Rick Hutto - BOOK - The Countess and the Nazis

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Height five fifty five kr CE DE Talk Station. A
very happy Wednesday to you by Thomas Please to welcome
to the fifty five CARC Morning Show. A renowned author,
Richard J. Huddo. He served as the White House Appointment
Secretary of the Carter family was chairman of the Georgia
Council for the Arts. He is one of the foremost
historians of the Gilded Age, author of a number of

(00:22):
books on the Gilded Age. I don't want to pick
this one out and mention it specifically. A peculiar tribe
of people, murder and madness in the heart of Georgia.
Not only was it adapted for television. I love what
the Atlanta Journal Constitution talked about this twenty ten book.
A Southern grotesque that comes complete with stately mansions, murder,
most vile, forbidden sex, a pot boiling trial, and a

(00:44):
duma worthy of a Greek tragedy, with an ending even
Sophocles wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. Welcome, Welcome, I'm
gonna have to read that one. Richard J. Huddo, author
of a book we're talking about today, The Countess and
the Nazis. It's a pleasure to have you on today. Richard,
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
I love that Atlanta Journal Constitution description. Anyhow, moving over
to your new book, The Countess and the Nazis sometimes
an American family's private war Gilded Age. The woman you
write about, tell my listeners a little bit about her,
and I guess I'm kind of curious to know where
your fascination with the Gilded Age came in. That was

(01:24):
the late eighteen hundreds up to around nineteen hundred period of.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Time married these titled husbands, and of course very few
of them were love matches. Most of them were pretty
crass exchanges of a title for money. You know, if
my daughter is a duchess, then they have to accept
me that kind of thing. But then when I came
across this particular woman, Muriel White, she was totally different.
She was out out of the ordinary, very very wealthy,

(01:51):
privileged background, spoke five languages. I mean, she could have
just been a social diletant, you know, having cocktail parties
with her friends, but she didn't do that. She actually
devoted herself to her family and to the families of
the people who worked for her and of course bought
the Nazis from within. Very unusual woman.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
So how did she get from America to well, what
I ended up being Nazi Germany.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Well, her father was probably the best ambassador of the
United States has ever produced, at least Teddy Roosevelt said so.
So her father had been an ambassador in France to France,
but she was born there in Paris, but born to
American parents, And so after the father was the first
secretary at the USM Missige in London, then ambassador to Italy,

(02:41):
and then ambassador to France. She had so of course
traveled with them and learned very early on sort of
all of the protocol that that was necessary. Her mom
was ill quite a bit of the time, so Muriel
would step up and sort of take over her mother's role.
It was perfect for her. As I said earlier, she
had just wanted to be a social boddice, but instead

(03:01):
she turned to a life of service and ended up
actually giving up her life because of it.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Well, I understand she was the wife of a Prussian count.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
That's right. She was only twenty nine, or rather was
twenty nine getting a little long in the tooth. According
to some people when she married Count Monti Sehertass as
you said, was a Silesian count. He was in the military.
There very very old family. They moved though into the families.
After she married, they moved into the family's secondary residence,

(03:34):
which was sort of a dump. So she used her
fortune to bring it up to standards, to put in
running water and electricity and make sure that the servants
didn't have to bring buckets of water in from outside.
And she had then started taking care of all of
the families of all of the people who worked for her.
Her husband was not particularly helpful, but she kept doing

(03:55):
it anyway. And then with the rise of fascism and
also Nazism, she thought, I thought those things from within
and got her two draft age sons out of the country.
And for that, of course, the Gestapo kept coming to
her and saying, you have to return your sons their
marriageable age. You have to let us know where they are.
Plus she had done other things like helping some pilots escape,

(04:17):
and they wanted to know how she did that, and
so that what they said to her was, unless you
return your sons to us, unless you tell us how
you've done all this, we're going to take you to Auschwitz.
They gave her notice, and one particular morning she saw
them turn into her driveway, knowing what they were doing,
that they were coming to take her to Auschwitz, that
she would be tortured, she climbed up to the tower

(04:38):
of her castle and jumped to her death instead. Oh
my word, yeah, quite a story.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Oh my god. Yeah, well that's amazing. Now did she
she see the Nazis for what they were at the outset?
I mean, the fall of the Prussian bureaucracy is widely known,
which is what gave rise to the fascist movement. Was
she aware of the evil that they represented early on?
Or di did she become aware of it as they
began to increase their power and ultimately get Adolf Hitler elected.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
A bit of the latter. The difference between her and
her husband is that she saw the evil, as you said,
she saw what they were doing. She knew what was
going to happen eventually, where as her husband only wanted
things to go back to.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
The way they were.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
He wanted to have you know, the Kaiser and all
the nobility in and he thought, well, gee, you know,
I'm against them only for that reason. So he was
rather lackadaisical in what he did. But she, as you said,
knew they were evil, knew what was coming, and was
against them from the beginning.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Well did she see the rise of the Italian fascists
as connected with this whole problem and recognize them also
for what they were doing? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Absolutely, In fact, not only did she see it, she
wrote about it, and I've got that never before published
things in this book. But the reason she did that
was because she was in Albania helping her husband's cousin, Geraldine,
the young Queen of Albania, when she had her had
a birth. The Fascist were coming in just at that
moment to overtake Albania, so they threw Queen Geraldine, having

(06:13):
had a Sceirian birth the day before, threw her into
the back seat of a car and got out just
as the Fascist were landing in Albania. And as I said,
Muriel was there, saw at firsthand, and as they said,
even wrote about it.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Fascinating. Now, what drove her altruism? You grew up really
really wealthy in the Gilded Age, as you kind of suggested,
It's really unlikely that you would be so altruistic, and
you know, sacrificial and willing to help out people rather
than just go about your merry way and enjoy the
fruits and luxuries of being one of the wealthy and
the Gilded Age when there was so much poverty around.

(06:50):
Influenced by what or she just was just a sort
of an odd bird as we look at things, you know, objectively.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
I think she was a bit of both. Her father,
as I said earlier, it's a great, great ambassador, but
he was one of the five US signatories to the
Verisy Peace Treaty ending World War One, and so she
grew up with his influence. She also grew up with
a father who had been very wealthy, and on the
family's estate, they took care of their families, all of
the people who worked for them. So she grew up

(07:18):
with that as the ideal, and she continued to do it. Descendants, actually,
if her servants family still talked about the Christmas day
when all of the families and all of the children
would be brought into the castle, have a huge breakfast,
you know, and then gifts everywhere, and so there are
people who still talk about that because of her kindness.
She really was unusual for a time.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
How about that now, I presume that throughout the entire
the Nazi regime there was some form of underground resistance.
I mean many movies about that. You had the French
underground resistance and all that kind of thing. Was she
a part of some underground organized anti Nazi group or
did she just sort of do what she was to

(08:00):
do independently.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
She did it independently. There was one exception though, in
nineteen thirty six, when the Nazi Olympics happened in Berlin.
She and her husband were invited to one of the
viewing boxes at the Olympics, and Hitler came and actually
sat in their box. She said to him, I know
who you are and what you're planning to do, and
I'm going to do everything to stop you. He threw

(08:24):
his head back and laughed and said, oh, Madam, don't
be so serious. The same time they were that couple,
they were meeting with other officers who were opposed to
Hitler to try to find out ways to ways to
oppose him. So they were part of that. But as
I said earlier, it was a difference in many just
wanting to go back to the old ways where Muriel

(08:47):
knew of this evil and wanted to stop it. Now.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Did she help the Jewish community anyway? Obviously, could Kaitler
project very clear messages regarding his feelings about and what
he was planning on doing what the Jewish population, rounding
them up and putting them in slums and ultimately endeavoring
to exterminate them. What was her connection, if any, to

(09:10):
the Jews in the Greater German region.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
She was absolutely responsible for saving a Jewish family, the Letterers.
He had been one of the court tailors.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
And when war was coming, when the Jews were being
pushed out, he wrote to many of his clients, very
very well well placed clients, saying, would you invite me
in my family into your country so we can get out.
No one would respond to him because they said that,
you know, they didn't want to help a Jewish family,
but Muriel did. She was able to get the money

(09:46):
for them, She was able to arrange their visas, able
to get them to England to get onto a ship.
They eventually resettled in Australia, and they were always grateful
to her because she was able to do that, not
only for the money to move, but also because once
they got there Australia didn't, of course want them to
become wards of the state, so it required them to

(10:10):
have a certain amount of money to start life. And
so she arranged.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
All of that. The letter of family got all the
way to Australia, and we're very happy there.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Was her father still alive when she threw herself to
her own death.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
Now her father had died in the twenties. After her
mother died, her father remarried to one of come of
Vanderbilt's granddaughters, and who was very helpful with money, because
these heiresses had their funds cut off by the US Congress.
The Congress said, look, if you're going to marry into
a family that's going to fight your country, we're not

(10:43):
going to let you have access to this money. So fortunately,
using diplomatic pouches and all that sort of thing, she
was able to get money from her stepmother and to
be able to use that as well.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
She was able to keep her sons from being constricted
in the Hitler's army. What became of her children.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Great question of Four months after her death, her eldest
son was in the United States. He went through basic
training at Camp Wheeler and Macon, Georgia, took the oath
of office, renounced his citizenship back in Silesia in Germany,
and went back as a US officer. However, they would

(11:22):
only let him go to London because they knew someone
who looked as Arryan as he did with a double
barreled German name would be recognized, so they changed. They
changed his name only because they knew that that would be,
you know, a mark for somewhat somebody to come across
that name. But he went, as I said, back to

(11:42):
England and he questioned imprisoned Germans to get information from them.
You can imagine some of them who recognized him were
rather cruel and mean about it, but that's okay. He
did his job and in his mind he was able
to avenge his mother's death in that way.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Wow, this is an amazing story. Countess and the Nazis
by my guest today, Richard J. Huddo, who is an
expert on the Gilded Age and quite quite a few
books on it. You can teck them out online and
maybe get a copy of some of his other books.
But also the Countess of the Nazis. We've rick. We
put your book on my blog page of fifty five
cars dot com. So my listeners can easily obtain a

(12:19):
copy of it, which I'm sure they're going to want
to do. It's Countess in the Nazis An American Families
Private War. Fascinating conversation, Rick, I really appreciate you spending
time with my listeners of me today, and thanks for
putting us down a paper. You got a lot of
the material I understand from never before published memoirs as
well as declassified CIA documents. Real quick, How long ago
were these documents declassified? I always find it fascinating that

(12:43):
documents remain classified for literally decades and decades beyond the
period of time that they relate to, for reasons wholly
unknown to me.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Well, in this case, they were from two thousand and seven.
I was when they were declassified, but most people had
not gone through them. They relate to the invasion of Albania,
the fact that she was there, and then what happened
afterwards when the United States tried to put King Zog
back on the throne. He was sort of the worst
of our rather the best of some bad choices. And

(13:15):
so that's where those documents came from. And as I said,
they were declassified in two thousand and seven.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
Got to do your research. I come up with a
book like this, and thanks for doing it. Rick, it's
been a real pleasure having you on the program.