Helen Fry
Helen Fry and Susan Ronald Discuss Susan’s Book “Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941”

Dr Helen Fry and Susan Ronald - A Discussion on Susan’s Book “Hitler’s Aristocrats

- Thank you for joining us today. We’re going to speak about an absolutely brilliant new book, “Hitler’s Aristocrats”, with historian Susan Ronald. Susan Ronald has written a number of really important, I believe, your research is groundbreaking in many ways, really important books. She’s written “The Ambassador” about Joe Kennedy. Really, really worth a read. “Conde Nast”, “The Most Dangerous Woman”? Question mark. Or at least I’m putting the question mark there. “Hitler’s Art Thief” about Gurlitt. Of course, you remember the Nazi’s stolen art, of Jewish art, looted art in Munich. So some really, really important works under your belt. And we’re absolutely delighted, I think this is one of the most important subjects for our time. So Susan, thank you for sharing with us today your research and discoveries of “Hitler’s Aristocrats”. I’ve got the British cover behind me, you’ve got the American version, haven’t you?

• I have the American version. Whoops, there we are, thank you. Anyway, yeah, no, thank you for having me, thank you very much.

• We are both sweltering in London, 30-degree heat and humid, so we do apologise when we’re not as glamorous as we would normally be and struggling with the heat. So Susan, thank you, I want to start with a quote from your book, and you wrote that once Hitler revised history, “His revised history took hold to make Germany great again,” phrase we’re all to familiar with, isn’t it? Reused in modern times. “He dragged those who feared another war towards the halfway house of appeasement.” And today we’re going to talk about those aristocrats, those appeasers, and the rise of power of Adolf Hitler. Can you explain, because you’ve come up with some really interesting insights and research that I haven’t really read elsewhere about Hitler’s rise to power?

• Yes, I think that this goes back 20, 30 years, and discussions around the table that I’ve had with my husband in particular about the origins of the Second World War. And I’ve always said, “That depends on what country you’re from,” okay? Hitler actually didn’t become Hitler, as we know him, for many, many years. And the product that we saw in the early 1930s was basically a man who had been groomed to become, as the Germans call it, salonfahig, or able to be presented in an aristocrat salon, all right? He was very rough around the edges, he knew how to swear, he knew how to do all sorts of things wrong. But what he was able to actually look at, time and time again, basically because of the people who advised him, was the fact that, from 1917, the world was completely helter skelter, okay? And it began really with the exodus of all of the white Russians, excuse me, who were coming west, who were basically trying to populate or repopulate the Baltic countries. And there were a lot of German Balts as well who became exceptionally important to Hitler before he was known as the leader of the Nazi Party. So what they were able to do was essentially to help Hitler create a false history, okay? So as these Russians were coming west, they brought with them a book called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, okay? Which had actually been published in Russia in 1905, okay? And so basically this blamed this great Jewish conspiracy around the world that was going to topple all of the Christian world.

It was definitely a fake, even Goebbels thought that it was a fake, but it became one of the main biblical primers for the Nazi Party. And it sold out its first printing within days when it was translated into German. So you’ve got this exodus in 1917 from Russia. You then have, of course, the peace, the so-called peace, or as the Germans called it, the Versailles diktat, in 1918. And what happens then is, for some unknown reason, Woodrow Wilson believed that the French should get their pound of flesh. And it was really the French who decided the punishments that Germany and Austria and Hungary would have to endure as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. And they weren’t only swingeing reparations, which, I mean, the Germans would’ve had to keep paying until I think it was 1985 under the original Versailles agreement. So basically what happened was they also made it illegal for the aristocrats in Germany, Austria, Hungary, all of the Baltic countries to be aristocrats. They had their lands taken away from them. You had a communist rising throughout Eastern Europe. There was something called the Spartacus Uprising in 1920 in Germany. People were being killed in the streets of Berlin and Hamburg and wherever. So you had this true fear of the rabble taking over the world. It was a very, very real fear. You have Weimar that had been put into power by the Allies. Well, it had been a monarchy beforehand, not a constitutional monarchy, a monarchy. The Germans had no idea how to run a democracy, okay? And essentially you have all of these aristocrats from the queen’s first cousin on down, or the king’s first cousin actually at that time, on down, who were unable to exercise any power. They had to put their lands into foundations. A lot of these foundations still exist in Germany. The only way they could rebuild their fortune was to try and sell jewels and paintings and whatever else they could that was movable outside of Austria, Hungary or Germany. People were starving, there was no real leadership. A number of the countries ended up with a variety of different communist regimes.

And essentially the one person that shone a bright light on everything in Europe at the time was Benito Mussolini, because he was able to conquer the communists in Italy. He started out as a socialist, I hasten to add. But what did he do? He got the industrialists on side, he got all of the aristocracy on site, the king of Italy adored him. And so basically everybody from Churchill on down said, “Hey, this guy Mussolini’s quite cool.” And it was an Italian fascism, which had nothing at all to do with antisemitism, okay? But it was still an unelected government. Now, the one thing that I still believe is you cannot take a feudal regime and turn it into a democracy overnight, okay? Gorbachev tried it more recently, it just doesn’t work. So when the people don’t understand how it’s supposed to work, haven’t lived with it for generations, it becomes a real problem. And so you had this geopolitical chaos, you had democracy, socialism and nationalism in new and dangerous forms. The American journalist, Dorothy Thompson, who was amazing.

