared an interest in astrology, and Hess also was keen on clairvoyance and the occult.[119]

Hitler decreed in 1939 that Göring was his official successor, and named Rudolf Hess as next in line. Through Bedaux and Flynn, Hess hoped to ensure an alliance with Britain that would continue despite Hitler’s conquest. When Paris was occupied by the Germans during World War II, Bedaux became acquainted with leading Nazi and Vichy figures. After the fall of France in 1940, he was appointed as an economic advisor to Vichy and the Reich. In October 1941, he was designated by the sabotage branch of the Abwehr to command a covert mission to Iran to capture the refinery at Abadan from his former client, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and protect it from Allied bombardment prior to a planned German military invasion of Iraq and Persia.[120] On January 13, 1943, Bedaux was in Algeria allegedly supervising the construction of a German pipeline when he and his son were arrested by the Americans and kept in custody without charge for a year.[121] Bedaux was eventually flown to the US, and committed suicide using an overdose of barbiturates while in FBI custody in Miami, Florida, awaiting charges of trading with the enemy and treason.

Although the plan was postponed, efforts were made by Hess to meet with Hamilton on several further occasions, which finally led to his dramatic landing on the Hamilton estate in Scotland on May 10, 1941, where he hoped to arrange peace talks. Anthony Masters in The Man Who Was M: The Life of Charles Henry Maxwell Knight, has claimed that Hess’ trip was part of a scheme devised by British Intelligence officer Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, modelled on sorcerer John Dee. According to Masters, Fleming laid the trap in 1940 after he read about the Anglo-German organization The Link in the intelligence file of its founder, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, also a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. The Link generally operated as a cultural organization, although its journal, the Anglo-German Review reflected Domvile’s pro-Nazi views, and attracted a number of anti-Semites and pro-Nazis particularly in London. Domvile had already visited Germany in 1935, being impressed by many aspects of the Nazi government, and was invited to attend the Nuremberg Rally of September 1936 as a guest of Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Link was investigated by Maxwell Knight, head of counter-subversion in MI5 and future role model for James Bond’s boss M. The organization closed in 1939, shortly after the start of World War II. By way of an agent, Fleming fed Hess disinformation that The Link had been driven underground and was in a position to overthrow the Prime Minister Churchill, and negotiate peace, and that the Duke of Hamilton was prepared to serve as negotiator.

Domvile was also friendly with Hastings Russell, 12th Duke of Bedford (1888 – 1953), to whose estate Hess had attempted to fly.[122] Hastings was the son of Herbrand Russell, 11th Marquess of Tavistock, and a knight of the Order of the Garter, after whom the Tavistock Institute was named. Herbrand was also the great-uncle to Bertrand Russell. Hastings, the fourth-richest man in Britain, bankrolled a number of fascist causes, including the British People’s Party (BPP) in 1939, which was headed by John Beckett, a former Labour Member of Parliament who had also been a member of the British Union of Fascists and the National Socialist League (NSL), a short-lived Nazi political movement in the United Kingdom immediately before World War II. The NSL’s ideology was based on a document published by founding member William Joyce, entitled “National Socialism Now,” in which he declared his strong admiration for Adolf Hitler but added that what was needed was a specifically British Nazism. Anglo-German Fellowship member and Conservative MP Jocelyn Lucas also developed clandestine links with the NSL.[123] Connections to the NSL were established with the Nordic League, an influential secret society chaired by Archibald Maule Ramsay.[124] The Nordic League originated in 1935 when agents of Alfred Rosenberg’s Nordische Gesellschaft arrived in Britain to establish a UK branch of their movement.[125]

