To the editor:
In five years of researching the life of Count Felix Schaffgotsche (1904-1942) and writing a forthcoming biography, “Unpredictable Weather,” I have learned that complexity abounds — beginning with the spelling of his surname (the ‘e’ is customary in the Bohemian, but not the main Silesian line of his paternal family).
A crucial discovery has been that Schaffgotsche, though by early 1938 an enthusiastic supporter of German expansion, and, after July 1940 a non-commissioned officer in the Wehrmacht, never joined the NSDAP, nor—though speculation to the contrary was repeated in the Enterprise last week—did he ever belong to the SS. These are important distinctions that delineate boundaries, and they are underpinned by extensive searches in German State Archives. The erroneous claims (propagated by quick internet searches) appear to derive from a section in the autobiography of his friend David Niven, whose well-meaning (if on this point inaccurate) storytelling in an interlude on Schaffgotsche is pure Hollywood.