• Oh, oh, isn’t she amazing?

• She’s just fabulous.

• She did masses.

• Yeah.

• She did masses for the cause of Jewish refugees, particularly in Vienna while she was covering stuff in Vienna, yeah, an amazing woman.

• And the biography of hers is actually quite good, I can’t remember the author now. But I mean, this is a woman who wouldn’t remember if she’d packed her pyjamas, but she was always on the road. And she had this way of seeing through things, she saw the ancient splendour of Vienna, for example, but the squalor as well. She listened to the people clip-clopping on the streets because they couldn’t get leather soles for their shoes, they had to use wood. So she understood the extreme displacement, whereas Woodrow Wilson didn’t, and the French didn’t care at that point, because as far as they were concerned, the roots of the Second World War began in 1871 when the Germans marched through Paris. So that’s a very long answer, I’m sorry.

• No, that’s fine. So at the heart of it, ‘cause you say in your book, doesn’t Hitler sort of style his rise to power, really, this is before the 1930s, he penetrates the circle, doesn’t he? Of the aristocrats, the industrialists. This is fascinating, I mean, how does he have access to, this was something I actually wasn’t aware of, but how does he have access to this highly influential group, in America, in the United Kingdom and beyond? It’s very clever, isn’t it? But very dangerous.

• Extremely clever. But what he was taught, I mean, one of the more famous Baltic Germans that people will have heard of is Paul Rosenberg, who was, or Alfred Rosenberg, excuse me, Paul Rosenberg was the Jewish art collector. Go back, we’ll say something else, whoops. Alfred Rosenberg was a Baltic German. There was a guy called Max Scheubner-Richter, who was really, really important, because he had developed an entire ideology, and he gave this across to Hitler in 1922. He was killed during the Beer Hall Putsch standing right next to Hitler. So Hitler had actually been the target. Rosenberg was in Landsberg prison with him. Rosenberg became the ideologue, and these people were all surrounding him and they were saying, “What you have to do is get the aristocracy on side.” And it was only before the Beer Hall Putsch, he became friendly with a German American called Ernst Putzi von Hanfstaengl. Let’s call him Putzi, okay? It’s easier, and it means Little One. Anyway, Putzi, Harvard educated, very international, and he said, “Look, all this violence, this has to stop. You have to get rid of the murderers and the rapists and all these criminals.” And Hitler kept telling him, “But they will be useful.” And of course, Hitler was right in that. He said, “No, but in order for you to be able to speak to the industrialists, to be able to speak to all of the important people in their own homes, you need to basically become a gentleman.” And so it was Putzi who really made him understand, he was the only person in the entourage who had international experience besides Ribbentrop, but Ribbentrop was not in high society, whereas Putzi was.

I mean, he went to an Astor wedding during the Night of the Long Knives, in America. So there are all sorts of interplay here. So Putzi was actually hooked into the American aristocrats, but also into the German ones. And as early as 1923, there was something called German Day, and the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, okay, which was the title of Prince Albert that had been taken over by his grandson, excuse me, Carl Edward, who was born Charles Edward in London, went to school at Eaton. Age of 15, his grandmother, Queen Victoria, taps him on the shoulder and says, “You’re going to take over your grandfather’s titles and go to Germany.” And he fought in the first World War as a great German. So basically by 1922-23, he is fed up with what’s happened to him. He’s lost all of his titles in England because he fought as a good German during the First World War. He’s now lost most of his wealth from Germany as well, as a result of the First World War. He’s one hell of an angry guy, with bags of international contacts, okay? And he welcomes Hitler into Coburg, he basically is one of the earliest adherents. Now, we all know royalty have international connections, and it was he who started the ball rolling with the industrialists. It was also he who was whispering in Prince Edward’s ear before he became Edward VIII, and then the Duke of Windsor, because he wanted to get everything back, okay? It was as simple as that. I should say that he is the, he was, excuse me, the grandfather of the current king of Sweden, okay? So that gives you an idea of the type of international connections that everybody had, they were all interrelated.

