CB's War: A Writer’s Journey

By Matthew B. Wall

Early in World War II, before the United States entered into the conflict, a young American journalist—CB Wall—traveled to the capital of wartime Germany to see how Berliners fared as the Royal Air Force assaulted their city in sporadic bombings during 1941. Living under threat of internment behind enemy lines, the foreign correspondent captured stories of civilians enduring the privations of war, with food and clothing rationed, and sleepless nights in basement air raid shelters. He observed the grim treatment of increasingly desperate Jews in Germany and Poland at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust could not yet be known. CB’s newspaper accounts recorded his dealings with the German propaganda and foreign ministries, brushes with the Gestapo, encounters with the Nazi high command and even Hitler himself.

Later in the war, CB crossed the Atlantic twice to England as an accredited war correspondent, telling the stories of American servicemen at war, flying with them on a bombing mission into Germany and venturing into a frigid North Sea on a torpedo boat sortie. With no word from CB for months at a time, his bride, Alice, kept home fires burning, recording her innermost feelings and fears in a meticulous wartime diary. “CB’s War” is a story told more than seventy-five years later by CB and Alice’s son, based on their contemporaneous accounts of ordinary lives lived during extraordinary times. This is also a story of discovery by a son who had long admired the handsome young couple in old photographs and who came to learn through writings and artifacts he uncovered about their early lives together, their loves and losses during war, and their struggles in peacetime to make a home for a young postwar family.

“CB’s War” is an artfully constructed, pleasing memoir that weaves together elements drawn from primary sources, including published as well as deeply private writings. Original color and black-and-white images help bring this compelling personal story to life. The narrative is cleanly written, in homage to a father’s journalistic style displayed throughout the book in excerpts from CB’s original feature newspaper stories and magazine pieces. Well-documented secondary source material is smoothly integrated into the whole, yielding a fresh and informative perspective on those perilous times decades ago for one family, America and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew B. Wall
• Release date: Oct 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780578404677

Matthew B. Wall

Following the childhood and youth mentioned in passing in this narrative, I was fortunate to receive degrees from two of Ithaca’s fine educational institutions, Ithaca College and Cornell University. After college at the height of the Vietnam war and already with a family to support, I passed up enticing opportunities in the great metropolis to take a job in my home town at my alma mater. I became director of admissions at Ithaca College at age twenty-five, then vice president for external affairs, then senior vice president. After thirty years behind the desk, I shed my suit and did a freelance stint at developmental editing and writing in the area of college and career success for low income and minori- ty kids, where I learned a lot more than I earned. These days, when we’re not at Laurentia, Annie and I remain at the old farmstead just a mile up the road from the college where I worked for so many years. My mother used to say with a wink, “Matt never got very far.”

Book preview

CB’s War

A Writer’s Journey

Matthew B. Wall

Copyright 2018 by Matthew B. Wall. All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by US copyright law.

For permissions contact: [e-mail].

eISBN 978-0-578-40467-7

Cover Photos:

1. CB’s passport photo as it appears on the cover of his German Foreign Office identity card.

2. Alice’s wedding announcement portrait, 1936.

3. A page from Alice’s diary for March 1941.

Back Cover Photo:

The author at the farm, ca. 1949.

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Book printed by Steuben Press.

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Dedication

For my parents

Contents

Prologue

Part I

One: Exeter

Two: Lisbon

Three: Berlin

Four: Buffalo, Before

Five: Florida

Six: Chippewa, Before

Seven: New York

Eight: Berlin, Continued

Nine: South America

Ten: Wall of Silence

Eleven: Sustenance

Twelve: No Refuge for Jews

Thirteen: Deliverance

Fourteen: Lisbon, Again

Fifteen: New York, Again

Part II

Sixteen: Zeitgeist 1941

Seventeen: Laurentia

Eighteen: Washington

Nineteen: Chippewa, Again

Twenty: War Hits Home

Twenty-One: England

Twenty-Two: Laurentia, Again

Twenty-Three: England, Again

Twenty-Four: Chippewa, At Last

Epilogue

Postscripts

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Alice and CB’s winter home ca. 1955.

The new house on Laurentia, ca. 1960.

