Catherine Radziwill

Princess Catherine Radziwill (Giovanni Boldini)

Princess Catherine Radziwiłł (30 March 1858 – 12 May 1941)^[1][2] was a Polish princess from the Polish-Lithuanian aristocratic Radziwiłł family. She was born as Countess Ekaterina Adamovna Rzewuska, member of the House of Rzewuski. She married Prince Wilhelm Radziwiłł at age 15^[1] and moved to Berlin to live with his family. It was speculated that she was the author of a book gossiping about the German Emperor William II and Berlin society in 1884 under the pen name Paul Vasili.^[2]

She stalked the English-born South African politician Cecil Rhodes and asked him to marry her, but he refused. She then got revenge by forging his name on a promissory note. She was convicted of forging Rhodes' signature and spent time in a South African prison for her crimes.^[3][4]

Catherine Radziwiłł played a major role in the history of the antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1921, she gave a private lecture in New York. She claimed that the Protocols were compiled in 1904-1905 by Russian journalists Matvei Golovinski and Manasevich-Manuilov at the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, chief of the Okhrana, the Russian secret service in Paris.^[5] Golovinski worked together with Charles Joly (son of Maurice Joly) at Le Figaro in Paris. This account, however, contradicts the basic chronology of the Protocols' publication, as they had already been published in 1903 in the Znamya newspaper. Moreover, in 1902, Rachkovsky was dismissed from the Paris Okhrana and returned to Saint Petersburg. Catherine Radziwill's statements were cited during the Berne Trial by Russian witnesses in 1934 and by experts in 1935; they gave evidence that her date of 1905, when Matvei Golovinski would have shown her a manuscript of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ("with a big blue ink spot on the first page") in Paris, is obviously an error of chronology, possibly caused by a typo in her article published in The American Hebrew and reprinted by The New York Times.^[6]

Works

• 'Cecil Rhodes' Future', North American Review, 1900
• The Resurrection of Peter. A Reply to Olive Schreiner, 1900. [i.e. to Schreiner’s book, Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland (1897)]
• My Recollections, 1904
• Radziwiłł, Catherine. 1914. Behind the Veil at the Russian Court.
• Radziwiłł, Catherine. 1918. Cecil Rhodes: Man and Empire Maker.
• Memories of Forty Years, 1914.
• The Royal Marriage Market of Europe, 1915.
• The Austrian Court From Within, 1916
• Sovereigns and Statesmen of Europe, 1916
• Because it was Written, 1916 [fiction]
• The Black Dwarf of Vienna, and other weird stories, 1916
• Germany under Three Emperors, 1917
• Russia's Decline and Fall: The Secret History of a Great Debacle, 1918
• Rasputin and the Russian Revolution, 1918
• Cecil Rhodes, man and empire-maker, 1918
• Confessions of the Czarina, 1918
• The Firebrand of Bolshevism; The True Story of the Bolsheviki and the Forces That Directed Them, 1919
• Secrets of Dethroned Royalty, 1920
• Those I Remember, 1924
• The Intimate Life of the Last Tzarina, 1928
• Child of Pity: The Little Prince [the Tsarevitch] Rides Away, 1930
• Nicholas II: The Last of the Tsars, 1931
• The Taint of the Romanovs, 1931
• It Really Happened; An Autobiography by Princess Catherine Radziwiłł, 1932
• The Empress Frederick, 1934.

See also

• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

References

External links

• Works by Catherine Radziwill at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Catherine Radziwill at Internet Archive
• Works by Catherine Radziwill in English (readable online)
• Cecil Rhodes, man and empire-maker at Project Gutenberg