And so essentially what Hitler then does is, through this connection with the Hesses and Putzi von Hanfstaengl, he starts to make his talks. He made his base in Munich, 'cause his first target was the von Wittelsbach, who were the southern German aristocrats. And he’s still going at them, even though Putzi says, “No, no, no, no, no, what you’ve got to do really is say, 'We want to put the Hohenzollerns back in power,’ you want the Habsburgs back in power. That’ll get everybody loving you, and then you don’t do it, right? You break your promise.” And he didn’t learn that to begin with, but he suddenly understood that by making Germany great again, that this was all part of the rhetoric, that you had to have the aristocracy leading from the front. And so they, together, all of these people worked to introduce Hitler around to the important people. And essentially, where one of the things that’s buried in the book somewhere is how Hitler was laughing at FDR because, of course, he had all his aristocrats on side, he had all his industrialists on side, and here FDR is fighting against them. So it was very interesting that Hitler, who’d never really been out of Germany, except to Austria, had already picked up on the fact that he had conquered the most important people. Now, mind you, they had the Mussolini model to go through, but I thought it was actually quite interesting. And then, of course, what’s his name? Hermann Goring comes in and he has his own separate contacts, his own Swedish connections through his wife. And he’s the one that really people were looking to follow on from Hitler, because Hitler wasn’t, they didn’t know, they knew that he was from a very lowly background, whereas Goring was the World War I flying ace, he was the great hero, and he cut a figure. So few people knew that he was a morphine addict after the Beer Hall Putsch because of his injuries. So that’s really how it all began. But the thing is, is that before they, it takes money to win elections. that’s what I’m trying to say, it takes money to fight a war, okay?

And what they hadn’t known is that from 1920, okay, despite all of the bells and whistles, and checks and balances, Gustav Krupp was still manufacturing armaments for Germany, okay? IG Farben was still working on how to create synthetic fuel, everybody was working for another war from 1920, and nobody realised it.

• Mm, so can you give us an idea, some of the famous aristocrats that we think of as being appeasers? I mean, you actually make a distinction, don’t you? And we will come on to antisemitism and aspects of the Holocaust shortly as well. But we tend to think of appeasers, traditionally, sort of in the popularist view, if you like, appeasers equal supporters of Hitler equal Nazis. But actually the nuances that you pick out in your book, it’s not necessarily so. Some of the well-known British aristocrats that we think about, the Mitford sisters, and then you mentioned earlier, the German lady, Princess Hohenlohe. I can never say, will come to her.

• It’s a tough one.

• Was potentially a double agent. We got the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward and Mrs. Simpson. As you said, we’ve got the Astors. I mean, they were not Nazis then, but they were appeasers. ‘Cause this is very interesting distinction that you make in your book, it doesn’t make them any less dangerous necessarily.

• No, and I think that the one thing that shocked me when I went to Chamberlain’s records and his papers at Birmingham University was just how much he believed Hitler. And it wasn’t that he wanted to believe Hitler, he believed him. And I just couldn’t get over the fact that he believed him, because, “If a gentleman tells you something and he’s in charge of a country, surely that means that he’s not lying,” and there’s a naivety to a lot of this. I mean, there’s no doubt that Chamberlain was not a Nazi, there’s no doubt that Halifax, who helped develop the appeasement programme, was not a Nazi, or a Nazi sympathiser for that matter. So what you have is, Hitler went on, effectively, a grand effort to bring all of these aristocrats into his orbit. Having succeeded with the Germans, he sent out one of the Hesse brothers into Italy, because he’d married Princess Mafalda, Philipp of Hesse, after whom the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip was named, okay? Because Prince Philip’s sister had married into the Hesse family, gives you an idea.

• They had, yes.

• Yeah, so he handles the Italian connection for Hitler. Spain, of course, is in turmoil long before the civil war came about in 1936. But what was absolutely fascinating is that they invited people one by one to Germany to see what was happening, okay? As far as the American aristocrats go, Lindbergh did an awful lot, Charles Lindbergh did an awful lot to promote Hitler, and he believed in fascism. Roosevelt called him a fascist, he believed he was a fascist, and he refused help from him after Pearl Harbour. I don’t blame Roosevelt, he was a major supporter of the isolationist movement in America that really created a lot of problems for the president and for America in general. But he was connected, and again, it’s all about these connections. People like Nancy Astor and the ladies particularly of British society. So although they were all American, sorry, Nancy Astor, Emerald Cunard, or Maude Cunard, who was born in California. You’ve got the Mitford sisters, as you say, but they’re slightly apart, the Mitfords, but I’ll come on to them in a minute. They were all enamoured with the dictators. So Nancy and Waldorf had gone to Russia to meet with Stalin. She never reported back, however, Stalin prolonging their conversation because he wanted to know if Churchill would ever become prime minister, he was worried about Churchill becoming prime minister. Oh, and this is while Churchill is still in the wilderness, 10 years in the wilderness, so. But she doesn’t report that back. She goes to meet Mussolini, she adores Mussolini. One of the mainstays at her dinner table was Count Dino Grandi, who was the Italian ambassador to Great Britain. And she adored Dino, everybody did, I mean, he had so many mistresses that it was not to be believed. But basically, one night, he said that Mussolini was wasting his money on Oswald Mosley, and she shut him up, “If you say another word against Mussolini in my house, you shall never be invited again.” Well, actually, he was telling the truth, and it wasn’t discovered until after the war that Mosley had been in the pay of Mussolini, then Hitler, for his entire career, basically, so.

• That’s now in declassified files. Yeah, I stumbled across that myself. It’s quite exciting, isn’t it? As historians, to be finding some really unusual aspects to these kind of stories.

• Oh, I know.

