Empire: World History
370. The First British Indians: Saving Jews In Nazi Germany (Ep 2)
21 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How did Catherine Duleep Singh's early life shape her identity?
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.
And me, William Dromple. So we are now on part two of this extraordinary story of this world that Anita discovered and pioneered with her wonderful book on Sophia, published a decade ago. And now... We have this exhibition in London bringing this story to a much wider audience. There are plaques on houses. There are first day covers.
And it's very exciting to see how this whole field has developed since Anita wrote this great book. So last time we discussed the focus of Anita's book, Sophia Dulip Singh. this extraordinary story of a woman who was at the heart of the monarchy, but also at the heart of the suffragette movement, which many would have thought was a contradiction in terms.
But today we have an equally extraordinary story. Her sister Catherine, and she spends most of her adult life hundreds of miles from England in a German town called Kassel in Prussia with her intimate companion who happened to be her childhood governess.
And honestly, it's one of the regrets of my life that although I wrote about Catherine, I knew that there was more and that she deserved her own book. Never quite got round to doing it. Not too late, Anita. I'd read it. Thanks, Willie. It really is in this whole Duleep Singh family history. This is one of the most tender relationships that I came across. And it is a love between two women.
Now, whether it's sexual or not, we don't know because there are no Polaroids from the time. But we do know that these are two women who follow each other around the world and who never let go of each other's hands and not even world war gets in their way. So this is the story that we're going to tell.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Catherine face living in Nazi Germany?
It's really interesting territory, this. The world I grew up, I grew up in a rather Edwardian Scottish seaside town. And there were lots of old spinsters cohabiting without raising any eyebrows at all. And who knows what their relationship was. Do we have letters or anything that are, you know, unquestionably romantic between the two?
We don't have letters between them, unfortunately. And that is because of, I think, largely the war, whatever ephemera was between them was lost at that time. I haven't seen them. If they do surface and stuff keeps surfacing about these sisters, it would be amazing.
And if Sophia, who was prudish, doesn't see any hint of impropriety, is that evidence on the other side or not?
I would say, on the contrary, she wouldn't talk about it if they were.
And what's the legal situation at this point? Because obviously you've got lots of very draconian laws against male gay relationships. Oscar Wilde, and indeed my great-grandfather, had to leave the country for very similar reasons, ended up living in Italy at exactly this time.
But presumably, I'd imagine there was not similar laws for women because they would not have even entered the minds of people of this generation.
You're right. So lesbian relationships are not criminalised in England at this point. Male homosexuality totally is. So Oscar Wilde, you mentioned in 1895, he receives a sentence of two years hard labour. The Ballad of Reading Jail, a beautiful piece of poetry by Oscar Wilde, which I can quote boringly from, is written about that experience. But for women, there's no equivalence in law.
You know, the Victorian legal mind simply couldn't get itself around the fact that women would do such a thing.
I love that. Brilliant.
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Chapter 3: How did Catherine's relationship with Lena Schaefer influence her actions?
Klaus, George and Ursula. And she doesn't know if her husband's alive. He's last seen heading into this camp with the SS. It's not looking good. And she has no idea how it took it out. And in a doctor's waiting room in Castle, she finds herself sitting next to an Indian princess. As one does.
And Catherine just offers immediately, according to the family, she will be the guarantor to get them into the UK. She will sponsor their British visas. They can stay at her house in Buckinghamshire, a perfect stranger to a Jewish family she's known for 10 minutes. That speaks very, very well of her. Presumably also this could go wrong with the Nazi authorities who she's living among.
Well, I mean, really, I mean, it's something of a red flag for the Nazis. Wilhelm gets out of Sachsenhausen, partly because the camp is overcrowded and they're releasing prisoners on condition that they get out of Germany immediately. So he leaves with absolutely nothing. Ilse and the children leave. They are carried on Catherine's largesse.
Sophia collects them, I guess they might be the coal people that her goddaughter remembers. And then they are put up in this place in Buckinghamshire where they are allowed to live. And they're not the only ones because Catherine acts as a guarantor for at least six other people that we know about. There's Wilhelm Meierstein, a physician.
His partner, Marie-Louise Wolff, the violinist, Alexander Polonarov. Now, I know about him because Drovna remembered him playing in the drawing room of Hampton Court, Polonarov.
Who is this that's remembering?
So this is a woman I interviewed for the book who was a living link with Sophia, which just tells you how recent all this stuff, women fighting for the vote, actually is. So she remembers growing up in Faraday House And as a young girl in the evening, this wonderful violinist called Polnareff is playing for the family. And there's another family. There's the Reich family. There's the Gertmans.
And Peter Bunce, like I said, is leading the investigation on this. And he's done really well. But he thinks there's a much longer list than this. And actually, there's a lovely thing that Peter talks about that in 2002, after reading a local newspaper article, somebody turned up in his office and And said, my mother and my uncles and my grandparents were saved by Princess Catherine in Germany.
If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be alive today. A spine tingling moment. This carries on, Catherine playing saviour at this time. But then something happens to her and she herself needs to be saved. Okay. Because Lena dies. So it's just weeks before Kristallnacht, August 1938.
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