Princess Marie Adelheid of Lippe

Alarmed by the failure of their class to respond to the troubles occurring in Germany, many younger members of royal families joined the emerging Nazi party and other radical right-wing groups.[5][6] In the beginning, many of them were women.[6] Like the Hesse family, the Lippe dynasty joined the Nazi party in great numbers (ultimately eighteen members would eventually join).[4] Some German states provided a proportionally higher number of SS officers, including Hesse-Nassau and Lippe, Marie Adelheid's birthplace.[4] As an ardent believer of the party's views, Marie Adelheid developed strong connections to the emerging Nazi regime, and became a leading socialite during that time.[4]

She embraced "blood and soil" notions with great enthusiasm, and belonged to the paganist sect of Nazism.[4] In 1921, the same year of her divorce, Marie Adelheid published Gott in mir (God In Me) in Bremen.[7] A small work of forty-one pages, its spacious layout and the exceptional quality of its paper is evidence that while Germany was suffering from an economic depression, the book was distributed in small quantities to a select, wealthy clientele.[7] It is likely that soon after producing this work, Marie Adelheid was already moving in far-right circles or on the verge of becoming an ardent National Socialist;[5] she became employed as an aide to the Nazi Minister of Food and Agriculture, Richard Walther Darré (a friend of her third husband's).[8] Her cousin Ernst, Hereditary Prince of Lippe (son of Leopold IV, Prince of Lippe) was also employed under Darré.[4] As he was her mentor (and referred to her as "little sister"), Marie Adelheid devoted her writing talent to promoting National Socialist ideals, in particular those of Darré.[9] These essays included Nordische Frau und Nordischer Glaube [Nordic Women and Nordic Religion] (1934), Deutscher Hausrat [Setting up the German Household] (1936), two edited collections of writings by Darre, and two novels, Mutter Erde [Mother Earth] (1935), and Die Overbroocks [The Overbroocks] (1942).[9][10]

In the late 1920s, Marie Adelheid regularly attended meetings for the paganist Nordic Ring, which were a forum for the discussion of issues concerning race and eugenics.[11] Her third husband was a leader of this group.[12] Konopath was a member of the Race and Culture Division in the Reich Leadership Office.[12] The group was a great proponent of the "Nordic idea", in which they believed that the Occidental and Germanic cultures were a creation of the Nordic race.[11] To them, the Nordic race had been "losing ground rapidly" in the new industrial age due to an influx of "inferior" races to the enlarging cities; their goal was thus to reverse this trend before Germany followed France, Italy, and Spain in racial decline.[11] Through these meetings, Marie Adelheid emerged as a leader of the Nordic Faith Movement. At one meeting she presided over in March 1935, she stated that children should be forbidden from reading the Old Testament and asserted that there was not much sense in reading the New Testament.[13]

"In the Old Testament, the greatest and most sacred things are treated as a variety of sin. One should not, therefore, place in children's hands the sort of tales of which the Old Testament is made up. However, the new Testament is not much better. Throughout the Old Testament woman is treated as something shameful. We read there that a woman who has borne a child should make a sacrifice".[13]

In the same meeting, Marie Adelheid also called on other Nordic pagans to remember that "thousands of blond-haired, blue-eyed women" had been burned as witches during the Middle Ages, a fact, she declared, that meant they should be avenged by bringing back to life the old Nordic faith.[13]

The Nordic Faith professed by Konopath and Marie Adelheid soon declined in importance. Wilhelm Kube, the leader of the Nazi Party in the Prussian parliament and a fervent Christian, soon discovered that Konopath belonged to "a school of thought that even the most radical of Kube's group could no longer consider Christian". Soon afterwards, Kube had Konopath ejected from his DC responsibilities; he was additionally deprived of all his party offices on "grounds of immorality".[14]

As the war caused unwelcome developments, Darré's romantic "blood and soil" views suffered as new and more efficient plans were produced by important Nazi officials Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring.[10] As Darré's influence declined, so did that of Marie Adelheid and her cousin, as their family lacked a viable power base.[10] While Darré retired to his hunting lodge outside Berlin, she and Ernst continued their activities under the Nazi regime until the end of the war.[10]

• Mutter Erde [Mother Earth] (1935)[9]
• Die Overbroocks [The Overbroocks] (1942)[18]

• Gott in Mir [God in Me] (1921)[18]
• Weltfrommigkeit (1960)[18]
• Freundesgruss (1978)[18]

• Das bist du [That is you] (1924)[18]
• Deutscher Hausrat [Setting up the German Household] (1936)[9]
• Nordische Frau und Nordischer Glaube [Nordic Women and Nordic Religion] (1934)[9]
• Feiern im Jahresring (1968)[18]
• Small contributions to the monthly magazine Odal. Monatsschrift für Blut und Boden (1932–1942)[18]

As a speaker of French, English, and German, Marie Adelheid produced translations of various works after the end of World War II. Along with Paul Rassinier's Holocaust-denying work The Drama of the European Jews, Marie Adelheid also translated Lenora Mattingly Weber's work My True Love Waits from French into German and Harry Elmer Barnes' Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt from English into German, among others.[20]