At the start of 1940, Hastings corresponded with the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson after obtaining a document from the German legation in Dublin that Russell claimed contained Adolf Hitler's draft proposals for peace. On March 13, 1940, Domvile then organized a meeting for both men, Mosley and Imperial Fascist League (IFL) veteran Bertie Mills to discuss a plan of action. Mosley proposed the creation of a “Peace Government” to be led by David Lloyd George, although nothing more came of this initiative as the government soon launched a crackdown on far-right activity.[126] Although a number of leading figures were interned under Defence Regulation 18B, Hastings’s nobility helped to ensure that he avoided arrest, along with other fascist-leading noblemen such as the Lord Lymington, the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Westminster, the Earl of Mar, Lord Brocket, Lord Queenborough and others.[127] Hasting’s personal links to Lord Halifax also helped to ensure his freedom. He had written a number of letters to Halifax in the beginning of the war expressing his admiration for Hitler and urging him to use his influence to bring about a swift conclusion to the conflict.[128]

Spandau #7

Masters also claims that Hess selected the date of the flight after he was informed by his astrologer, Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, that there was going to be a rare alignment of six planets in the astrological sign of Taurus at the time of the full moon on May 11, 1941, exactly one day after his landing in Scotland. Hitler, who had not authorized the flight, saw it as a betrayal or the act of a mentally ill person. He ordered that all supporters should be arrested. On the morning of May 14, Schulte Strathaus was arrested and taken for questioning by the Gestapo. In the course of the investigation, parapsychologist Gerda Walther, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s assistant, was arrested and interrogated about her correspondence with Schulte Strathaus. During the interrogation, Walther explained that she had seen Schulte Strathaus as an “enthusiastic supporter of Schrenck.”[129] Schulte Strathaus transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.[130]

According to John Harris and M. J. Trow, in Hess: the British Conspiracy, report that there is circumstantial evidence that Hess was lured to Scotland by the British secret service. Violet Roberts, whose nephew, Walter Roberts, was a close relative to the Duke of Hamilton and was in the political intelligence and propaganda branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SO1/PWE), was friends with Karl Haushofer and sent a letter to him in which Hess took a great interest in prior to his flight. Haushofer replied to Violet and suggested a post office box in Portugal for further correspondence, which was intercepted by a British mail censor. Speculation from Edvard Benes, head of the Czech government in exile and his intelligence chief Frantisek Moravetz, who worked with SO1/PWE, was that British Intelligence used Haushofer’s reply to Violet to trap Hess.

The British authorities immediately arrested Hess upon his arrival in Scotland, and held him in custody until the end of the war. Over the four-year period from June 1941 to Hess’ appearance at the Nuremberg trial, Dr Henry V. Dicks and Dr John Rawlings Rees, both psychiatrists of the of Tavistock Institute, were charged with Hess’ care at the secret prison locations. Dicks and Rees concluded that while he was not insane, Hess was mentally unstable, with tendencies toward hypochondria and paranoia.[131] Rees apparently established a relationship with Hess, whose diaries record many meetings with “Colonel Rees,” when Hess accused his captors of attempting to poison, drug, and “mesmerize” him.[132] Hess’ claims were merely dismissed by Rees as paranoid delusions symptomatic of a case of schizophrenia.

During much of the trial at  Nuremberg, Hess claimed to be suffering from amnesia, but he later admitted this was a ruse. He was returned to Germany to stand trial in the Nuremberg Trials of major war-criminals in 1946, where he was convicted of crimes against peace and of conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes. The chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg, Douglas Kelley of the US Military, gave the opinion that the defendant suffered from “a true psychoneurosis, primarily of the hysterical type, engrafted on a basic paranoid and schizoid personality, with amnesia, partly genuine and partly feigned,” but found him fit to stand trial.[133]