• So I mean, the question that comes to mind, a lot of these famous people, how did they react then? Because the reality of Hitler in power was very different, wasn’t it? And very quickly, the Jewish community is singled out, culminating in the Nuremberg Laws, of course, in 1935, and then it deteriorates to what becomes the Final Solution. So presumably they would never have endorsed or been part of Hitler’s circle, would they? Were they living in some kind of disconnected fantasy land? I mean, did they not see reality of the way things were going?

• I think what happened, it’s actually quite similar to people since lockdown here, okay, around the world, is they had created an alternative universe for two years during lockdowns. And in the case of Hitler, they had wanted so badly to believe him because they didn’t want to have another world war again. That was the main motivating force for a lot of them. Others, it was because, “Cousin Willie has been hurt,” “My good friend, Princess, whoever, has been hurt.” So there was a lot of personal connection that made people try to believe that Hitler was telling the truth. Don’t forget, before he came into power, up until about 1930, he was still waving the flag for a new kaiser, okay? He had to get rid of Weimar, “We have to get rid of Weimar.” And the greatest thing that got all of the aristocrats really behind him was, believe it or not, the Wall Street Crash, because, “Here’s proof that capitalism doesn’t work, here’s proof that democracy doesn’t work, and everybody’s out on the street and we’re all out on the street.” And of course, Germany was in big trouble because it had to reimburse all of the loans from primarily Morgan Bank in dollars. And when you have a trillion Deutschmark to $1, that’s not really good. That happened in 1923, but there was still this huge inflation. And the only way that Hitler was able to actually repatriate Germans was from money stolen from the Jews, and this is in the early 1930s. It became known as a, or an overseas mark, okay? And it was a terrible thing. But they heard about what was happening, particularly after September, 1935, with the Nuremberg Laws, and they chose not to see it, okay? A lot of them, if not all of them. “After all, there are our Jews and then there are their Jews, and their Jews are different from our Jews.”

They didn’t recognise the fact that Jewish children were not allowed to continue with their education, that they certainly weren’t allowed to teach, or to go to university, or that any of their degrees would be honoured in Germany. So none of them seemed to have reacted to what was happening to the Jews, okay, or the fact that their goods were being stolen, because quite a few of them, particularly in Germany, were buying up the Jewish stolen goods for a song, okay? So that wasn’t the main thrust, 1936, don’t forget Hitler had the Summer Olympics and the Winter Olympics. So this is his great showcase, and all of the anti-Jewish everythings were taken off the streets. People were brought to Germany in droves. And everybody said, “Ah, now this is a country, it’s not under any difficulty whatsoever. It’s very well run, et cetera, et cetera.” And I really have to say that the Olympic movement in the early 1930s was completely filled with Nazi admirers, okay? And it was particularly the French who were in charge of things, and Avery Brundage, who was the only American head of the Olympic movement for 1936. So you’ve got all of these problems, they’re trying not to think about people being killed, and, “It’s an exaggeration, it’s this, it’s that, it’s the other.”

It didn’t stop people like Nancy Astor being extremely antisemitic, okay? I was at a talk earlier, right after the book came out, and her great-grandson was sitting in the front row. And he raised his hand and he said, “Well, weren’t all of these antisemitic remarks just the sort of thing that everybody was doing at the time?” And I go, “Yes, but does that make it right?” He thinks. And I took it out from there, okay? But basically, she hated Catholics, she hated Jews. She was a very peculiar person. And I said that in front of him, and he said, “No, she wasn’t peculiar, she was totally bonkers.” But basically a lot of these people, they were very powerful, in their own homes, in their own rights, if they had an opinion, it counted. But the one thing we overlook, particularly as far as Britain is concerned, is that there was something called democracy fatigue. For the previous 10 years before Hitler came to power, it was either James Ramsay MacDonald or Stanley Baldwin who was prime minister. It got to the point where you couldn’t tell if it was Labour or the Tories who were involved. Everybody was sick and tired of being led by a bunch, this is going to sound really familiar, by a bunch of old men. Okay?

• Remember what’s happening at the moment, yeah.

• Exactly. And there was huge amounts of disinformation that were being put out, not only by Hitler and his supporters, but by people in foreign countries who didn’t want wars, “So the Jews have done something wrong in Germany.” One of the biggest lies was that the Jews were responsible for the Treaty of Versailles. If they had said Morgan Bank, which was a Yankee bank, not a Jewish bank, then I would’ve believed it. I mean, we have a dear friend in common who’s a Russianist, who said to me, “You mean it wasn’t Jewish banks?” And I go, “No, it wasn’t. They weren’t allowed a look-in on the German loans.” So it comes down to democracy fatigue in Britain, the United States after the crash was in dire straits, and Roosevelt was fighting isolationism, he was fighting his own industrialists. As a matter of fact, the attempted White House coup in 1934, was one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because I said, “Oh, see, it’s all happening again.” Five years ago, when I first pitched the book to my editor, I said, “You do realise we’re back in the 1930s.” And he went, “No.” I think we are.

