Was the princess a spy?

Jim Bradshaw
jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com

In the early 1930s, a former German princess, Alexandra Victoria, lived for several months at the Ardennes Hotel in Jennings with her second husband, Arnold Rumann, causing a great deal of speculation about what they were doing here.
They kept to themselves, disappeared for days at a time, and never really said why they’d shown up in Louisiana. Longtime Jeff Davis Parish newspaperman Franklin Hildebrand thought they were spies.
A hotel in Jennings did seem an unlikely place to find Alexandra Victoria. As a young woman she hobnobbed with the crowned heads of Europe. Her father was Friedrich Ferdinand, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. Her mother was Princess Karoline Mathilde of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg.
Alexandra Victoria’s first husband was Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia. He was the son of Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor. Wilhelm was the grandson of Queen Victoria of England.
We get varying descriptions of the princess. A contemporary, Princess Catherine Radziwill (same family as the one Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee later married into), wrote that Alexandra was “a nice girl – fair, fat, and a perfect type of the ‘Deutsche Hausfrau’ dear to the souls of German novel-writers.” Another contemporary described the princess as a “charmingly pretty, bright girl.”
Her marriage to Prince August Wilhelm was described as “a love match,” but something happened to change that. It might have been the fall of the German monarchy at the beginning of World War I. For whatever reason, they were divorced in 1920 and she married Rumann in 1922.
By the time they arrived in Jennings, Rumann was said to be a supporter of the rising German politician, Adolf Hitler, but it’s not certain that she was. Hitler had no love for the German monarchy and she still had ties to nobility – although Emperor Wilhelm had been forced to abdicate in November 1918 and her own family and others of rank were much diminished in influence and wealth at the end of the Great War. The rise of Hitler may have smothered her second marriage; she and Rumann were divorced in the middle 1930s.
By the time they made their way to Jennings she was establishing herself in the United States as a portrait and landscape painter and that is the way she made her living after her second divorce.
But they were still happily together when Hildebrand began to puzzle over them. He reminisced about the pair in his book “As I Remember.”
“More and more I have come to the conclusion that the pair, especially the husband (who had a naval background), was in the espionage service for Hitler,” Hildebrand wrote. “Often they would sprawl out under the trees at Civic League Park about where the Armory now stands and pore over maps and books. Then they would be gone for days at a time.
“When we were at war with Germany again in 1941 and Hitler’s U-boats were operating off the Gulf Coast, I often wondered if [Rumann] was not making secret trips from here to Cameron and charting the shorelines and sounding the water for submarines and bases in case of war, which surely was on the way even then. The two kept very much to themselves, but would talk freely when approached. Both were highly educated.”
Jennings is not that far from German enclaves such as Roberts Cove, and old German families in Calcasieu Parish came from the princess’s ancestral Schleswig-Holstein, but Hildebrand said the couple wasn’t here to visit kith and kin.
“The only visits to other Germans I ever heard of were calls they made to the home of Ben Meyer where they drank beer. I never heard of them even attending the Lutheran Church while here. The couple left as silently as they came,” Hildebrand wrote.
Maybe they were just tourists. Maybe they had come to find new landscapes for her to paint. Maybe she had ties to the Schleswig-Holstein Germans in Louisiana (though none of them had noble blood). Or maybe Hildebrand was right – for a time during World War II, German submarines were virtually unchallenged as they sank tankers in the Gulf.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.