Prologue

During the first weeks of 1941 a young American journalist crossed by ocean liner from New York to Lisbon. From there he traveled another 1,500 miles by plane to Berlin via Madrid, Barcelona, Lyon, and Stuttgart. He had never wandered far from his native Buffalo; this was his first trip to Europe. War had spread across the Continent and was on the verge of engulfing the rest of the world. The United States was not in it yet and the country was riven over whether America should join in another dreaded World War. The correspondent’s assignment was to bring back stories about what life was like in the capital of Nazi Germany. This was a plum job for the thirty-three-year-old newspaperman who had been a reporter for the Buffalo Times until that paper’s demise in 1939. Along with his newspaper work, he had been trying to earn a living as a freelance writer. Now, he was hoping to make a name for himself as a foreign correspondent. He carried press credentials from two mid-western newspapers, the Detroit Free Press and the Akron Beacon Journal. Most important, as it turned out, he had an agreement with the New York City daily, PM, to write a series of articles on his Berlin reporting. Ultimately, PM acquired exclusive rights to these stories and ran them daily, mostly with front-page leads, for nearly a month during June 1941.

It had been a hat-trick to obtain permission to enter wartime Germany as a working journalist. After much travail and some potent good luck, the aspiring foreign correspondent landed an entry visa from the German consulate in New York on December 12, 1940. Permission to transit Spain was granted by the Spanish consul general on December 30. Finally, on January 10, 1941, he obtained a visa from Portugal’s New York Consulate to enter that country for travel en route to Germany. He sailed for Lisbon the next morning.

This account is in part the story of that particular journey, but also of a writer’s longer odyssey, as I am retelling it more than seventy-five years later. The trip to Berlin was an ordinary adventure on which the young journalist embarked a lifetime ago, as travelers have always set off for strange lands and new experiences. But those were heady and parlous times. A rising tide of unease in the United States was palpable at the beginning of 1941, perhaps more than at any time since the European conflict began in earnest two years earlier. Americans in all walks of life wanted to know what would befall them and their loved ones if we were drawn into another European conflagration. With the country teetering between ever more precarious peace and looming war, foreign correspondents were in the vanguard of reporting what was going on across the Atlantic and divining what it all meant for the folks back home.

Correspondents from the United States and other non-belligerent countries, as well as press from the warring parties, had homed in on international nerve centers such as Paris, Berlin, London, Cairo, and Lisbon — sending back dispatches and broadcasts on the course of the war in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This was the tantalizing world to which the Buffalo newspaperman was drawn, for which he was willing to forsake the familiar comforts of family and friends. His bride of five years, Alice, came down to New York to see him off, and then returned home to await uncertain word of his progress. The couple had no children, as my sister and I were still waiting in the wings.

It is in retrospect remarkable that no one ever told me this story, or that I did not have sufficient curiosity to ferret it out decades ago. In the thirty-four years I knew him, my father never once said, That reminds me of the time I was in Berlin... Neither as a teenager taking courses in journalism and creative writing in high school nor as an English major in college did I ever really ask him about his early career as a journalist and writer. I was always very proud of the fact that my father was a writer and that he had written a book. By happenstance, my English textbooks in each year of high school had featured excerpts of his magazine articles. Pieces with titles such as Incandescent Genius, Hunt for a Spy, High Speed Death in Slow Motion were authored by C.B. Wall, which is how my father signed most of his work. My high school friends always referred to him as CB, and still do.

I had a wonderful life growing up with my father, but reminiscences about the Berlin assignment or his subsequent trips to Europe as an accredited war correspondent weren’t part of it. Now, nearly four decades after his death, with all my family of his generation gone, there isn’t anyone left to ask. I am piecing together this account from CB’s published writings, bits of correspondence, travel documents, photographs, and miscellaneous finds from the old metal file drawer he kept in his desk. The cache of PM newspapers from June 1941, originally set aside for safe-keeping by CB’s sister and mother, had been in an attic storage closet in our old farmhouse for decades, stowed in a cardboard box riddled by the gnawing of generations of red squirrels. A King Taste Mayonnaise Products carton marked in my mother’s hand, Things from Carl’s trips abroad, has given up hotel receipts, telegrams, ration cards, menus, baggage tags, and a manila envelope full of red waxen seals marked with the imprimatur of the English Ministry of Information Press Censorship Division.

