Prince Philip and the Nazis

THE effete-looking British Army major seemed to be in a state of high anxiety and nerves as he sat at the very back of a flight leaving Germany that morning in August, 1945.

Young Prince Philip Young Prince Philip

His concern centred on the battered briefcase he was clutching, gripped tightly in his arms. He was first off the aircraft when it landed and was waved into the back of an unmarked car which roared off at speed.

Just who was the mystery major and – more vitally – what was in the old briefcase he was holding so closely? He was Anthony Blunt, an Army intelligence officer whose name would come to personify treachery when he was unmasked as a communist spy 30 years later.

But the contents of the briefcase would prove to be dynamite. Blunt had carried out a secret mission for George VI to find any documents in Germany that might prove embarrassing to the Royal Family – about any links with the Nazis in pre-war years.

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler

He was also to see if there was anything damaging concerning the young Prince Philip, who was paying court to Princess Elizabeth – the King’s oldest daughter and heir to the throne.

Blunt’s researches proved that the Prince did have German relatives who were avowed Nazis before and during the war – revelations that troubled many in Britain at the time and could have proved a severe impediment to a royal marriage.

The question of the Prince’s Nazi relatives was raised this week by Mohamed Al Fayed during his evidence at the inquest into the deaths of his son Dodi and Princess Diana in 1997. Mr Al Fayed believes Prince Philip personally orchestrated their deaths and, while being questioned, demanded that the coroner Mr Justice Scott Baker investigate the “Prince’s Nazi past”.

The sinister Nazi connections come from three of the Prince’s four sisters – Sophie, Cecile and Margarita. All had married German princes, three of whom became leading Nazis.

Prince Philip, whose family name is Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, even attended the funeral in Nazi Germany of his elder sister Cecile as a 16-year-old schoolboy in 1937. He was pictured flanked by other relatives who were dressed in SS and Brownshirt uniforms.

Philip was born in Corfu in 1921. His parents, Prince and Princess Andrew of Greece, fled the country after being

sentenced to death by a revolutionary court. Philip ended up in England and his education was paid for by his doting aunt, the Marchioness of Milford Haven. After attending Dartmouth Naval College, he acquitted himself with distinction as a Royal Navy officer during the Second World War.

Meanwhile in Germany, Hitler had won power in 1933 and made cunning efforts to attract the German aristocracy to the Nazi cause. Two princes in particular – Philipp of Hesse and his brother Christoph, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria – had drifted easily into Nazism. The Hessen brothers were willing to make great moral compromises, particularly in regard to the Jews and the Holocaust.

The Von Hessens soon became participants in the early stages of the Final Solution – Hitler’s genocidal plan against the Jews. They joined the SS, enthusiastically backing Hitler in his evil quest.

What attracted Hitler to the Von Hessens was their strong links to British royalty. The Führer was obsessively driven by his dream of conquering Britain and have the Royal Family serve him. What better than to enlist the support of their German relations, which included those with links to Prince Philip?

Philip’s youngest sister Sophie had married Prince Christoph in 1930 and he rose to become an SS colonel attached to Himmler’s personal staff. He also became the head of the sinister Forschungsamt – a spying outfit under the control of Hermann Goering that carried out surveillance on anti-Nazis.

Sophie and Christoph were such devoted Nazis that they even named their eldest son Karl Adolf in Hitler’s honour. Christoph’s brother Philipp had joined the Nazis as early as 1930 and became the Nazi governor of Hesse in 1933.

The damaging material that Anthony Blunt discovered on his secret mission to Germany after the war also contained much information about the activities of Philip’s Nazi relatives.

There was considerable sensitivity in Britain when it became known that the dashing blond Prince who was so clearly in love with Princess Elizabeth had a dark side to his family tree. The prospect of a Prince with such German links marrying into the Royal Family horrified many. Whenever the Prince’s relatives were mentioned, they were described as being “distant” – as if they were faraway cousins whom he seldom saw. This was far from the truth. He had many nieces and nephews, children of his sisters, and other relatives in Germany who were still scarred by their Nazi connections.

Philip’s engagement and subsequent marriage to Princess Elizabeth in November 1947 had been skilfully manipulated by his uncle Lord Mountbatten but the match was bitterly opposed at the very highest level. The most formidable opponent to the union was Philip’s future mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, later to become the Queen Mother, who was markedly anti-German.

She never forgot the horrors of the First World War, when one of her brothers, Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, had been killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. And during the Second World War her hatred of Germans increased after witnessing the scenes of destruction on her visits to the blitzed areas of Britain.

Now her daughter was planning to marry a Prince of German blood whose four sisters had all married Germans and whose brothers-in-law had fought for Hitler. The Queen became increasingly horrified at the prospect of having Prince Philip as a son-in-law, a man she referred to priv­ately as “The Hun”.

One of her friends, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst, said: “She felt that her daughter ought to marry a British duke and not a German prince. She lobbied against it and said to me at the time: ‘The ­trouble is that Philip is so imposs­ibly attractive, and Lilibet [Princess Elizabeth] just cannot see beyond that.’”

Despite their misgivings, the King and Queen eventually gave their consent for the marriage. But the guest list was carefully vetted and almost all of Philip’s sisters and their husbands were excluded. The only member of his German family to be invited was his mother Princess Alice, and even that invitation was issued with reluctance.

What the hapless Major Anthony Blunt handed over in 1945 must have stunned the King – in particular the details about the active Nazism of Prince Philip’s German relatives. It is probable that over the years those Nazi connections have been a source of embarrassment to the Royal Family, who have always been keen to distance themselves from their Teutonic relatives.

For Prince Philip, the old adage must apply: “You can choose your friends but not your family.”

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