Unveiling Heroism: New Book Chronicles How Gilded Age Heiress Became A Nazi Resistor

Historian Richard Jay Hutto has released his latest book, “The Countess and the Nazis,” exploring the life of Muriel White Seherr-Thoss, a Gilded Age American heiress who became an active figure in the Nazi resistance during World War II.

Hutto draws upon unpublished memoirs and declassified CIA documents to bring Muriel’s fascinating narrative to life. She was the daughter of an American diplomat and married to a Prussian count, and the book spotlights how Muriel leveraged her privileged position among Europe’s elite to aid Jewish families in fleeing Nazi tyranny. Despite her lofty position, even mentoring emerging royalty like the future Queen Geraldine of Albania, Muriel ultimately sacrificed everything to save her children the Nazi regime.

Publishers Weekly praised the book as “an exhilarating account of principled antifascism,” while Library Journal highlighted Muriel’s defiance of her privileged background as a powerful piece of history.

Notable royal biographer Hugo Vickers commended it as “an extraordinary saga, ultimately tragic, proving once again that rich American girls should have nothing to do with unworthy European aristocrats.”

The book captures both familial and societal dynamics impacting personal and political choices during turbulent times, including the motivations for wealthy American women’s families to seek marriages with European aristocrats, spending fortunes to secure such alliances.

One of the foremost historians of the Gilded Age, Hutto is the author of “Crowning Glory: American Wives of Princes” and “Dukes, and Their Gilded Cage: The Jekyll Island Club Members.” The former chairman of the Georgia Council for the Arts also wrote “A Peculiar Tribe of People: Murder and Madness in the Heart of Georgia,” the television adaptation of which was described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a southern grotesque that comes complete with stately mansions, murder most vile, forbidden sex, a pot-boiling trial and a denouement worthy of a Greek tragedy.”