• Yeah, I would happen to agree with you on that, I would. Incidentally, I would just say to our audience, I’m going to be chatting with Susan for about 10 more minutes, and today we’re going to open up for questions. So have your questions ready to post in the chat, and we will do our best, or Susan will do her best to answer as many of those as possible in the time we have after that. But also, I just want to throw in as well about the newspaper tycoons, Lord Rothermere, of course. I mean, his foreign correspondents don’t even cover the Anschluss, do they? I mean, how much does the outside world really know? Because, of course, Lord Rothermere’s actually kind of placed amongst that group of appeasers, isn’t he?

• Yes, Harold Harmsworth.

• It was dangerous.

• Yes, Harold Harmsworth, the 1st Lord Rothermere, again, extremely powerful, used to being listened to, who had always lived, until his brother’s death, Lord Northcliffe, in his shadow. He was always the money guy, but he was a very, very firm believer in monarchy, in constitutional monarchy. And he thought, probably rightly so, that the biggest mistake of the peace from World War I was dismantling the monarchies in Europe. And that was his motivating force above all else. But it perverted his thinking and his thinking clearly. And what he wanted to do, and he believed the Hitler myth about putting the Hohenzollerns back on the throne. So he didn’t realise it, but he was actually, well, talent spotted as it were, by one of the Hitler acolytes, a lady called Stephanie von Hohenlohe Waldenburg Schillingsfurst.

• Oh, I was coming to her.

• Okay. She’d probably been sent to meet up with him by Admiral Horthy, who was the regent of Hungary at the time. Horthy, he was a regent to a country without a king on the throne, all right? So Hungary was in a real mess, and it needed to get money from America in particular, because the only country that could afford to rebuild these countries after World War I was actually the United States. So she sent out, like a dove from the ark, in 1927, to meet with Rothermere at the gaming tables at the Casino de Paris in Monte-Carlo. And she gives him what Americans call an elevator pitch and says, “How would you like to have the scoop of the decade?” And he goes, “Really?” 'Cause he wasn’t a newspaper man, okay? He was just the money man. And she tells him that, “Hungary is a special case, 70% of the land had been lost. If you take up its cause, they’ll make you its king.” I don’t think he ever believed that they’d make him its king. But he did, he took up the cause in a big way, because here is a regent without somebody on the throne in charge. And he did a fantastic job, he had over two million people from Hungary writing to him to thank him, presents from peasants, and all sorts of people. But he didn’t dare step foot in Hungary, because for all of the press, he wasn’t able to do anything, okay? But he did send his son, Esmond, who went and he received all the accolades in person. But he had been suborned at that point by Stephanie.

She said, “I can introduce you to Mussolini, I can introduce you to Hitler.” And this is a woman who, I hate to say it, was 100% biologically Jewish. She never stepped foot in a synagogue, she had never ever learned anything about Judaism. Her mother converted before she was born, her father of record was in prison when she was born for stealing money from an underage client, he was a lawyer. And so her mother ended up sleeping her way into money by getting money from a home broker who ended up being Stephanie’s biological father. So here we’ve got this woman, Stephanie Richter. Up until the time I wrote the book, nobody knew anything, they believed that the von Metternichs of Austria had somehow taken her under their wing. No. I saw that her mother’s maiden name was Kuranda. And before I was a full-time author, I was in corporate finance, and I spent quite a lot of time in South Africa. And I said, “I remember a place called Kuranda House in Joburg, hmm.” So I got in touch with the Johannesburg Heritage Trust, and lo and behold, Stephanie’s uncle became one of the very first diamond millionaires. And he is the one who funded the two sisters, Stephanie’s mother and her aunt, and had her introduced into society. But basically, there was no other person that could do it, but she was taken under the wing of Fanny von Metternich, and so this is how she got where she got to. But the really, really interesting thing is, very early on, she realised the only way she could maintain herself in the style to which she wanted, become accustomed, was essentially to sell information to the highest bidder. And that’s what she.

• She becomes a spy, doesn’t she?

• Yes, she becomes a.

• Spy slash double agent. I mean, you and I worked on some newly, well, you were responsible for getting the files declassified. It was a bit iffy, it was about a year wait, wasn’t it, on Princess Hohenlohe?

• Yeah, it was 18 months.

• But she. 18 months, she’s got this kind of, I thought the Home Office weren’t going to release them, but there is still that kind of murky question, isn’t there? Who was she really working for? She was certainly working as a spy for the Nazis, her self-interest, potentially as a double agent for the Allies, who knows? No one will admit to that.

• I suspect there is a professor at Aberdeen University who claims that Hitler’s adjutant, his third adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, who we haven’t spoken about, who became Stephanie’s lover. And when war was declared, or just shortly before war was declared, he went to San Francisco as the German consulate to San Francisco, this professor at Aberdeen University insists that he was a good guy, okay? That he wasn’t a bad guy after all. And basically all the research that I have from the Hoover in California and also from University of California at Northridge, says that he was the head of the Japanese and German spy networks in America, sorry, in the Americas, north and south.

• Wow.

• He was in the pay of IG Farben, as was Stephanie, okay?

• Yeah, it’s shocking, it’s really shocking, yeah.

