Princess Catherine Radziwi?? (30 March 1858 - 12 May 1941)[1][2] was a Polish princess from a famous Polish-Lithuanian aristocratic family named Radziwi??. She was born as Countess Ekaterina Adamovna Rzewuska. She married Prince Wilhelm Radziwi?? at age 15[1] 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.[2] She stalked the English-born South African 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 jail for her crimes.[3][4] Catherine Radziwi?? played major role in the history of antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1921, she gave a private lecture in New York. She claimed that Protocols were compiled in 1904-1905 by Russian journalists Matvei Golovinski
...and Manasevich-Manuilov at the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, Chief of the Russian secret service in Paris.[5] Golovinski worked together with Charles Joly (son of Maurice Joly) at Le Figaro in Paris. This account, however, contradicts basic chronology of Protocols publication, as they were already published in 1903 in Znamya newspaper. Moreover, in 1902, Rachkovsky was dismissed from Paris Okhrana and returned to Saint Petersburg. In 1935, Catherine Radziwill repeated her statement as a witness at the Berne Trial.
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