1940 Bucharest – The Countess’s View of Life from a Hotel Lobby

Romania, a place I had barely thought about, is now on my bucket list of countries to visit.   When I go, I must stay at the Athene Palace Hotel.   This is the perch upon which the Countess settled for eight months.   With her freshly printed American passport, her media credentials from Newsweek, her irresistible charm, and her “listening soul” she was ready to uncover the inner workings of Bucharest politics. 

The Countess arrived in Bucharest on June 14, 1940, the day that the German army entered France. “Her room on the first floor of the Athene Palace,” writes Ernest Latham, Jr. in the introduction of the 2019 edition, “was a front row seat for a crucial sequence in Romanian, Balkan and European history.” (Athene Palace 7-8)

“When I came to the Athene Palace on that hot June afternoon in 1940,” the Countess wrote, “I was an American who had felt and still did feel against my will, that Hitler might not only win the war but could win the peace and organize Europe if he did. When I left Athene Palace on an icy morning at the end of January 1941, I was convinced that under no circumstances could Hitler win the peace or organize Europe.” (Athene Palace 57)    

Athene Palace Hotel Lobby (Wikipedia)

Though the Countess spilled ink about the Jewish community of Romania, her primary concern was not the “Jewish question.”   In Athene Palace, the Countess shared her view of the big picture – with Romanian history in the rear-view mirror and the unknown post-war Europe out the front windshield. She sat on the precipice of history, waiting to see what Germany would do and how the Romanian people and other Europeans would respond. 

Romania was of strategic importance to Germany as it sits at “the crossroads of southeastern Europe, the country bestrides a major artery of empire, the Danube.” (Athene Palace 39) It is a country rich in natural resources.  Its oil and agricultural surpluses were high on Hitler’s shopping list.    By the time France fell to Germany in June of 1940, western Europe had been swallowed by Germany.  Hitler’s next stop was the Soviet Union or the Balkans.  It was in June of 1941 that Germany ripped up its friendship pact with the Soviet Union and attacked.  Romania was a stepping-stone to the Soviet Union. 

There were people from all over the world in 1940 Bucharest, including plenty of Nazis.  After the fall of France, the Nazis insisted that the war would be over in three months.  “To the Romanians,” wrote the Countess, “there was nothing in the performance of the German armies so far which did not justify this belief. France was gone. There was on the Continent no army left to take up the battle.  Talk in the cafes said Britain would surely capitulate or, if she would not capitulate, she would be bombed off the map and invaded.” (Athene Palace 159-60)

Taking a look in that rear view mirror, the Countess saw the fall of France as a “climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflations, labor unrest, party egoism, and what not.” She goes on to analyze why Hitler seemed to be “walking into” every country in Europe.  “Europe,” she wrote, “tired of herself and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled – not satisfactorily but in such a way that it absolved her of all responsibility.  Freud talks somewhere about man’s subconscious longing to get away from light and back to the stuffy warmth and safety of the womb. The European man’s surrender to Hitler seemed to be the translation of this longing for the mother womb.  Hitler, Europe felt, was a smart guy- disagreeable but smart. He had gone far in making his country strong. Why not try his way? That’s how Europe felt in this summer of 1940.” (Athene Palace 160)

As the Countess described Western Europe, I couldn’t help but hear an echo of Donald Trump’s 2016 America.   “What really made for surrender to Hitler,” argued the Countess, “was people’s distrust of freedom because of the weaknesses in its wake and people’s fedupness with their ruling class; and the ruling class’ fed-upness with itself.” (Id.)

Back to Romania – I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know that Romania had a king.  His name was King Carol, and he dumped his queen for a Jewish mistress named Lupescu.  It seems the Romanian people were terribly antisemitic and never forgave Carol for this.  The Countess felt that Lupescu “would probably have got by if she had been the natural daughter of an orthodox Catholic streetwalker but being of Jewish extraction was too much for her to overcome. The Romanian people felt humiliated that their King had dropped his Queen for a Jewess.  And now they were blaming her for the misfortune which had befallen the country – and they blamed the entire Jewish race for Lupescu.” (Athene Palace 165)  

King Carol II (Wikipedia)

 According to the Countess, the Romanian antisemitism was the “old-fashioned kind” – religious, not racial – and under this antisemitism it was well known that “the Jewish middlemen had built up a devilish system to enslave the peasant.” (Id.)  After King Carol fired the British as an ally and appointed a pro-German premier, laws excluding Jews from “the press, theater, and the management of big business” were enacted. (Athene Palace 162)   Next came laws declaring “who was a Jew and who was not.” (Id.)

The Nazis had an idea for a new world order.  This new world was one without Jews, but it was also one where other inferior peoples were subservient to the Aryan race.  The Countess came to a deeper understanding of Germany’s intentions as she overheard a conversation on a train between two SS officers.  

It was a fancy Pullman car and there were SS officer together with a “dark-haired Romanian lady with a dark-haired little boy.”  

“If that’s not a Jewish mama with her little Moritz, I’ll be hanged,” the SS man said to his colleague. 

‘He’s Romanian,’ the other SS-man corrected him.  ‘His father saw him off – an officer.’

‘A Romanian is he?’ said the first.  ‘Just wait until we are masters here, then Romanian boys will travel in cattle trains and not in Pullmans.’”

“So this, I thought,” the Countess wrote about this overheard encounter, “was the new European Order.   It was nothing of the sort – it was a German order. . . clearly this new order benefited only Germans. The same SS-men who were gentle baby-kissers with little Germans from Bessarabia, were savages with a Romanian or a Jewish boy.  It was an order in which only the Germans partake of mercy and salvation, and almost everyone else is condemned to everlasting doom. Yet, I knew one could never organize Europe on ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles.” (Athene Palace 333)

After her train ride, the Countess summed up her view of the new Nazi world order that appeared to be unfolding across Europe.  “The Nazi order,” she wrote, “rested on the trinity of race, nation, and state. . ..   Their church was the Party hierarchy; the Gestapo was their Holy Inquisition; the French revolution was their original sin; Dachau was their purgatory for the sinners against the trinity of nation, state, and race. Heretics were everyone who was neither Nordic nor German.”  (Athene Palace 334)

This Jewish girl of Staadecker stock from Mannheim, Germany, watched Hitler rise to power and here a year into the war and she was able to grasp ahold of the stark reality that confronted Europe.  Ernest Latham, Jr., the expert on the Countess, told me that her analysis of Romania and Europe in the Athene Palace is one of the best he’s ever read. 

Countess Rosie Waldeck (Archive of Ernest Latham, Jr.)

After the war, the Countess went back to Europe and wrote one more non-fiction book titled Between the Acts.  She lived in New York City until she died in 1981.  The timing of her death hit me as I realized that the Countess and I lived in the same city for two years; I arrived in New York for college in 1979.   Had I only known about her then, what interesting conversations we could have had. 

I am amazed and grateful that I “stumbled” into my cousin Rosie and my life is richer for “knowing” her.  Thank you, Seattle Jewish Transcript, for recording the social life of the Victor Staadecker family and for writing about the Countess’ visit to Seattle 82 years ago. 

So, was she or wasn’t she?  

After 300 pages of intelligence gathering, the FBI concluded that she was not a Nazi spy.  But no one really knows for sure.