31st July 1940
Winifred Wagner

Winifred Wagner (1897-1980)

From Wikipedia:

Winifred Marjorie Wagner, the English-born wife of Siegfried Wagner, the son of Richard Wagner, and ran the Bayreuth Festival after her husband's death in 1930 until the end of World War II in 1945. She was a friend and supporter of Adolf Hitler, himself a Wagner enthusiast, and she and Hitler maintained a regular correspondence.

In 1923, Winifred Wagner met Adolf Hitler, who greatly admired Richard Wagner's music. When Hitler was jailed for his part in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Wagner sent him food parcels and stationery on which Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf may have been written.

Although Wagner remained personally faithful to Hitler, she denied that she ever supported the Nazi party. Her relationship with Hitler grew so close that by 1933 there were rumours of impending marriage (there were similar rumours about her love for English novelist Hugh Walpole). Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner home in Bayreuth, became Hitler's favourite retreat. Hitler gave the festival government assistance and tax-exempt status, and treated Wagner's children solicitously.

According to biographer Brigitte Hamann, Wagner was reported to be 'disgusted' by Hitler's persecution of the Jews. In one notable incident, in the late 1930s, a letter from her to Hitler prevented Hedwig and Alfred Pringsheim (whose daughter Katia was married to Thomas Mann) from being arrested by the Gestapo. Alfred Pringsheim was a fan of Richard Wagner, who he corresponded with and supported financially. He was also a patron of the Bayreuth Festival.

According to Gottfried Wagner, Winifred Wagner's grandson, she never admitted any error to her ways. After the war, her posthumous devotion to Hitler, whom she referred to as 'USA' – for Unser Seliger Adolf (our blessed Adolf) – remained undimmed. She corresponded with Hitler for nearly two decades. Scholars have not been allowed to see the letters, which have been kept locked away by Amélie Lafferentz, one of Winifred Wagner's grandchildren, who has insisted that they not be released until the whole family agrees to do so.

Like Hitler, Wagner believed profoundly in the rite of a secular cult of German nationalism, of Nordic self-realisation, and völkisch aspiration. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a denazification court banned her from the Bayreuth Festival, which she passed to her sons Wieland and Wolfgang.

In the 1950s, she again became a political hostess. Her grandson Gottfried Wagner later recalled that,

'My aunt Friedelind was outraged when my grandmother again slowly blossomed as the first lady of right-wing groups and received political friends such as Emmy Göring, Ilse Hess, the former NPD Adolf von Thadden, Gerdy Troost, the wife of the Nazi architect and friend of Hitler Paul Ludwig Troost, the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, the German NS-movie director Karl Ritter and the racist author and former Senator of the Reich Hans Severus Ziegler.'

She died in Überlingen, one of the best preserved medieval sites, on the shore of Lake Constance on 5th March 1980 at the age of 82 and was interred at Bayreuth.

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