In his statement to the court at Nuremberg, Hess claimed that he had predicted in advance that numerous of his former Nazi colleagues would make false confessions and incriminate their associates, and he implied that it may have been the result of mind-control. Hess cites a large Paris newspaper Le Jour which apparently revealed that the Moscow show trails employed “rather mysterious means.” He quoted the Vökisch Observer which reprinted from Le Jour: “These means make it possible for the selected victims to be made to act and speak according to the orders given them.” According to Hess, “The latter point is of tremendous importance in connection with the actions, the hitherto inexplicable actions of the personnel in the German concentration camps, including the scientists and physicians who made these frightful and atrocious experiments on the prisoners, actions which normal human beings, especially physicians and scientists, could not possibly carry out.” This explanation, according to Hess, is equally applicable to those who gave the order to perform these atrocities, all the way to Hitler himself. Hess mentions the testimony of Field Marshal Milch and that of a number of his comrades who told him that during the last years, Hitler’s “eyes and facial expression had something cruel in them, and even had a tendency towards madness.” Hess also remarked that those assigned to him while he was captive in England also were in “an abnormal state of mind,” as their eyes were “glassy and like eyes in a dream.” The same was the case with the British Army doctor who attended him, whom he named Dr. Johnston, a Scotsman. Lastly, Hess notes that reports of the Moscow trials also described the defendants has having strange eyes.

Only seven prisoners were finally imprisoned in Spandau Prison. After World War II, the prison fell under the British Sector of what became West Berlin, but it was operated by the Four-Power Authorities to house the Nazi war criminals sentenced to imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials. Arriving from Nuremberg on July 18, 1947, the seven were:  Konstantin von Neurath, Erich Raeder, Karl Dönitz, Walther Funk, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach and Rudolf Hess. On April 30, 1945, after Hitler’s death of Adolf and in accordance with his last will and testament, German admiral Karl Dönitz (1891 – 1980) was named Hitler’s successor as head of state, with the title of President of Germany and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Funk had been Hitler’s Minister of Economics, who succeeded Hjalmar Schacht as head of the Reichsbank. Of the seven prisoners, Dönitz, Speer and von Schirach were released after serving their full sentences. Raeder and Funk, who were given life sentences, were released earlier due to ill health along with Neurath. Between 1966 and 1987, Hess was the only inmate in the prison and the warden, Eugene K. Bird, who became a close friend, wrote a book about Hess’ imprisonment titled The Loneliest Man in the World.

Hess served a life sentence in Spandau Prison, where he died by hanging himself in 1987 at the age of 93. After Hess’ death, the prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.[134] Hess’s son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess believes that his father was keeping a secret that he was unable to share, and that was the reason he was kept in prison and ultimately murdered. Soviet authorities had indicated to Hess’ son that Gorbachev was soon to allow his father’s release Dr. Hugh Thomas is convinced that Hess was murdered to keep him from revealing the treasonous activities of his secret British contacts during the war.[135] Certain documents that Hess brought with him to Britain were sealed until 2017. When the seal was broken in 1991-92, the documents were missing. Various conspiracy theories have suggested the man imprisoned at Spandau was not Hess, but a double. This was the subject of David Irving’s Hess: The Lost Years, and has been the theme of at least two novels: Spandau Phoenix, by Greg Iles, and The Separation by Christopher Priest, which considers an alternate history where Hess’ peace mission was a success.

[1] Charles Loch Mowat. Britain between the wars 1918–1940 (1955), p. 188–94.

[2] Elizabeth Langhome. Nancy Astor and Her friends (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 48. See also D.C. Watt. Personalities and Policies: Studies in the Formulation ofBritish Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1965), p. 29.

[3] John Tayler. “A Reevaluation of Cockburn’s Cliveden Set.” (San Francisco State University, 1999).

[4] Boyce. “Harmsworth, Alfred Charles William, Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922).”

[5] John Taylor. “A Reevaluation of Cockburn’s Cliveden Set,” p. 93.

[6] Martha Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess: The Extraordinary Life of Princess Stephanie Von Hohenlohe, translated by Angus McGeoch (Sutton: 2004)

[7] Noah Feldman. Scorpions: the battles and triumphs of FDR's great Supreme Court justices (1st ed.). (New York: Twelve, 1970), p. 153-155.

