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Ishrael [Esrael] Shpilt [Schpilt] from Zhmerinka, Zhitomir Oblast, Russia had arrived in New York City and joined Emma Goldman. Her group believed that nineteenth century rulers were oppressors but Ishrael particularly felt that any means including intelligence operations were justified in opposing oppression. He began using the name of the anti-Semitic counts of Spielberg who had tormented and persecuted his ancestors centuries earlier in Otingen [Ottingen, Oettingen], Germany. By the 1890s that family had been raised from counts of the town of Spielberg to princes in the Holy Roman Empire and by all accounts were still anti-Semitic. Ishrael registered property and two perfume companies in Philadelphia using the Spielberg name, Fairmount and Mountjoy, both of which are translations of Spielberg.
But he went much further than that, actually using the identity of the real Prince Otto von Spielberg to oppose the latter's anti-Semitic activities in Germany. When Esther Rosenfeld arrived in NYC in 1893 with the intention of joining Emma Goldman's group, Ishrael persuaded her to his point of view and she married him. He pointed out to her the strange coincidence of names that Prince Otto von Spielberg's wife was Bertha de la Rosee or Rose, similar to Rosenfeld. Their daughters, Frances and Sophia, belonged to at least three groups: Emma Goldman's, the communists, and the Free French. By coincidence, Prince Otto von Spielberg had named his daughter born 1919 Franzeska Spielberg after Ishrael had already named his daughter born 1911 Frances Spielberg.
When the princess of Otingen died between the 1923 Munchen Putsch (Hitler's attempt to take power in Munich) and his actual takeover in the late 1930s, Ishrael took advantage of the coincidence of names. It wasn't easy for most people to check out identities back then, it wasn't electronic and there was no internet.
Ishrael sent his daughter Frances, who had already been studying art at the Barnes Foundation and Pennsylvania Academy of Art, to Paris to study painting under the French Jewish artist Andre L'Hote. In 1937, Ishrael died, his daughter went home to Philadelphia, married a young communist named Paul Gustav Smith, and the nazis marched into Paris, arresting Andre L'Hote as a Jew. In 1938 Frances was back in France meeting Jewish communists at the Chateau d'If in 1938 and working with Pierre Gabard (later French consul in Philadelphia 1957-1967) a member of the French resistance who married her cousin Barbara Padowicz, a cousin of the Rosenfelds in the Lodz ghetto, Poland.
In 1941, their uncle, Soviet General David Rosenfeld had intelligence that a German baron, Hans Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt, had ordered executions of Jews at Kamenez-Podolsk in the Ukraine and also was responsible for the murders of Rosenfeld relatives and other Jews in Berdicheff. Frances assumed the identity of Franzeska von Spielberg and Paul her husband put out the story that he was going to New Orleans "to join a jazz band" and was sent undercover either by the Roosevelt OSS (Office of Strategic Services) or by Frances's uncle David to rescue Basha (Barbara) Padowicz (Gabard) and her sister and children from Lodz, which the nazis were turning into a death camp after Gen. David Rosenfeld had been informed of the exterminations ordered at Kamenez-Podolsk.
They felt perfectly justified, under the circumstances, assuming the identities of nazis in order to rescue Jews from the Lodz Ghetto which was being sealed off about this time. Paul Smith was back in the States by 1942 as he was aboard the USS Eldridge in Philadelphia.
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