Most important, I have rediscovered the diaries my mother kept during those wartime years. Her well-timed and impeccably judicious entries have filled gaps in my father’s journalistic narrative and opened a bright window on their early life together. It has been a journey all its own getting to know the handsome young couple in the old photographs, whom I have long admired from afar. But why, I find myself asking, has this very old penny dropped after all these years? Why, this late in the game, when it will not be long before others are rummaging through the remnants of my own life, am I so keen to discover this chapter in the lives of a bygone generation?

The answers to those questions lie in two houses. The first of these is on an island in the St. Lawrence River, located not quite halfway across one of the widest reaches of that vast riparian border between the United States and Canada, at a tiny village in northern New York State called Chippewa Bay. Ours is a small island of about one acre on a calm day when the water is low; a Little Leaguer could chuck a baseball across its widest part. But we have it all to ourselves and it has been in the family since CB and Alice bought it in 1936 when they and most of the rest of the world didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

The couple discovered this out-of-the-way nook of the Thousand Islands region while visiting CB’s aunt who had settled in the village with her husband a few years earlier. Both CB and Alice fell hard for the craggy grandeur of the bay, with its mounds of Laurentian granite bulging up randomly in various shapes and sizes from the riverbed, forging islands topped with windswept white pines and gnarled cedars anchored in rocky crevices. The more time they spent in Chippewa, the more the lure of island life became irresistible. After renting briefly, the couple somehow managed at the height of the Depression to buy their own place. Laurentia Island was their first, wholly impractical, home together as newlyweds. They made the trek from Buffalo to Chippewa as often as they could, arriving most years early in the spring and staying in the unheated house through October, until driven out by unrelenting North Country cold.

As my sister and I were growing up, our family spent all summer every summer at the Island, since our father the writer was unencumbered by a regular job. The four Walls would pack up chattel and animals and head north right after school ended in June and we would not leave our island home until the day before school started again in September. I had never known anything different, so living on our own island and getting from place to place by boat all seemed perfectly normal to me. There were plenty of visitors to keep us company, but also quiet stretches of time all to ourselves with our two Irish Setters plying the river from shoal to shoal, web-footed, in search of ducks to retrieve. After Mass on Sundays at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic church in the small farming community of Hammond, my mother would set out a big lunch of bacon and eggs on the dining table CB had fashioned from wide knotty pine planks. Sunday trips to shore often included a visit to Vida Smith’s ice cream parlor where I would be treated to a hot fudge sundae and one Lone Ranger comic book from Vida’s bountiful magazine rack. Once every week or two we would visit the Hammond public library where Mrs. Lavarnway would load us up with dozens of books to carry off to the Island in large canvas bags. I would devour these of an evening by candlelight, in bed by flashlight, and — I suspect to my father’s well-concealed chagrin — out in the boat while fishing.

The second house is an old farmstead in the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York that my parents bought a decade after the first, just as I was born, and where I have lived on and off most of my life. With its white clapboard siding and green shutters, it was the young city-dwellers’ dream of what a house in the country should look like. House-hunting in 1945, CB and Alice would have been struck by the hundred-year-old Greek Revival structure with its stately gable façade featuring pilasters on either side of the front door, and wide frieze boards with cornice trim above the second-floor windows. A single-story wing off to one side with a small entry porch supported by Doric columns marks one of the distinctive variations on the National Style which proliferated across most well-settled areas of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. [1] Separated from an elm-lined state road by towering black walnut trees, the house was situated on ninety acres of farmland, yet located only three miles from town. Inside, a formal entry hall and double parlors with high ceilings in classical proportion to the width and length of the rooms made the house seem more commodious than its actual dimensions. In the autumn of 1945, the old place was badly in need of repairs and had no central heating — but the price was right. With wartime shortages of metals and other commodities, it would be months before radiators and piping could be fitted to bring warmth to the drafty rooms upstairs from the new coal-fired boiler in the cellar. But that was the task to which CB put his shoulder as Alice waited patiently in Buffalo for their new winter home to be habitable.

