Stephanie Von Hohenlohe - The Second World War

The Second World War

She returned to England a year later but following the outbreak of World War II she left the country, fearful she might be arrested as a German spy. Princess Stephanie went back to her former lover Fritz Wiedemann in San Francisco. On her arrival, the United States government immediately placed her under a security surveillance and a 1941 memo to President Franklin D. Roosevelt described her as "extremely intelligent, dangerous and clever," claiming that as a spy she was "worse than ten thousand men." All the same, her social position and keen sense of self-preservation resulted in her being able to align herself with people who helped her avoid a deportation order when her visitor's visa expired.

Estranged from Fritz Wiedemann by the end of 1940, in March 1941 U.S. immigration authorities detained her for several days. She quickly seduced Major Lemuel B. Schofield, the Director of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service who put her up in a hotel in Washington, D.C. where the two carried on an affair that lasted several months. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she was arrested by the FBI and interned at a facility in Philadelphia, and later at a Texas camp for enemy aliens. She was paroled in May 1945. Documents released after her death, show that for the newly formed Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Princess Stephanie provided considerable insight into the character of Adolf Hitler that helped Professor Henry A. Murray, Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and psychoanalyst Dr. Walter C. Langer prepare the 1943 OSS report titled the "Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler."