From "Cincinnati Post," February 9, 1901
This is the story of three women, each of whom claimed the title of Countess von Blücher. You will need a scorecard to keep track of the three women, so just remember this simple mnemonic:
Countess von Blücher #1 had a legitimate claim to the title.
Countess von Blücher #2 apparently had no claim to anything, but that wasn’t her fault.
Countess von Blücher #3 was a poseur, a procurer and a pestilence in Cincinnati.
Our story begins with a real and authentic German general, one Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Fürst von Wahlstatt (1749-1819). Fürst means “Prince,” the title our general earned from King Frederick William III of Prussia after helping the Duke of Wellington defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. Prince von Wahlstatt passed his royal title along to his grandson, while his other male descendants retained the title of “Graf,” or count.
Which brings us to the real countess, Countess von Blücher #1. One of the great general’s great-grandsons was Ferdinand Franz Gebhardt Leberecht Graf Blücher von Wahlstadt. He was a naughty boy. After squandering his inheritance at the gaming tables, he set out for America to marry an heiress. Specifically, Franz was searching for a girl whose father could buy a Graf-hood for $1 million.
Instead, Franz found Alma Loeb, whose father owned a small business in Brooklyn. Miss Loeb was visiting her sister in Milwaukee when she met Franz. He proposed, and the two were married in 1891. Miss Loeb’s sister went berserk and spirited Alma back to Brooklyn, vowing that divorce was imminent. Alma, indeed, showed up in Brooklyn, but so did her new husband, who announced that he would patch things up with Alma’s father, then vacationing in Asbury Park. Dad had no objections to a count in the family, so long as the count was not flat broke. Franz, having failed to procure a million dollars, was abandoned by his family in Prussia and died in February of 1892, brought low by a kidney infection. His Countess had relocated to Colorado by that time, apparently trying to establish a year’s residency so she could file for divorce. On his deathbed, Franz alleged that he had been tricked into marriage. Alma donned widow’s weeds and rushed back to New York for her husband’s funeral.
Meanwhile, another Countess von Blücher came to light in New York City. This would be Countess von Blücher #2. A man, identified as Count Gebhard Friedrich Ludwig Adam Blücher von Finken, who may or may not have actually been a grandson of the Waterloo general, lay in a Bath, New York hospital. This presumptive Count von Blücher had arrived in the United States some years ago, served in the U.S. Army and married a Brooklyn girl named Ella Ohlsen in 1892. After a not-so-remunerative career as a night watchman, the maybe count checked into a soldier’s home in Washington, DC. He was moved to Bath, but no one seems to have informed his wife. News arrived that Gebhard’s brother, Count Adolph von Blücher, had been murdered back in the Fatherland by an insane game keeper. [I cannot make this stuff up.] Gebhard stood to inherit $200,000 (more than $5 million today) and a castle in Sweden if—BIG if—he was really one of the Counts von Blücher.
Skipping now to Countess Von Blücher #3, we must understand at the outset that she was a complete sham and had absolutely zero connection to the great Graf und Fürst Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. This phony countess arrived in Cincinnati in 1893, claiming to be a “world-renowned medium.” She immediately placed an advertisement in the Cincinnati Post.
“Her friends can be counted by the score. She has directed the misguided ones and brought many separated ones together. She tells all your business affairs with the utmost truth, gives advice on marriage and divorce. Can tell your history from the cradle to the grave.”
The Cincinnati “Countess” (later revealed as one Helen Krolage, nee Hildebrandt) claimed to be the only living niece of the great General von Blücher, the daughter, in fact, of his younger brother. In addition, she asserted that she was the seventh of that brother’s daughters, and that her mother was also a seventh daughter, and from that chain of mystical significance derived her psychic skills.
The psychic skills of the Cincinnati Countess were tried severely on April 19, 1897, when she was beaten, gagged and robbed while reading the fortunes of a young man. The cad absconded with some $6,000 in jewelry. Cincinnati reporters naturally inquired why the Countess could not locate her missing gems by employing her psychic powers. She declared that her nerves were too badly shaken by the trauma for her second sight to work properly.
From "Cincinnati Enquirer," April 20, 1897
How did Cincinnati’s “Countess” earn so many jewels? A report in the Marietta newspapers provides a clue. When a Mrs. Stewart disappeared from that town, her husband found a letter from the Countess von Blücher directing how to use a magic powder to cause husbands to abandon their wives. He didn’t, so she did. Another client, a fetching young lass who lived in the country outside Cincinnati, reported that the Countess offered to kill her husband so she could be free to live with the Countess. Why would the Countess want a pretty young country girl to come live with her?
It all came clear on February 8, 1901 when Cincinnati’s ersatz Countess rocketed to the front page again with the revelation that she was a procuress, luring young girls to ruin in the rooms above her shady fortune-telling operation on Ninth Street. “She Makes No Secret of Her Nefarious Traffic in Innocent Young Girls in the Very Heart of Cincinnati,” trumpeted the Cincinnati Post. For days to follow, the newspapers reported how the “Countess” had used her fortune-telling front to procure girls—some as young as 15—for the lascivious pleasure of Cincinnati libertines. According to the Post:
“Unblushingly, openly and defiantly, she pandered to the desires of men who had money and were dominated by the evil passions of depraved natures.”
Cincinnati’s Countess, by now around 70 years of age, skipped town after posting bail. Spotted in New Orleans, she made her way to New York, where she was recaptured in Brooklyn. There, just east of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Countess and her husband were supported by their adopted 13-year-old daughter, Helena, who gave music lessons. If the Countess was ever held accountable for her many sins, I can find no record of it. She appears in the news a few times more—once accused of stealing and selling a pedigreed dog and she eventually moved back to Cincinnati, employing a collection of aliases including Madame Vance and Mrs. Campbell.
Daughter Helena, when she wasn’t presenting piano recitals as “Miss La Moor,” read fortunes and got herself arrested in 1904 for palmistry. She ran away from home for a month in 1904, but returned to the Countess, where she was arrested again for palm-reading in 1906.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Ella Blücher, poor possible Countess von Blücher #2, wife of the alleged Count Gebhard Friedrich Ludwig Adam Blücher von Finken, sued in 1910 to get her daughter back from one Agnes Gamnes, who was holding the girl for ransom. Although the newspapers unanimously reported in 1900 that Gebhard had inherited a fortune, by 1910 he was still an impoverished invalid. Mrs. Blücher placed her daughter with Mrs. Gamnes out of desperation, but the protector was trying to parlay her ward into a fortune by blackmailing the Mecklenburg branch of the Blücher family in Germany. The authentic European Blüchers declined to acknowledge any relation to the New York invalid, so the blackmail attempt came to naught. The kidnapping of her daughter and the subsequent death of her husband must have been a trying experience because Ella was arrested on a charge of public drunkenness in December 1911.
A decade later, in 1922, Alma Loeb—remember her? Countess von Blücher #1?—was living in Germany among the family of the count she had been married to for less than a year. It appeared Alma had done quite well for herself because she was robbed of a great deal of jewelry that year in a Berlin hotel.
[For those of us who are fans of Mel Brooks’ classic, Young Frankenstein, we must sadly confess that there is no connection between any of these ladies and Frau Blücher (neigh!) portrayed by Cloris Leachman.]
