Nazi Princess Read Online Free Page A

command? American-born Annabel Kruse, my great-aunt, having tasted the peaks of 1930s highlife in Britain and on the Continent, had fallen victim to one of the deadly addictions to which some of the stylish super-rich of the period were attracted – heroin. Amongst the very wealthy, use of the drug was not uncommon. From 1933, six years after that fatal introduction of Princess Stephanie to Rothermere, Jack and Annabel were searching desperately for a cure for her drug-induced illness. They sought advice from specialists in London, New York and Paris. When more orthodox cures from qualified medical experts failed to relieve Annabel’s suffering, she turned in desperation to faith healers and ‘quacks’. It cost the couple a great deal of money, but to little effect. Annabel was sinking into a half-world, detached from much of what was going on around her. She was cared for by nurses and by her sister-in-law Lilian Kruse, languishing for days at a stretch in her antique Renaissance bed surrounded by antique furniture, Dresden mirrors and priceless tapestries.
    The Wall Street Crash of 1929, followed by the Depression years of the early 1930s, seriously damaged the Kruses’ finances. In the early 1930s Sunning House was sold to Rothermere, and the couple also had to give up their apartment at the Grosvenor House Hotel, the permanent suite they kept at Claridge’s and a mansion on Egham Hill standing in 50 acres of parkland. They had been forced to reduce the standard of super-rich living to which they had become accustomed, but they were still able to afford a fifty-room mansion, Ridge House, close to the Women’s Golf Course at Sunningdale. Before Annabel succumbed completely to her heroin-induced illness, she was able to furnish Ridge House in fairly lavish style.
    By the mid-1930s Jack was virtually retired, although he was then only in his mid-40s. Encouraged by Rothermere’s campaigning, his interests had moved from expensive cars and Alpine touring to aviation and, in particular, the need for the country to build up its air defences. He, like Collin Brooks, took to lobbying through the National League of Airmen. He was an avid writer of letters to The Times on rearmament and the enlistment of men from the empire into the British Armed Forces. Kruse was well informed, too. He had travelled widely and, as a director of one of Rothermere’s newspaper companies based in Paris, he was extremely well briefed on European affairs. As the dictators and their National Socialist ideas gained ground, he took a much more balanced view than his employer. On the one hand he disliked Churchill’s hawkish anti-appeasement policy, but on the other he was appalled by Rothermere’s cosy relations with Hitler. How he judged the role Princess Stephanie was playing in that relationship, and her real motives, is unrecorded. He maintained his friendship with her, but to an observant man her deceptions must have been pretty clear.
    Kruse was spending more and more time in North Yorkshire at Moor Top, his bolt-hole and the place he loved perhaps more than anywhere else. His last ‘exotic’ car, purchased in 1937, was a Buick saloon. Despite returning frequently to Moor Top, Kruse still travelled extensively. He became friendly with a Russian woman, Tamara, who ran a vegetarian guest farm in the Pyrenees. As Annabel became more and more detached in her own uncomprehending world, Jack sought comfort in his friendship with Tamara. By this time Annabel, who had worshipped Jack ever since they had first met in New York, was incapable of recognising him. In the late 1930s, worn down and distraught at Annabel’s illness, he went to live at Tamara’s apartment in the Avenue des Baumettes in Nice. Sadly, his family never saw him again.
    When war broke out and the German invasion of France looked inevitable, Jack and Tamara attempted to escape back to England. They hitched rides to Paris, but the fall of France overtook them and they were