The Nazi relative that the Royals disowned
The Nazi relative that the Royals disowned
Nov 30, 2007
By MICHAEL THORNTON
Behind the Queen’s diamond wedding is the extraordinary untold story of how her marriage was almost scuppered by Philip’s links to one of Hitler’s closest henchmen…
The scene was one of devastation and squalor.
At a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, in the weeks following the death of Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich, a 60-year-old man, crippled by arthritis, stumbled painfully round a rubbish dump.
He scrabbled in the rotting refuse until he discovered an old tin can. Starving, he pulled up grass to add to the thin soup his American captors allowed him for sustenance.
No one looking at him would have believed that this forlorn figure had once been one of the richest and highest-ranking men in Britain, a royal duke, the grandson of Queen Victoria, a Knight of the Garter, and the first cousin of kings and emperors.
Against his own wishes, fate had exiled him to a land where he never chose to live and placed him on the losing side in two World Wars.
Now he was a prisoner, ostracised by his royal relations and branded a traitor to his country.
The tragic history of Prince Charles Edward, to be explored next week in a TV documentary, has a certain ironic relevance to the recent diamond wedding anniversary celebrations of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.
Sitting quietly in Westminster Abbey at the service of thanksgiving two weeks ago was a small group of former royal personages with names and faces hardly known to the British public.
Their presence was significant.
It testified to the fact that the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip, though a popular fairy tale in the glamour-starved years of post-war austerity and now regarded as a source of stability to Britain’s monarchy, was by no means hailed with rejoicing in royal circles 60 years ago.
In fact, evidence that is still held off-limits in secret archives suggests that it almost never happened at all.
The little group of ex-royals to whom I have referred were described in the media as “Prince Philip’s distant German relations”.
Relations, yes. Distant, no.
They were Philip’s nieces and nephews, the children of his sisters, all three of whom were excluded from receiving invitations to the royal wedding in 1947, owing to the fact that their husbands were German officers, in some cases with strong Nazi connections.
Philip’s youngest sister, Princess Sophie of Hanover, had married Prince Christopher of Hesse-Cassel, who was an SS Colonel attached to Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and became head of the sinister Forschungsamt - a security service under Hermann Gˆring’s command that carried out surveillance on anti-Nazis.
Sophie and Christopher even named their eldest son Karl Adolf in Hitler’s honour.
Christopher’s brother, Prince Philip of Hesse-Cassel, had joined the National Socialist party in 1930, becoming the Nazi governor of Hesse in 1933, and later acted as the liaison between Hitler and Mussolini.
Our own Prince Philip, who Anglicised his name to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, really had the Germansounding family name of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburgs.
Although his marriage to the young Elizabeth was skilfully promoted and manipulated by Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, and the Princess had been deeply infatuated with the tall, blond, Viking Prince for at least eight years, the match was bitterly opposed at the very highest levels.
Leading the opposition was Philip’s future mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, afterwards the hugely popular Queen Mother.
One of her brothers, Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, had been killed at 26 fighting at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Queen Elizabeth had a dislike of Germans, and this had increased through the scenes of destruction she had witnessed during her visits to the blitzed areas of Britain.
Now, here was her daughter, who would one day be monarch, proposing to marry - only two years after the defeat of the Third Reich - a Prince of German blood, whose four sisters had all married Germans and whose brothers-in-law had fought for Hitler.
Queen Elizabeth, who had great shrewdness and a highly-developed sense of expediency, was aware that there was a new, post-war spirit of republicanism in the air.
She thought this marriage - to a man she referred to in private as “The Hun” - was dangerous, and that it risked reminding people that her husband’s family was German in origin, descended from the Hanoverians, and that her own mother-in-law, Queen Mary, was a German Princess.
“Queen Elizabeth opposed the marriage,” said her friend, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst.
“She distrusted the Mountbattens, and felt that her daughter ought to marry a British duke. 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.’”
In the end, with deep misgivings, the King and Queen gave their consent and the marriage went ahead.
But 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 she was requested to divest herself of the sombre grey nun’s habit she had adopted after suffering a nervous
breakdown when her bisexual husband, Prince Andrew of Greece, left her for a mistress in Monte Carlo.
But there was one royal figure whose scandalous life and career perhaps did more than anything else to unite the opposition to Philip’s entry into the Royal Family.
This was his cousin, the British-born Prince Charles Edward.
At the time of Philip’s marriage, Charlie was living in obscurity and utter disgrace, ostracised by all but one of his royal relations and reviled as a traitor to Britain.
The Channel 4 documentary traces the tragic tale of how this man, born into the British Royal Family, was forced against his will into accepting a German dukedom, found himself fighting for theKaiser in World War I, was deprived of all his British titles and branded a “traitor peer” - and then, even more tragically, assisted Hitler’s rise to power and ended his days as a convicted Nazi.
His Royal Highness Prince Leopold Charles Edward, second Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence and Baron Arklow, was born at Claremont House, Surrey, on July 19, 1884.
He was Queen Victoria’s favourite grandson. King George V was his first cousin - as were Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Russia’s last Czar, Nicholas II.
“He was a very happy little boy,” says his granddaughter, Victoria Huntington-Whiteley.
But Charlie, as he was known in the family, had a tragic destiny in store for him.
When he was a carefree 14-year-old schoolboy at Eton, his mother, the widowed Duchess of Albany, wrote to him: “Don’t forget work and duty over your pleasures. Don’t be lazy and indolent.
“If my words read hard, understand that they come out of a full heart, full of love and anxiety, to help you become a good man, so that you bring no shame on Papa’s name.”
But while he was still only a boy, his grandmother, Queen Victoria, made a decision that was to ruin his life.
She decreed that Charlie should become Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the German principality from which the Queen’s husband Albert had come.
Charlie’s granddaughter Victoria says: “He didn’t know anything about Germany. He couldn’t even speak the language. He didn’t want to go”.
But Queen Victoria insisted.
And so, at 16, Charles Edward was forced to leave his home and become Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with 13 castles in Germany and Austria, hunting lodges, hotels, a power station, tens of thousands of hectares of rich arable farmland in Bavaria and a duchy with an income worth £17million in today’s value.
He was enrolled at Germany’s top military academy by the bombastic Kaiser, who then married off Charlie to his own niece, Victoria, by whom he had three sons and a daughter.
And when, in 1914, war was declared following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Charlie found himself in the nightmare situation of fighting for the Kaiser against the country of his birth.
In Britain, as the great monarchies of Europe - the Hapsburgs of Austria, the Romanovs of Russia, and finally the Hohenzollerns of Germany - tumbled from power, Charlie’s first cousin, King George V, hastened to dump the German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and adopted Windsor as the new title of Britain’s royal dynasty. Charlie was left high and dry.
After the war ended in 1918, worse was to follow. George V removed all Charlie’s British titles as well as the status of Royal Highness, and struck his name from the register of the Knights of the Garter. He was declared ‘a traitor peer”.
Germany was now a republic, and Charlie, believing that Communism was responsible, tragically allied himself with the extreme right-wing group led by a charismatic and ranting former army corporal - Adolf Hitler.
By 1933, when Hitler seized power as Chancellor of Germany, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg was among his most fervent supporters.
Charlie returned to Britain in 1936 to attend George V’s funeral, but because he no longer had the right to wear a British uniform, he shockingly wore German military attire, complete with a stormtrooper’s metal helmet.
As president of the newly-formed Anglo-German Fellowship, he tried to engineer personal dealings between his cousin, the new pro-German King Edward VIII, and Hitler.
When Edward’s abdication only 11 months later scuppered that plan, Charlie again found himself out in the cold, treated with icy distance by the new King, George VI, and his dominant and strong-minded consort, Queen Elizabeth, who wanted no part of him.
