Lemuel Schofield

Lemuel Bradley Schofield was born in 1893. He became a lawyer and eventually became Philadelphia's director of public safety (then the fire and police departments), and as U.S. commissioner of immigration and naturalization. He was married with four children.

Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe was arrested as a Nazi spy. On 7th March 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a direct order to US Attorney General Francis Biddle: "That Hohenlohe woman ought to be got out of the country as a matter of good discipline. Have her put on a boat to Japan or Vladivostok. She is a Hungarian and I do not think the British would take her." The following day Major Schofield ordered the arrest of Princess Stephanie.

A few days later Schofield visited her at the detention centre. According to Jim Wilson, the author of Nazi Princess: Hitler, Lord Rothermere and Princess Stephanie Von Hohenlohe (2011): "As she had done so successfully so often before, she switched on her undoubted sexual charms and flirted with her captor. Schofield was hardly a handsome catch. He was obese with large, ugly features, but he had authority and influence. Despite his senior position of trust in the American immigration service, Schofield succumbed willingly to the princess' seductive wiles. In the way so many influential men had done before him, he found he could not resist her." On 19th May 1941, in a move that contradicted the President's specific order, Schofield released on $25,000 bail on "condition she informed the immigration service of where she was living; made no contact whatsoever with Wiedemann in San Francisco; or had any contact with any other foreign government; and gave no interviews nor made any public declarations."

Princess Stephanie and her 89 year-old mother had moved into the Raleigh Hotel in Washington. Schofield also took a room at the hotel. Schofield wrote to Stephanie: "Everything about you is new and different and gets me excited. You are the most interesting person I have ever met. You dress better than anyone else, and every time you come into a room everyone else fades out of the picture... Because of you I do so many crazy things, because I am mad about you."

On 8th December 1941, the day after Japan carried out its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Princess Stephanie and her mother went to visit friends in Philadelphia. While leaving a cinema, Stephanie was arrested by the FBI. She was refused permission to phone Lemuel Schofield and was taken to the Gloucester Immigration Centre in New Jersey. Soon afterwards US Attorney General Francis Biddle signed an order citing that Princess Stephanie was a potential danger to public security and peace. The FBI searched her home and found the Nazi Party's Gold Medal of Honour given to her by Adolf Hitler in 1938. Her son, Prince Franz Hohenlohe, was also arrested and interned.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was furious when he discovered that Princess Stephanie had not been deported. He wrote to J. Edgar Hoover on 17th June 1942: "Once more I have to bother you about that Hohenlohe woman. The affair verges not merely on the ridiculous, but on the disgraceful... If the immigration authorities do not stop once and for all showing favour to Hohenlohe, I will be forced to order an inquiry. The facts will not be very palatable and will go right back to her first arrest and her intimacy with Schofield. I am aware that she is interned in the Gloucester centre, but by all accounts she enjoys special privileges there. To be honest, this is all turning into a scandal that requires extremely drastic and immediate action."

The Attorney General took immediate action and transferred Princess Stephanie to a more remote internment centre, Camp Seagoville, near Dallas. Lemuel Schofield attempted to obtain special privileges for her, including the right to make telephone calls outside the camp. When this was discovered Schofield was forced to resign and he returned to New York City where he developed a successful law practice. An FBI agent reported that she was "distraught and emotional" when she heard the news. However, he added that he felt she was "a consummate actress" and her "emotions were artificial and designed to win my sympathy."

Princess Stephanie went to live with Lemuel Schofield in New York City. Every so often details of her Nazi past appeared in newspapers. In March 1947, leading newspaper columnist, Robert Ruark, with a column syndicated throughout the United States, pointed out that Princess Stephanie was a former close friend of Adolf Hitler and had been "his most trusted female spy". In July 1947 The San Francisco Examiner published a story saying that she was being feted in Long Island society: "The Princess is pretty well known locally. Not favourably. She was once an ardent and well-subsidised Nazi good-will ambassador."

They lived on a farm near Phoenixville in Pennsylvania, as man and wife.

Lemuel Schofield died of a heart attack in 1954.

Primary Sources

(1) Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to J. Edgar Hoover (17th June, 1942)

Once more I have to bother you about that Hohenlohe woman. The affair verges not merely on the ridiculous, but on the disgraceful... If the immigration authorities do not stop once and for all showing favour to Hohenlohe, I will be forced to order an inquiry. The facts will not be very palatable and will go right back to her first arrest and her intimacy with Schofield. I am aware that she is interned in the Gloucester centre, but by all accounts she enjoys special privileges there. To be honest, this is all turning into a scandal that requires extremely drastic and immediate action.

(2) Martha Schad, Hitler's Spy Princess (2002)

After an absence of eleven years, Stephanie returned to Europe to show "Brad", as she called Schofield, her Austrian homeland. The following year the couple travelled to Europe again, this time with Schofield's two daughters. They had a chauffeur who drove them through France, Germany, Austria and Italy. Schofield's daughter Helen later married the internationally respected Hungarian historian, John Lukacs, and Stephanie was a witness at the ceremony.

On the second trip Stephanie could not resist revisiting her beloved Schloss Leopoldskron. It brought back many memories. But her home was now Anderson Place, Schofield's beautiful farm. Sadly, this happiness only lasted until 1954, when Schofield suffered a heart attack and died. He was only sixty-two.

The death of the celebrated attorney had major consequences. The Philadelphia Reporter published a lengthy story which created an uproar in the city, with its revelation that the late Lemuel B. Schofield had been evading taxes for the past six years and that the sum owed to the Internal Revenue Service, including interest, was in the region of one million dollars. The tax inspectors went to work and checked out other "prominent citizens" who had known the attorney: his family, his business partners and, of course, the woman in his life. In the course of their investigations the IRS established that since her arrival in the USA. Stephanie had earned no money at all, but that for the years 1971, 1952 and 1973 she had made no tax declaration. An initial inspection revealed unpaid taxes of $250,000.

The princess now had the guile to make a voluntary declaration, and in fact managed to show she did not have a single dollar of back taxes to pay. She claimed that her famously luxurious lifestyle was "financed by the sale of jewellery, works of art and antiques," which had been in safe keeping during her internment, some in Britain and some with her mother. In this way she had made "a few hundred dollars a month". This could well be true. And in any case, during the years which the IRS were scrutinising, she had been living with a wealthy lawyer.

In mourning after Schofield's death, the princess left that part of her life behind her, and moved to another beautiful farm. Cobble Close, near Red Bank, New Jersey. The property had originally belonged to Herbert N. Straus, owner of Macy's, the world's largest department store. Living nearby was another multimillionaire, Albert Monroe Greenfield, the richest man in Philadelphia. With him as an agreeable new lover, Stephanie would spend the next three years at Cobble Close.