Muriel White did not set out to be a hero.
She was an American heiress who — like many other US debutantes at the turn of the 20th century — married a European aristocrat.
Then the Nazis came.
Other Americans who had married Germans embraced Hitler, but not Muriel. She helped Jewish acquaintances escape extermination.
She hid American pilots whose planes crashed nearby. She smuggled her children out of the Reich so they wouldn’t have to fight in Hitler’s army. She even insulted the Führer to his face.
And as Richard Hutto writes in the new book “The Countess and the Nazis: An American Family’s Private War” (Lyons Press): “She would be killed for her defiance.”
Her dramatic end — plunging to her death when trying to evade SS officers — is the stuff of movies and historic novels. And yet, Hutto told The Post, the American countess has remained an obscure, largely forgotten figure.
“I had come across her name before, but I did not know much about her,” he said. When he finally connected with one of her great-grandchildren and learned her tumultuous history, he was astonished. Muriel was not a member of the official Resistance. She did not bear arms or intercept messages. Hers was a quieter kind of rebellion — no less courageous or noble. “I said, ‘This needs to be told. I need to revive her story.’”
Margaret “Muriel” White was born in 1880 in Paris. Her father, Henry White, was a world-famous diplomat. Her mother, Margaret “Daisy” Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, was a celebrated society beauty, painted by John Singer Sargent.
Young Muriel had a glamorous, peripatetic childhood. She lived in London, Paris and Rome — moving through the royal courts of Europe with ease. She spoke six languages and was known as “the most charming listener in society.”
Muriel, Hutto writes, “didn’t follow the usual social path taken by her fellow American heiresses.” Since Daisy was frequently ill, Muriel often served as her father’s “second in command,” hosting events for the diplomatic community. When the family moved to Italy, Muriel was 27 and still — gasp! — unmarried.
At a party in Berlin, Muriel met 29-year-old Hermann “Manni” Seherr-Thoss, a count with a seat in the House of Lords and a job at the German embassy in Vienna. He was “good-looking & charming & amusing & brave & . . .full of tender beautiful poetic thoughts which touch one’s heart,” Muriel, then 28, wrote to her aunt.
The two married in 1909 in Paris —Muriel revoked her American citizenship to make it happen.
They moved to one of the count’s castles in Silesia, a region that spans parts of modern-day Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. She became disenchanted pretty quickly. She and her husband fought, particularly after World War I, when the US cut off the bank accounts of American heiresses married to men from the Axis Powers.
Muriel immediately saw through Hitler when he rose to power in 1933. When two SS officers asked her why she didn’t fly the swastika outside her home early in the regime, she answered: “Why would a family hang a flag for a party they don’t support?”
She got to personally diss Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, when they shared a viewing box. “I know who you are and what your aim is, and I shall work against you,” she told him. He laughed: “Oh, Madame, don’t be so serious.”
After Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Muriel used her diplomatic connections to get her three children to the US. She secured and arranged funds for a Jewish family she knew to escape Vienna and emigrate to Australia.
In 1941, she hid British soldiers who had escaped from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp and American pilots who crash-landed by the estate. When Manni — by then her ex-husband — was called to the front, she smuggled him away in a hay wagon.
She somehow even had the time to help the Queen of Albania abscond to the mountains after the Italians invaded her country.
In Muriel’s last year, she barely went out of the house, due to the soldiers she said were surrounding the estate. She disguised herself as a peasant to go feed and pet her goats. She feared that the Nazis would torture her to reveal the whereabouts of her children and send her to a concentration camp.
On the morning of March 13, 1943, she saw a group of Gestapo officers walking up her driveway.
She had saved her children, her husband, her friends. But she knew she couldn’t save herself.
She climbed up to the tower — and jumped to her death.
Her family in the US was shocked when they found out. And yet, they didn’t see it as an act of cowardice.
“Many were able to get away because of her help,” her grandson later said.