[8] James Crathorne. Cliveden: The Place and the People (London, 1995), p. 213.

[9] H.G. Wells. Experiments in Autobiography (New York:Macmillan Co., 1934) 73-76.

[10] “Who Was Jack the Ripper?” Time (November 9, 1970).

[11] Osterrieder. “From Synarchy to Shambhala,” p. 113 n. 42.

[12] T.E. Lawrence. Jeremy and Nicole Wilson (ed.). Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, 1922—1926, 1. (Castle Hill Press, 2000). Foreword by Jeremy Wilson.

[13] “Nancy Astor: letters from TE Lawrence and GB Shaw.” Special Collections Service (University of Reading, 2010), p. 5.

[14] Edward J. Renehan Jr. “Joseph Kennedy and the Jews.” History News Network. George Mason University. (April 29, 2002). Retrieved from http://hnn.us/articles/697.html

[15] Thomas Jones. A Diary with Letters: 1931-1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954); cited in John Taylor. “A Reevaluation of Cockburn’s Cliveden Set.” San Francisco State University (1999), p. 93.

[16] A.M. Gollin. Proconsul in Politics : A Study of Lord Milner in Opposition and in Power (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 41-2.

[17] Milton. Russian Roulette, p. 15.

[18] Ernest Robert Zimmermann. The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior: A History of Canadian Internment Camp R (University of Alberta, 2015), p.169; Coleman. Tavistock Institute for Human Relations.

[19] Ernst Hanfstaengl. Unheard Witness (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1957), p. 28.

[20] Ibid., pp. 197-8.

[21] William Shirer. The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 47.

[22] Andrew Nagorski. “Hitler’s Harvard Man.” World War II (June 2013).

[23] John Sedgwick. “The Harvard Nazi.” Boston Magazine (March, 2005).

[24] Ernst Hanfstaengl. Unheard Witness (Lippincott, 1957).

[25] Spence. Secret Agent 666. Kindle Locations 2043-2044.

[26] Stephen E. Flowers. “Introduction.” Hanns Heinz Ewers. Strange Tales (Lodestar Books, Mar. 3, 2011).

[27] Bob Herzberg. The Third Reich on Screen, 1929-2015 (McFarland, 2016), p. 26.

[28] Edward Cotterill. The Mitfords - A Tale Of Two Sisters. 3DD (2017).

[29] Ben Macintyre. “Those utterly maddening Mitford girls,” The Times (October 12, 2007

[30] Nancy C. Parrish. The Downton Era: Great Houses, Churchills, and Mitfords (Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2019).

[31] Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 116.

[32] “Magda Goebbels’ biological father may have been Jewish.” Jewish Chronicle (August 21, 2016).

[33] Colin Shindler. The Hebrew Republic: Israel’s Return to History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), p. 19.

[34] Robert Service. “Unholy alliance.” The Guardian (September 7, 2002).

[35] “Hitler’s British Girl.” Channel 4 Documentary (2007).

[36] David Pryce-Jones. Unity Mitford: A Quest (W&N, 1995).

[37] Ron Rosenbaum. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York; Toronto: Random House, 1998), p. 134.

[38] Ron Hansen. “The Human and the Monstrous.” Boston Review (October 1, 1999).

[39] Parrish. The Downton Era.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. p. 131.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Martin Bright. “Unity Mitford and ‘Hitler’s baby’.” The New Statesman (May 13, 2002).

[44] Charles Higham. Mrs Simpson (London: Pan Books, 2005), p. 50.

[45] Rob Evans & David Hencke. “Wallis Simpson, the Nazi minister, the telltale monk and an FBI plot.” The Guardian (June 29, 2002)

[46] Ernst Hanfstaengl. Hitler: The Memoir of the Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Fuhrer (Simon and Schuster, 2011).

[47] Gerhard Wehr. Karlfried Graf Dürckheim: Leben im Zeichen der Wandlung (Freiburg, 1996), p. 75.