In this house as a youngster, I would secretly don the tailored, Norfolk-style regulation US Army Officer’s jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue with its rustic green patches sewn above the left pocket and on the left shoulder reading U.S. War Correspondent in gold letters. Here, sometime after I was old enough to read sentences and tall enough to stack things up to reach the upper shelves of our bookcases, I would haul down one of the thick red volumes of Marquis’s Who’s Who in America. Starting with the 1946-47 edition, the entry under Wall, Carl Bernard included my own name, as well as my sister’s. That column-inch of family celebrity seemed a pretty big deal:

Wall, Carl Bernard, newspaperman; b. Buffalo, NY, Feb. 16, 1907; s. Matthew Bernard and Elizabeth Ruth (Wyant) W; grad Canisius Prep schl., Buffalo, 1924; studied Notre Dame Univ.; m. Alice Elizabeth Gillen, Nov. 28, 1935, children — Ann Stewart, Matthew Bernard. Asso. with Scripps-Howard Newspapers, 1931-39; foreign corr. for PM, Detroit Free Press, etc., in Berlin; war corr., London, 1943-44. Writer of articles and fiction. Contbr to Reader’s Digest, etc. Home: Danby Rd. Ithaca, NY (summer), Laurentia Island, Chippewa Bay, NY. [2]

So far as I knew, none of my friends at the Immaculate Conception School had anything like it. I’m not sure when I noticed that the annual editions had stopped accumulating by the early 1950s, long before I was able to read them. Those bookshelves also still hold musty volumes in which I have found context for my father’s own wartime writing. The first edition of William L. Shirer’s classic Berlin Diary is the copy CB purchased to review the book for PM in June of 1941. First editions of Leland Stowe’s No Other Road to Freedom (1941), Howard K. Smith’s Last Train from Berlin (1942), and Eric Sevareid’s Not So Wild a Dream (1946) have shed further light on CB’s experiences as a foreign correspondent.

Both the farmhouse in Ithaca and the island in Chippewa Bay remain in our family, complete with bookcases still cradling venerable tomes long untouched. Parents, grandparents, and aunties have lived and died in these places. Children, grandchildren, and great-nephews still find a sense of belonging and relevance in these old familial sanctuaries. I have continued my father’s labor of love in tending to their clapboards, roofs, and chimneys. From their windows, my view of the world has been shaped by an inescapable sense of place that always draws me back from distance and distraction. The chores around these homes that I grudgingly endured as a youngster have long since become devotions I will fulfill as long as I am able. There is no need to visit family plots: as I work about these grounds I embrace the dead along with the living, sometimes right out loud: The place is looking good, CB!

It was late one recent summer when the weather looked to be dry for a spell that I cut out the shed roof over the outboard attic closet at the farmhouse. I had hatched a plan to add another upstairs bathroom that would be more useful than the alternately freezing and boiling storage space utilized mainly by red squirrels as a staging area for their perpetual assault on the house. Open to sunlight for the first time in 150 years, hand-hewn beams eight inches square made a solid foundation for the dormer I raised above the space, with a new west-facing window set off by green shutters, just like all the original windows in the old place.

Earlier, I had hoed out the remaining contents of the closet after the kids had excavated long-forgotten toys and vintage gold leaf picture frames in their insatiable appetite to sell things on the Internet. A heaping pickup load went to the dump before the small room was emptied out once and for all. Mostly, it was junk by any standard, except for a few items I told myself were no longer relevant and just in the way. My father’s framed diploma from Canisius High in Buffalo, all in Latin, had not seen the light of day in decades; it was too big to hang anyplace. My Auntie Marg’s large wedding photo had similarly long been entombed there. I remember having served as a rather hapless altar boy-in-training at their small wedding in Cornell’s Newman Oratory, receiving a withering arched eyebrow from Monsignor Cleary for ringing the Eucharistic bells at not quite the right moment. My aunt had met an older widower in midlife, and when he died in his sleep after not too many years of marriage, Marg traveled the world as a widow, not a spinster, until succumbing to a second stroke. There was also my Uncle Bill Gillen’s wartime photo portrait, of which I have kept a smaller copy, with newly won flyer’s wings on his army air force uniform. I reasoned that someone else would be pitching these before too long, and it might as well be me. Even my father’s military cap was too badly chewed to save, so off the truck it went, into oblivion. Glass-covered picture frames struck the concrete floor of the dump with startling finality, and agenbite of inwit immediately set in.