• IG Farben had a New York company called Chemnyco. C-H-E-M-N-Y-C-O, which had been fined for doing all sorts of things wrong, okay? The head of Chemnyco was the brother of the guy who was the head of IG Farben. I mean, please. So the whole thing was so transparent. But this was in an America that had no secret services yet, really.

• That’s true, that really emerges, doesn’t it?

• Yep.

• In the early part, well, after Pearl Harbour, but it’s beginning to emerge before that with the agreements.

• Yes.

• But yes, you’re absolutely right.

• They had naval intelligence, they had Army intelligence, they didn’t talk to one another, they were constantly at loggerheads. You had the FBI and Hoover said, “The world is my patch, I don’t want to have anybody else.” And to the point where one of Britain’s best double agents, Popov, Dusan Popov, comes to America with news of Pearl Harbour, concrete news, “This is going to happen, guys,” and Hoover kicks him out of the country.

• Yeah, there’s quite a fractious relationship between Edgar Hoover and British intelligence.

• Yes.

• We can’t go into that today. I mean, your book covers these themes just so well.

• Thank you.

• I mean, I really encourage people to read it. We are going to have to open up fairly soon. I’ve got tonnes of questions, but we aren’t going to get through them. But that’s good because I think people really should read the book and get them thinking.

• Yes, please read the book, please read the book.

• Can I ask you, before I open up for questions from our audience? Thinking of the British intelligence services, thinking of MI5, which is home security, effectively, MI6 being the agency for espionage abroad largely. But in this period, MI5, the security service working in the UK. Now surely these aristocrats, particularly the British aristocrats, Hitler’s aristocrats, are a huge security risk. Did you find during your huge breadth of research, that I know took you transatlantic, you weren’t only in the UK, did you find any evidence that MI5 was tracking some of, if not all of these aristocrats?

• Yes, what is fascinating, and this hasn’t been written about yet, so guys, this is the first time ever you’re going to hear this.

• And don’t repeat it, isn’t it? You’re sworn to secrecy.

• Stewart Menzies, who was the head of the Secret Intelligence Service in London, which encompassed MI5, MI6, sent his dear first cousin, Rex Benson, to the United States to become the military attache at the British Embassy. Rex Benson was actually meant to become head of the British Security Coordination, the BSC, or the Baker Street Club, as the Americans called it. In the Middle East, in the Near East. So he was about to be sent to Palestine because he had done all he could do before Pearl Harbour, okay, to get America into the war. And what did he do? He helped write the charter for the OSS, he was schooling Donovan at his home day in, day out. Now, how do I know this? Oh, I have Rex Benson’s diaries here that are unpublished. And why do I have them? This shows you the weird connections, okay? Why do I have them? Because Rex Benson’s stepdaughter was Conde Nast’s daughter.

• Right.

• Okay?

• It’s amazing.

• And I’ve remained friends. So it is amazing. But yes, they were tracking them. The one they were most worried about, and I think, with reason, it was the Duke of Windsor, okay? There are documents that have come to light from the German foreign archive where the Duke of Windsor warns the German ambassador to Portugal one month before the Blitz starts that the only way to get the British to surrender is to bomb the hell out of them, okay? One month. So yes, they were tracking them, definitely.

• Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing, because of historians like yourself, this material’s beginning to come out and we’re getting a deeper understanding. Well, I’m going to, excuse me, sorry, open up for the questions. I’m going to ask some questions now from the audience.

Q&A and Comments:

• Good.

• Okay, excuse me, I’m just taking a moment or two to read.

• And thank you, everybody, for asking.

• “Why do you think?” Sorry, can you hear me?

• Yeah, just while you were reading, I was thanking everybody for asking questions, that’s all.

Q - I missed that bit. “Why do you think the Austrians have not bothered with restitution?”

A - Restitution of what? Wait a minute.

• Well, in the parallel, I guess this question is parallel to German restitution for lost property, looted art, 'cause the Jews of Austria lost, I mean, I’ve met relatives who lost property.

• Yeah, oh yeah.

Q - And there doesn’t appear to be the same kind of restitution programme. Have you come across anything relating to that?

A - Yes, yes. When I had written “Hitler’s Art Thief”, which was about Hildebrand Gurlitt, who was one of the four dealers responsible for fencing the art, okay, I joined temporarily something called the International Law Restitution Group, which effectively was looking into all these matters. Austria was not one of the 49 signatories to the Washington Agreement of 1997. I believe that the reason is they don’t want to know, okay? But even countries who have signed that agreement don’t want to know. Museums will not discuss direct with relatives, they have to go to lawyers, without publicising the negotiations, who are going to try and get restitution. There are international, I mean, the Dutch are very open about it, the Germans, up until the Gurlitt find in 2013, were not open about it, okay? I wrote a letter to the then minister for Culture, Monika Gruetters, She never answered me, but she only answered me once the collection had made it safely into Switzerland, saying, “You have to talk to the museum in Switzerland.” So countries that know they have a lot to hide and don’t know precisely what it is they have to hide, and Austria is number one in that, okay, are very reluctant to consider everything. So, for example, as part of my research for “Hitler’s Aristocrats”, not “Hitler’s Aristocrats”, sorry, “Hitler’s Art Thief”, we went down into the salt mines in Austria. And I asked a very simple question of the guide, I said, “Have you discovered all of the horizons,” which are the levels, “from World War II?” And he said, “Um, um.” And I go, “No, right?” And he goes, “Well, we think we know where they are, but we’ve been told not to open them.”