[48] “Nazi Agents in Japan Rounded Up.” The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848-1954), (November 1, 1945), p. 2.

[49] Levenda. The Hitler Legacy.

[50] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Hugo Vickers. “Alice, Princess (1885–1969).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). (Oxford University Press, 2004).

[53] Harry Mount. “Philip at a Nazi funeral and the day his sister had lunch with Hitler: TV documentary reopens painful chapter of duke's family past.” Daily Mail (July 19, 2015). Retrieved from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3167585/Philip-Nazi-funeral-day-sister-lunch-Hitler-TV-documentary-reopens-painful-chapter-duke-s-family-past.html

[54] “October 28, 1941 Memorandum on Stephanie von Hohenlohe for U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Safe files, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, hosted at Marist University.

[55] Neil Tweedie & Peter Day. “When Rothermere urged Hitler to invade Romania,” The Daily Telegraph (March 1, 2005).

[56] Coleman. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

[57] Donald Sassoon. Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (HarperCollins, 2006). p. 1062.

[58] Adrian Addison. Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail (Atlantic Books, 2017), p. 99.

[59] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess, p. 46.

[60] Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe Papers (Box 2).

[61] Neil Tweedie & Peter Day. “When Rothermere urged Hitler to invade Romania.”

[62] Jim Wilson. Nazi Princess: Hitler, Lord Rothermere and Princess Stefanie Von Hohenlohe (2011), p. 68.

[63] David Pryce-Jones. Unity Mitford: A Quest (1976) p. 228.

[64] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess (2002), p. 35.

[65] Joseph Howard Tyson. The Surreal Reich (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2010), p. 430.

[66] Martin Allen. Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies (M. Evans, 2002), p. 35.

[67] Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Steven Kreis. “Charles E. Bedaux.” American National Biography. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_National_Biography

[70] J. Petropoulos. Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008).

[71] Harald Sandner. “II.8.0 Herzog Carl Eduard.” Das Haus von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha 1826 bis 2001 (2004).

[72] Philip Ziegler. “Windsor, (Bessie) Wallis, duchess of Windsor (1896–1986).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).

[73] Al Cimino. Nazi Sex Spies: True Stories of Seduction, Subterfuge and State Secrets (Arcturus Publishing, 2020).

[74] Memoirs of Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt, cited in Greg King. The Duchess of Windsor (New York: Citadel Press, 1999), p. 295.

[75] Albert Speer. Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 118.

[76] Higham. Mrs Simpson, p. 450.

[77] Papers of Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein (1861–1945) in the State Archives, Vienna, cited in Kenneth Rose. King George V (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), p. 391.

[78] J. Petropoulos. Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008); Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[79] Wilson. Nazi Princess, p. 139.

[80] S. J. Taylor. The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail (1996), p. 294.

[81] James Douglas-Hamilton (1970). “Ribbentrop and War.” Journal of Contemporary History. 5 (4): 45–63.

[82] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess, p. 36.

[83] William Stevenson. A Man Called Intrepid (Globe Pequot, 2000), p. 232.

[84] Martin Pugh. “Hurrah For the Blackshirts!” Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the War (Pimlico, 2006), p. 270.

[85] Pugh. “Hurrah For the Blackshirts!” p. 270.

[86] Victoria Louise. Life as Daughter of the Emperor.

[87] “Hitler’s Black Book - information for Frank C Tiarks.” Forces War Records. Retrieved from https://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/hitlers-black-book/person/1171/frank-c-tiarks

[88] Carroll Quigley. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1981), p. 271.

[89] John Taylor. “A Reevaluation of Cockburn’s Cliveden Set.” San Francisco State University (1999), p. 99.

[90] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess (2002), p. 84

[91] Ibid., p. 84

[92] Lord Halifax, diary entry (July 17, 1938).

[93] Higham. Trading with the Enemy, p. 190.

