Radziwiłłowa, Katarzyna

Autor: Radziwiłłowa, Katarzyna
Rok: 1858-1941

Biogr./Hist. údaje: Polská šlechtična, spisovatelka a žurnalistka.
Zdroj: Autoritní databáze Národní knihovny ČR

Princess Catherine Radziwiłł (30 March 1858 – 12 May 1941) was a Polish princess from the Polish 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 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.She stalked the South African-based British magnate and 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.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. 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.