Stephanie Julienne Richter, daughter of Johann Sebastian Richter and Ludmilla Kuranda, was born 16 Sep 1891 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. She died on 13 Jun 1972. She was reportedly Jewish by birth. She died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1972 and is buried there.
In her early twenties, Stephanie had an affair with the married Archduke Franz Salvator, Prince of Tuscany. He was the son-in-law of Emperor Franz Joseph I through his marriage to Archduchess Marie Valerie of Austria. Pregnant with Franz Salvator's child, she persuaded Friedrich Franz von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, a German prince of the Hohenlohe family, that the baby was his. They married on 12 May 1914, giving her the title of "princess", which she used the rest of her life. Her son was born in Vienna on 5 December 1914. His full name became Franz Josef Rudolf Hans Weriand Max Stefan Anton von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst.
ALSO KNOWN AS:
Hitler's Spy Princess
Princess Stephanie and her husband were divorced in 1920. Later that year he married Count Emanuela Batthyány von Német-Ujvár of Hungary, in Budapest on 6 Dec 1920. They did not have any children. They escaped to Brazil in the closing days of World War II.
After the divorce, Princess Stephanie's surname was zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, as was Austrian custom. Over the years, she always represented herself as a Hohenlohe princess. She lived in Paris until the government forced her out on suspicion of being a spy. She moved to London in 1932, settling at the exclusive Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair, London. During this period, she had developed friendships and sometimes intimate relationships with powerful and influential men, including Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, an Anglo-Irish tycoon who owned the influential Daily Mail and Daily Mirror in London, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, who in the 1930s was the German Ambassador to Britain. She also cultivated others in the Nazi Party hierarchy.
As a princess, she socialized with the British aristocracy, connections that the Nazis believed could be valuable for their new government after they came to power in 1933. Her close friends included Lady Margot Asquith, the widow of the former prime minister Herbert Henry 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.
After Hitler gained power in Germany in 1933, MI6 circulated a report stating that the French secret service had discovered documents in the princess's flat in Paris ordering her to persuade Lord Rothermere to campaign for the return to Germany of territory ceded to Poland at the end of First World War. She was to receive £300,000 – equal to £13 million today - if she succeeded. Princess Stephanie had received financial support from Rothermere, who was an admirer of Hitler, and in the early 1930s he advocated an alliance with Germany. During the 1930s he paid Princess Stephanie an annual retainer of £5,000 (£200,000 today) to promote Germany and develop support for it among her influential connections. He also hoped she would introduce him to Nazi inner circles. (As war approached in 1939, their association deteriorated and Rothermere stopped paying her. Princess Stephanie took him to court, alleging in a lawsuit that he had promised the retainer for life. She lost the case.)
During visits to Germany, she had become closely acquainted withmembers 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."(This was part of a release of MI6 records in 2005 under declassification of documents.)In England, Princess Stephanie acted as a courier, passing secret messages among high-ranking British men who were sympathetic to the Nazi regime. In 1937 she arranged for Lord Halifax to travel to Germany and meet Göring. She was also instrumental in arranging the visit that year to Germany of Edward, Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis, The Duchess of Windsor.
In 1937 Princess Stephanie began an affair with Fritz Wiedemann, a personal aide to Hitler. When Wiedemann was appointed to the post of German Consul-General in San Francisco, she joined him in the United States in late 1937 and stayed for a time, returning to Europe the following year.
In 1938, the Nazis confiscated the property of Austrian Jews, including the Leopoldskron castle in Salzburg, which had been owned by theatre director Max Reinhardt. Some reported that Göring gave Princess Stephanie the property; other sources say she leased it, or was charged by Göring with developing the estate as a guest house for prominent artists of the Reich and to serve as a reception facility to Hitler's Berghof home.
Princess Stephanie returned to Britain in 1939, but after war was declared later that year she left the country, fearful of being arrested as a German spy. She traveled to the United States, returning to her former lover Fritz Wiedemann, then German Consul in San Francisco. On her arrival, the United States government placed her under security surveillance by the FBI. In March 1941 she was detained for several days by U.S. immigration authorities. She created some relationship with Major Lemuel B. Schofield, the Director of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, DC. He put her up in the Raleigh Hotel, where he also lived, and the two carried on an affair that lasted several months. She then lived with her mother and son in Alexandria, Virginia.
In October of that year, the FBI prepared a memo describing her as "extremely intelligent, dangerous and clever," and claiming that as a spy she was "worse than ten thousand men." Summarizing what was known about her, it recommended that her deportation not be further delayed, noting that the British and French, in addition to the United States intelligence community, suspected her of being a spy for Germany. She continued to stay in the US.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the formal entry of the USA into World War II, the FBI arrested Princess Stephanie, interning her at a facility in Philadelphia, and later at a Texas camp for enemy aliens. During this period, she was interviewed by personnel of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She was paroled in May 1945.
It was not until 2005 that British intelligence MI6 and the US FBI declassified and released some of the documents from these years, which are now available to researchers. American files show that during her interrogation by the OSS she provided insights into the character of Adolf Hitler, which were used by Henry A. Murray, Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and psychoanalyst Dr. Walter C. Langer, in preparing the 1943 OSS report entitled Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler.
In the post-war era, Princess Stephanie returned to Germany, where she established new, influential connections. She worked with media executives such as Henri Nannen of Stern news magazine and Axel Springer, the owner of the Axel Springer AG publishing company. For the latter, she secured interviews with the United States presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
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