Q - Oh, really? So there is a possibility that the salt mines where the Nazi looted art was hidden, that we thought was rescued in that, well, the film, it was immortalised in the film, wasn’t it? “The Monuments Men”.

A - Yeah.

Q - And actually some of the SOE teams, the special operations executives, some of those agents went in and were involved in helping to retrieve the art. So you think there’s still art hidden in the salt mines in Austria potentially?

A - Yes, I’m virtually certain of it, because part, you know that the, what was it? I can’t remember the name of the Hitler order to destroy the salt mines. It’s gone from my head, I’m sorry. But Hitler ordered all the salt mines to be destroyed. And of course, it was the salt miners who had to set the charges, okay? Now, they were going to be out of a job, so they weren’t about to do it. What they did do very successfully is they closed down the various horizons. But nobody knows exactly which ones, except maybe their families, I don’t know, but anyway, but they did save a lot of the art. I mean, some of the Rothschild silver didn’t surface until 1962. And that was from a horizon that had been closed. So yes.

• We’re going to have to do a lockdown trip to the salt mines of Austria. We seriously are.

• Yay.

• Start asking awkward questions. And I mean.

• Oh, do you know? The most amazing thing is that the environment in there stopped all corrosion, everything. The wood was like it was brand new, it was amazing, absolutely amazing.

Q - We’ve had another question about the parallel to the 1930s. So if it’s true, if we are living in sort of parallel, like a 1930s, how can we wake up, wake up the world to that, and the consequences?

A - Well, we can write books.

• And hope people read them. Yeah, get people thinking.

• Yeah, if people read them, that would be even better. No, seriously, the reason for writing this book five years ago, actually it was six years ago, I said, “Five,” before, it was actually six, I had pitched the idea to my editor and he said, “No, no, no, no, you’ve got other books coming out, let’s just see how they do first, blah, blah, blah.” I said, “But we’re in the 1930s. And if Trump becomes president in America, you’re going to see the most unholy set of disinformation come out.” And he looked at me like this, and this was over a lunch. And I said, “Well, I did have the misfortune of spending a morning with the guy, okay? So do me a favour, believe me, he’s going to disrupt America to such an extent, it will be totally divisive.” So now we’re in a situation where half the world wants to believe we’re in 1939, or the 1930s, the other half is saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, my pronouns are she, or it, or they, or you, okay? And what’s important is,” or, “What’s important is to make America great again, and we’re going to storm the Capitol building.” So you’ve got all of these people, left, right, nobody’s in the middle, and that’s always a danger. So the problem is, as well, history is not selling like it used to. People think, “Oh, it’s too awful.” I gave a book to a friend who’s in the aristocracy, and he’s very friendly with one of the descendants of one of the aristocrats that I wrote about, and he said, “It’s very depressing, your book is so much like today.”

• Say no more?

• Did he go beyond that? No.

• Yeah, yeah.

• Okay. We have to be aware of our dangers, we do not have the right leaders in the world to make us aware of those dangers. And there are many, many around, okay? But if people aren’t reading history as much as they used to, then there’s not a lot we can do.

  • Yeah. Okay, so, “How come the German people?” This is a huge one.

• Okay, oh good.

Q - So you’ve got two or three sentences, 'cause there are a couple more things we want to ask you. And you might want to say, actually link your answer into why you wrote the book. You’ve dedicated the book, haven’t you, to Auntie Baba and Uncle Larry? So the question that’s come in from Charles is, “How come the German people were so easily seduced into virulent antisemitism and be complicit to the Nazi annihilation of European Jews?” I mean, it’s a question which historians and theologians ask, it’s a question which has been addressed many times on lockdown, right, with 2,000 years of antisemitism. But would you give your perspective, please, Susan, and why you wrote this book, well, you’ve commented on that before, but why you dedicated it to Auntie Baba and Uncle Larry?

A - Okay, it’s very, very simple, I think. The Jews prior to the mid-19th century in Germany stood out. They were different, they dressed differently, they had all sorts of different habits, they obviously were very Jewish. Then comes along the reform movement in Germany, and suddenly, Jews are assimilating. Now, when you’ve assimilated, you feel better as a Jew, right? But maybe your next door neighbour doesn’t like the fact that you don’t look like a Jew anymore, you don’t act like a Jew anymore to them, you’re doing things that everybody does. And so there was a resentment that had built up, particularly in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Eastern Europe, against Jews who had become successful, who had assimilated, a lot of them, probably as much as 30% ended up converting, okay? But they were still resented, okay? I mean, I had somebody tell me, “Well, Britain wasn’t a problem because Disraeli was a Jew when he was prime minister.” And I went, “No, he had converted from Judaism long before he became prime minister.”

