Hitler's Girl by Lauren Young

Author:Lauren Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Wolkoff Affair

Soon after Adolf Hitler was designated Time magazine’s Man of the Year (1938), Joseph Kennedy, American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and scion of the Kennedy family, stated in an interview, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here (in the US) too.” Britain’s relationship to America was central during this period. Churchill believed that unless Britain entered the war with American support, the Commonwealth could not survive and that the entire European bloc, including Britain, would fall to the Nazis, possibly for generations to come. Roosevelt was constrained not only by public opinion in favor of isolationism but by Kennedy’s predictions of Britain’s swift defeat by Germany, warning that any American military aid would end up in Nazi hands. Churchill’s private correspondence with Roosevelt, written under the pseudonym “Former Naval Person,” was stolen by Nazi sympathizers in England and handed to the Reich late in the 1930s.

While Ambassador Kennedy arguably harbored some sympathy for Germany, other forces were at work in the American embassy to undermine Churchill’s pleas for American intervention. Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian émigré in London and secretary of the Right Club who operated out of a tearoom in Kensington, recruited Tyler Kent, a low-level employee at the American embassy, to steal secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill requesting American military aid. Both Wolkoff and Kent were eventually arrested and indicted.

The trial of Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent, heralded by front-page headlines in the British press as “the biggest trial of the war,” took place in a sealed courtroom at the Old Bailey in October 1940. Tried separately, Wolkoff and Kent were accused of stealing top secret cables exposing both Britain’s strategic military weaknesses and Roosevelt’s willingness to support England, thereby violating American neutrality. The contents of these documents were so inflammatory, especially to the incumbent American president, that Churchill tried unsuccessfully to have the trial postponed until after the US presidential election in early November 1940. Kent was also refused extradition and tried as a war criminal in England.

Despite Churchill’s repeated efforts, the Wolkoff trial commenced on October 23, 1940. In early November, Roosevelt won the presidency in a landslide, protected by the cloak of secrecy about the issues at stake and assuring that none of the evidence fell into the hands of the press. Describing security at the Central Criminal Court, the Daily Express reported that “thick brown paper was pasted over the glass panels of the doors, the doors themselves were locked, and police stood guard at them to ensure that nobody outside the courtroom would see a certain witness.” The British press speculated correctly that the star witness at the trial was likely to be high-ranking MI5 agent Maxwell Knight.

The accused Anna Wolkoff was a dressmaker and sole proprietor of Anna de Wolkoff Haute Couture Modes. Her atelier was located on an especially upscale stretch of Conduit Street in Mayfair, home of London’s high-end retail boutiques. Despite clientele like the Duchess of Windsor, Wolkoff’s business barely

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