From a small corner shelf stacked inconspicuously above the mess, I retrieved the five small volumes of my mother’s diaries — miraculously spared the ravages by red squirrels. Hardbound in Holyoke, Massachusetts by the National Blank Book Company, the entries for 1940-1944 were filled out in my mother’s recognizable Palmer Method hand. Alice apparently did not keep a diary in 1945, and the 1946 edition trailed off early in that year, perhaps reflecting the new priorities of a mother now with two small children to tend and an old house to make into a home. I’d never really sat down to page through the diaries carefully, but promised myself to do so. I also kept for further inspection the large carton of PM newspapers, down at the very bottom of the heap, containing the articles my father had written in 1941. Many of the papers were damaged, but enough survived more or less intact to comprise a full set of CB’s Berlin reporting. Later, as I carefully decanted those old newspapers into a new Rubbermaid container, I perused them for the first time in many years and found myself wondering anew about the young journalist who had written the Berlin articles and who went on to be an accredited war correspondent in later trips to Europe.

My father never did get to be famous or become successful as a writer in the way he had once hoped. But he made a pretty good run at it in those early years before he stopped trying and became the man I knew.

PART I

One

Exeter

Judging by CB’s paper trail, January 10, 1941 was a hectic day. He confirmed passage from New York to Lisbon with American Export Lines of 25 Broadway, New York City, to sail aboard the SS Exeter at 11:00 the next morning. He also called at the US Department of State Passport Agency in New York to pick up his passport. It was the old Type III version in use since 1926, with a red cover and cutout window displaying the number 673264 and stamped for renewal as of that day. Good for just six months, his new travel document would expire in July and was not valid for travel in any country outside the Western hemisphere except: Germany for newspaper work; Portugal, Spain, and France en route; traveling on a vessel of a non-belligerent country. With his German and Spanish visas already in order, the holdup had been the Portuguese visa. Now, that too was in place, stamped January 10, 1941 and signed at the Portuguese Consul General’s office in New York.

CB’s one-way passage on Voyage 68 to Lisbon cost $356.10 including tax, roughly $6,000 in current terms. At Barajas Airport in Madrid a month later, where he was required to account for all funds being taken into Spain, CB was carrying 400 US dollars and 220 Portuguese escudos. Including the cost of a return passage to New York, the equivalent of at least $20,000 in today’s money was being invested in expenses for the trip. The passenger’s address given on the ticket contract was the Detroit Free Press in Michigan. Whether the Press actually made that initial outlay for CB’s ticket or if they were reimbursed by PM is unclear, but somewhere along the line, the New York paper became sole sponsor of the trip in consideration of CB’s producing an exclusive series of articles. How much CB may have made for himself on the deal is anyone’s guess, but then as today even daring freelancers were unlikely to get rich in the journalism business.

The vessel on which CB would make his first transatlantic crossing was one of four virtually identical sister ships of American Export Lines (AEL), known collectively as the Four Aces: Exeter, Excambion, Exochorda, and Excalibur. SS Exeter had been in service about ten years, plying the waters between New York and the Mediterranean. In happier times, she carried cargo, mail, and 125 first-class passengers on Yankee Cruises to ports of call in the Mediterranean for voyages of up to forty days, with stops at Gibraltar, Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, Alexandria, Haifa, and Beirut. These were not mammoth ships: any of the Four Aces would have been dwarfed alongside the iconic super-liners of the day, such as Normandie, Bremen, or the Queen Mary. Still, these passenger-cargo liners were very serviceable at 450 feet in length and 62 feet abeam, displacing some 9,300 tons. Propelled by a single-screw turbine engine that streamed exhaust out of one central funnel, Exeter could make sixteen knots. The crossing to Lisbon took ten days. [3]

AEL had discontinued its Mediterranean routes in June 1940 as the region became a war zone that American vessels were prohibited from entering under the Neutrality Act of 1939. Exeter and her sisters were put in service on the New York-to-Lisbon run, carrying outbound passengers to what was now effectively Europe’s only open port, returning loaded to the gunwales with passengers fleeing the Continent. Correctly anticipating a brisk trade, AEL moved its European office to Lisbon and advertised weekly sailings. The new route proved to be quite profitable, but short-lived. It was also fraught with the legal, financial, and moral complexities of dealing with desperate refugees seeking passage to safety. By March of 1941, AEL had stopped advance bookings, citing a waiting list of some 10,000 refugees. The Four Aces would continue to sail the route for the remainder of the year until December 10, when Excambion made the line’s last return voyage to New York, back home to a country now itself suddenly at war. [4]