• Yeah, he’d never have been prime minister if he’d still been professing Jewish, yeah, yeah.

• Of course, of course. So you have a lot of people who are misinformed who believe that they know the story when they don’t. But the thing that is, Stefan Zweig wrote books about it, and he was an Austrian Jew, who actually killed himself when he thought that Hitler was going to win the war. But he basically thought that it was because of envy, all right? And I think that there’s this hatred, this envy, “How can they take on my way of acting? Why can’t they just be Jews?” So there’s that story. But the German people as a whole, I mean, were generally well educated, they shouldn’t have fallen for it. But then again, why did Donald Trump become president of the United States, okay? There’s a vast segment of the American people, and really intelligent people, okay, wealthy people, who voted Trump, who still believe in him despite everything, okay? The same thing is happening all over again, this is my problem, all right? Trump is not as good a liar as Hitler was, okay? By the way, he did not sexually abuse me when I spent the morning with him, in case anybody’s wondering, he just called me a bimbo and that I was fired, but I didn’t work for him. Okay, go on.

• I love that story, we don’t have time to tell the whole story, but.

Q - Okay, so why did I write the book? Okay, basically.

• Well, yeah.

A - This question is the $64 question, okay? And it comes back to my childhood, all right? Essentially, I grew up in Los Angeles as a Jew in a nice Jewish community. My mother was always in constant turmoil about one thing or another. And my Auntie Baba and Uncle Larry became my surrogate parents.

• Aw, yeah.

• They’re not related, okay? Barbie was my mother’s best friend, Larry was a father figure from day one. Their daughter, Jan, is my best friend since we were both born. And I used to go to them every summer, every time when there was a crisis, and I was just one of the family. Now, Larry was Larry Weinberg, who was the president of APAC from 1976 to '82. APAC, the American-Israel Political something or another, I don’t know, but anyway. And his daughter, Jan, is now on the board. Barbie was the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies in Washington.

• Oh, of course, yes.

• The think tank. Every time I went to the States or to California, I would see them, I would stay with them. The last time was the May before Larry died. He was frail, but he’s still completely with it, age 93, and he said, “Sue, I’m going to sit you down next to me, good ear, and we’re going to have a talk.” And what does he talk about? “Was I afraid of the rise in antisemitism in Britain?” Okay, and I said, “Yes, there were things happening when Corbyn was in charge of the Labour Party that I thought I would never see, and I had.” And I said to him, “Uncle Larry, do you think we’re back in the 1930s?” He goes, “Absolutely,” okay? Now, this is a man who dealt with Menachem Begin, he was part of the brokerage for the Israel and Egypt peace. He dealt with Jimmy Carter, who he later intensely disliked. He dealt with Ronald Reagan. Al Gore was his great friend. So this is a man who was asking me my opinion, and I thought, “Oh, that’s really cool.” So when he died, I decided I’d have to dedicate this book to them, because they are the ones that helped me to try and understand antisemitism, which is, frankly, not understandable by any rational means, but it’s for them that I wrote the book.

Q - Thank you, I’m going to ask you one final question, as that’s all we have time today, a sort of broad one, really, which is right at the heart of lockdown and ethos of Lockdown University. I’m going to ask you, as a historian, why does the past matter? And I know, because we’re very close friends, that you are concerned about this cancelling of culture, the cancelling of history. So do you want to just give us something about why you feel the past matters?

A - I wrote an article that appeared last week in “Salon” magazine online, salon.com, entitled, “History: An Inconvenient Truth”. And it is because I tried to get this story about Rex Benson, the man who was sent by MI5, MI6, to America to get America into the war, I have all of his diaries. And I was told by my publisher, Macmillan, that, “People aren’t reading history like they used to before, they’d rather make it up themselves,” okay? So I wrote the article, because if you don’t like the past, you want to change it, which everybody seems to be doing these days, why not? But it is an inconvenient truth, history matters, it matters that I grew up afraid that the Holocaust would happen again, it matters. It helped form me into who I am, all right? It matters that I lost family that I don’t know at all. It matters that I’ve met family who survived. My stepfather’s aunt was in Dachau, lost her first family completely. She survived by some miracle, but she lost her mind, okay? These are all things that help make us who we are. Do I want to change that? Well, yeah, I’d like to make sure that nobody has any pain, but it’s part of who I am, it’s part of the past, and for us to deny that is cheating ourselves of reality. And a lot of this talk has been about what is reality? And history matters, but more important than history mattering, context matters.

• Absolutely, yes, yeah.

• Okay? And this is what I’m writing about. And I think, as historians, we’re going to find it harder and harder to get good sales in America, in particular, less so in Britain, but in America, much, much harder. Just look at the top 10 nonfiction books and nine out of 10 will all be self-help, okay? So that’s what we’re fighting against.

• Susan, thank you so much for such an animated hour.

• Thank you.

• And for those of you, I hope most of you, all of you really will get into this subject and benefit from your extensive research, five or six years of incredible research and writing. Please do get hold of “Hitler’s Aristocrats”. And thank you, once again, Susan. And please, keep researching, keep writing. Thank you.

• Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for attending, thank you.