How Europe’s aristocrats aided Hitler’s rise... with help from a Jewish princess
THE extent to which Europe’s aristocracy supported the rise of Adolf Hitler has been revealed in a historian’s latest book.
The Nazi leader went out of his way to cultivate contact with them and was especially obsessed with the British Royal Family, Karina Urbach says. He even granted ‘honorary Aryan’ status to a Jewish aristocrat because of her well-placed social contacts, says the book Hitler’s Secret Helpers.
Although Hitler boasted that Nazism was the true classless society, he courted the support of European nobility, Miss Urbach says.
‘Due to their close friendship and kinship relationships across national borders, they formed an international network which Hitler used.
‘Many of them helped in the rise of Hitler and gave him support in the social arena with the glare of publicity falling upon them.’ Hitler was particularly entranced by Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a Hungarian-born Jewish commoner who married into the Austrian nobility.
The princess is suspected of spying for the Nazis while in London in the 1930s. Hitler awarded her the Gold Medal of the Nazi Party in 1938 for her services to the Reich and bestowed Aryan status upon her. She died in 1972.
‘She was rewarded because she used her good relations in the nobility to open doors for Hitler,’ says Miss Urbach. Nazi supporter Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was Hitler’s main conduit to Edward VIII and George VI, helped by his being a grandson of Queen Victoria and hence a relative. The Duke tried tirelessly to pull Britain on to the Nazis’ side.
Prince Philipp von Hessen led secret diplomatic missions which included talks with Pope Pius XII. Details of German contacts to our Royal Family are mostly sealed in archives, as are many of the histories of the German aristocracy.
Miss Urbach says this is ‘intolerable’ and is fighting for access to the secrets.