Constance Drexel - Family and Childhood

Family and Childhood

Public references to Drexel’s nation of origin and pedigree were contrary to privately recorded facts. As early as 1915 (in American press reports) and as late as the 1940s (in Nazi broadcasts), she was described as a member of the “famous Drexel family” of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an apparent reference to the descendants of Francis Martin Drexel (who founded the Drexel & Company banking empire), including his son Anthony Joseph Drexel (who founded Drexel University in Philadelphia) and his granddaughter Saint Katharine Drexel. Yet by all accounts, including the one provided by Constance Drexel to the Bureau of Investigation in 1918, she was born in Germany late in the 19th century (many decades after Francis Drexel emigrated from Europe to Philadelphia in 1817). After she began broadcasting from Nazi Germany during wartime, at least one American syndicated columnist speculated that “Drexel” was a pseudonym.

Published information regarding her age and date of birth is also wildly inconsistent. Historian John Carver Edwards has concluded that Constance Drexel was born in Darmstadt, Germany, on November 28, 1894, to Theodore Drexel, scion of a wealthy family in Frankfurt, Germany, and Zelda Audemar Drexel, daughter of a prominent Swiss watch manufacturer, and was brought to the United States by her father the following year. However, all five of the ship manifests in Ellis Island records documenting her re-entry into the Port of New York between 1905 and 1923 state her age as if she were born in the 1880s. A U.S. Department of Justice internal memorandum prepared in 1946 described her birth date as November 24, 1884.

Drexel became a United States citizen upon her father’s naturalization in 1899. She reported to the FBI in 1918 that she had a sister named Norma Georgia Drexel, then living in Switzerland. Constance grew up not in Philadelphia, but in Roslindale, Massachusetts, where she attended public schools. “As an adolescent she divided her time between the United States and Europe, attending school in four different countries and honing her skills as a writer,” completing her education at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.