Born January 31, 1912, the Infanta Dona Maria Adelaide of Braganza was the last surviving granddaughter of a Portuguese monarch. Known as the “Red Princess” because of her socialist beliefs, the woman code-named Mafalda by the resistance studied in Vienna during World War II, traveling at night to help war victims, including Jews in hiding. She worked with the von Stauffenberg group and was arrested and tortured after the group failed to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. The Nazis condemned Mafalda to death but Salazar – fascist ruler of Portugal – is believed to have intervened with the Germans, possibly because of her royal status. This intervention resulted in her release and immediate deportation. In 1945, Mafalda married Nicolaas van Uden, a Dutch physician, with whom she worked as a nurse and social assistant caring for children in Vienna, Africa, and Portugal.

For more than 50 years, Mafalda never spoke of her wartime actions. Her grandson learned of them when he was assigned The Hand of Compassion in a class in Vienna. In one chapter, Otto Springer describes his resistance work and mentions Mafalda, whom Otto suspected carried secret messages from Churchill to von Stauffenberg agreeing to conditions for German surrender if Hitler were assassinated. Otto described trying to track down Mafalda but noted that he had failed. When Mafalda's grandson read the chapter on Otto he called his father, saying, “I think this is Grandma.” His father used the internet to contact me, received what information I had, and quizzed his mother, who finally owned up to her role in the resistance movement. Eventually, my son Nicholas interviewed Mafalda in Lisbon in October of 2010, with her family in attendance, learning for the first time about some of their mother's activities. Questioners are Nicholas (N), Mafalda's son, and Mafalda's daughter. Mafalda died not long after this interview, on February 24, 2012. After her death, I learned she had a sister named Dona Mafalda, who died in 1918. I do not know if the code name was chosen by Maria Adelaide to honor her sister or whether the similarity was chance.