Following the fall of France in June 1940, American Export Lines also played a crucial support role in the work of the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), a private organization formed to extricate prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals — many of them Jews — from Europe. The ERC focused rescue efforts in Marseilles under the supervision of one Varian Fry, an American journalist just the same age as CB. Fry had witnessed Nazi hatred of Jews as a magazine correspondent in Berlin in 1935 and eagerly took up the work in Vichy France to effect the escape of many refugees, Jews and non-Jews alike. Notable figures including Marc Chagall, Jean Arp, Andre Breton, Max Ophuls, Jacques Lipschitz, Max Ernst, and Hannah Arendt owed their freedom — and their lives — to Fry. Operating out of Marseilles for over a year (including the entire period CB was reporting in Berlin) Fry and his confederates forged travel documents and mapped out secret escape routes through Spain to Portugal. All non-French living in Vichy were under acute threat by the surrender on demand provision of the Franco-German armistice, which obligated the government to turn over for deportation anyone deemed of interest to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Many of the figures identified by the ERC were actively being hunted by the Gestapo as enemies of the Reich. The prominent German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, whose early novels presaged in most unflattering terms the suffocating rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, was near the top of a list of disloyal Germans whose citizenship had been revoked. Feuchtwanger was spirited out of a concentration camp in France and, with Fry’s help, led overland to Lisbon. Working frenetically in Marseilles, Fry collaborated with the Unitarian Service Committee in Lisbon to secure passage out of Europe for many hundreds of refugees. [5]

CB had arranged for a taxi to take them to the docks in Jersey City that Saturday, January 11. He and Alice arrived around ten in the morning in plenty of time to get the traveler situated in stateroom A-16 and to explore the ship. Alice had packed her husband’s bags the afternoon before while CB was obtaining those eleventh-hour travel documents in the city. He had to carry three bags on board to fit in the clothing and supplies he would need. Earlier in the week, he had purchased a new blue suit, a sheepskin-lined overcoat, and cold-weather shoes — along with coffee, cigarettes, and cold medicines. CB had suffered from another of his debilitating chronic cold viruses all that week and had been sleeping poorly. He looked and felt beat. The Exeter was an hour and-a-half late sailing, so CB and Alice had extra time to spend on board having coffee in the bar. It was cold and windy on deck and Alice was fearful CB’s cold would get worse. There seemed to be quite a crowd milling about the ship, but after the all ashore signal was given, Alice reckoned that only about fifty passengers remained. It was about 12:30 in the afternoon as she watched Exeter ship anchor and sail out of the harbor. That was the last time Alice would see CB or hear his voice for four months.

On the way back from Jersey City, the cabbie told Alice that Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe was rumored to have been on board Exeter for this voyage and that she was the reason the ship had been delayed. However well known the whereabouts of the then-notorious Princess Stephanie may have been on the Jersey City docks, her exploits in Europe and her recent presence in the United States were widely reported. A woman abreast of her times, Alice knew well enough how to spell Hohenlohe correctly in her diary that night. Stephanie née Richter von Hohenlohe was an Austrian born of a Jewish mother in 1891. A beautiful and accomplished young woman coming of age in World War I Vienna, Stephanie had a child by the son-in-law of Emperor Franz Joseph. Married off to a lesser nobleman to cover up the royal scandal, she became Princess Stephanie. The arranged marriage lasted six years, characterized mostly by absences during the Great War, when he was a soldier and she a nurse. By 1920 a divorced but titled femme fatale, Stephanie attracted the attentions of rich and powerful men across Europe. In the 1930s, she was a favorite of Hitler himself, who called her my princess and seemed to ignore the fact that she was Jewish. Having lived for some time in London and moving in the highest echelons of British society, she was active in an organization known as the Anglo-German Fellowship and was instrumental in arranging the infamous 1937 visit to Nazi Germany by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Windsors were at the pinnacle of a considerable segment of upper crust British society which sought peaceful relations with Germany, even as the full extent of Nazi aggression became impossible to ignore. Drawing on her status and consummate social skills, Stephanie worked to cultivate pro-German sensibilities among influential Britons and was long believed by British Military Intelligence to be a spy in the service of the Nazi propaganda machine. [6]

Having taken up with one Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s personal adjutant and the Führer’s former military superior in World War I, Stephanie followed her lover to a diplomatic posting-in-exile as German