[94] Peter Neville. Appeasing Hitler The Diplomacy of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937-39 (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 149.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Ibid., p. 263.

[97] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess, p. 103.

[98] “Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace For Our Time’ speech.” eudocs.lib.byu.edu. 30 September 1938. Retrieved from https://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Neville_Chamberlain%27s_%22Peace_For_Our_Time%22_speech

[99] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess, p. 104.

[100] Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[101] Armin Fuhrer. “Prinzessin Stephanie betörte Hitler, obwohl sie Jüdin war – dann musste sie fliehen.” Focus Online (May 17, 2020).

[102] Schad. Hitler’s Spy Princess, p. 135.

[103] Brigadier General Sherman Miles, Chief of Military Intelligence, memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover (14th December, 1940) -105

[104] “The James D. Mooney Papers.” Georgetown University. Retrieved from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/cl98.htm

[105] Leif Leifland. Svartlistningen av Axel Wenner-Gren: en bok om ett justitiemord [The blacklisting of Axel Wenner-Gren: A book about a gross miscarriage of justice] (Stockholm: Askelin & Hägglund, 1989); Ilja Luciak. “The Life of Axel Wenner-Gren–An Introduction." In Reality and Myth: A Symposium on Axel Wenner-Gren, edited by Ilja Luciak and Bertil Daneholt (Stockholm: The Wenner-Gren Foundations, 2012), pp. 12–30.

[106] Higham. Trading With The Enemy.

[107] Ibid., p. 328.

[108] Sol Bloomenkranz. Charles Bedaux – Deciphering an Enigma (iUniverse. 2012), p. 32.

[109] Ibid.

[110] Sol Bloomenkranz. Charles Bedaux – Deciphering an Enigma (iUniverse. 2012), p. 37-38.

[111] “The James D. Mooney Papers.” Georgetown University. Retrieved from http://www.library.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/cl98.htm

[112] Higham. Trading with the Enemy, p. 195.

[113] J. Edgar Hoover, memorandum sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (January 13, 1941).

[114] President Franklin D. Roosevelt, memorandum to US Attorney General Francis Biddle (March 7, 1941).

[115] Higham. Trading with the Enemy, p. 197.

[116] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, pp. 44-45.

[117] Higham. Trading with the Enemy.

[118] Spence. Secret Agent 666, p. 194.

[119] Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel. Hess: A Biography (London: Granada, 1971), p. 94.

[120] Adrian O’Sullivan. German Covert Initiatives and British Intelligence in Persia (Iran), 1939-1945 (DLitt et Phil dissertation) (Pretoria: UNISA, 2013).

[121] Steven Kreis. “Charles E. Bedaux.” American National Biography. Retrieved from http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1000116

[122] John Coleman. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

[123] Stephen Dorril. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley & British Fascism (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 460.

[124] Richard Thurlow. Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 80.

[125] Dorril. Blackshirt, p. 425.

[126] Thurlow. Fascism in Britain, p. 181-182.

[127] Martin Pugh. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”: Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006), p. 306.

[128] Richard Griffiths. Fellow Travellers on the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 372.

[129] Gerda Walther. Zum anderen Ufer. Vom Marxismus und Atheismus zum Christentum (Reichl Verlag, St. Goar 1960), S. 473f., 591.

[130] Susanne Meinl. Bodo Hechelhammer: Geheimobjekt Pullach (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2014), S. 55 ff.

[131] Ibid., p. 136.

[132] B. K. Eakman. Push Back!: How to Take a Stand Against Groupthink, Bullies, Agitators, and Professional Manipulators (Simon and Schuster, 2014).

[133] Roger Manvell & Heinrich Fraenkel. Hess: A Biography (London: Granada, 1971), pp. 154–155.

[134] Tony Paterson. “Hess’s body exhumed and grave destroyed to stop neo-Nazi pilgrimages.” The Independent (July 22, 2011).

[135] Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack, Season 2 Episode 6.

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union