Hitler made him president of the German Red Cross, in which he presided over the horrific programme of enforced euthanasia, in which some 100,000 mostly disabled people, including children, judged by the Nazis unworthy of life, were murdered. The extent of his involvement in this barbarism was never really established.
When war inevitably came in 1939, Charlie once again found himself on the wrong side.
His three sons were sent to fight for the Germans, and one of them, Prince Hubertus, was killed on the Eastern front.
As the Allies advanced, Hitler, before committing suicide in his crumbling Berlin bunker, sent a telegram to Charlie in Coburg, warning him not to fall into the hands of the Americans.
Yet that is precisely what happened.
In spite of being a cousin of King George VI, he was held in the harshest internment camps.
The one member of the British Royal Family who had always stood by him, his sister Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, flew to Germany with her husband and was horrified to find him starving, “scavenging on a rubbish dump to find a tin to eat from”.
Put on trial as a Nazi, Charlie pleaded not guilty.
He claimed he had acted honourably and did not know of any crimes by the regime. He was not believed.
Though he was exonerated of complicity in actual war crimes, he was judged to have been “an important Nazi”.
His houses and estates were confiscated, and he was almost bankrupted by heavy fines. Only his failing health saved him from remaining in prison.
Now a penniless, convicted criminal, he was given a chauffeur’s cottage in the stables of one of his estates.
“He thought it was wonderful,” relates his granddaughter Victoria.
“He had everything he loved.
“He had his wife, he had pictures, he had his little dog. And it didn’t matter how small, it could have been even one room, he would have been happy not to be in prison any more.”
By this time, Charles Edward had cancer, he was crippled by arthritis and blind in one eye.
He was exiled for ever from Britain and would never be permitted to return to the land it was deemed he had betrayed.
Yet, even in his disgrace, he was unable to let go of his royal birthright.
In 1953 he made one last journey from his house to a cinema in Coburg, to watch a colour film of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey.
His granddaughter Victoria says: “I think he would have cried, seeing all his relations, especially his sister, and he would have thought: ‘So sad I can’t be there with them. It could have been me sitting there, too.’
“And for him, I think that must have been the worst moment.”
The man ordered to leave his homeland as a 16-year-old Eton schoolboy clung on to one last memento he had brought with him from England.
“He always slept in a particular bed, which came from Claremont House. He said it was his little bit of England, as he could never come to England again.”
He died in that bed on March 6, 1954, at the age of 69.
Prince Charles Edward, sometime Duke of Albany, and later, at his grandmother Queen Victoria’s insistence, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is never mentioned today in the British Royal Family.
He has been airbrushed from the history of the House of Windsor.
Yet his adored sister Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, became one of Britain’s best-loved royals, a game old lady who was the only member of the Queen’s family to travel on public transport.
She made her final appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in 1977, at the age of 94, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, standing in almost the same place as she had as a child, 90 years earlier, for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. She died in 1981.
Elizabeth II has made four State visits to Germany, but Coburg, where her disgraced cousin Charlie reigned as Duke, remains one town she has never entered.
http://tinyurl.com/3392y3
The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor
by Scott Thompson
Printed in The American Almanac, August 25, 1997
One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a ``black sheep,'' an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British monarchy, and the City of London's leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer's election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain's planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia.
Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links.
So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be ``reincarnated as a deadly virus'' to help solve the ``population problem,'' he is just ``doin' what comes naturally'' for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy (see page 8 for more quotes from Prince Philip).
To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.
Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.
The marriages of Prince Philip's sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip's four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England's Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.
Three of Philip's brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.
Enter Prince Bernhard
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, royal consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of the current Queen Beatrix, co-founded and became the first head of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in October 1961. When the Lockheed scandal forced Prince Bernhard to resign from his most important public functions in 1971, he was replaced by Prince Philip. Prince Bernhard, like Prince Philip, whom he recruited to the eco-fascist cause, had strong roots in the Nazi movement.
In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana's daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth.
Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labor camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.
When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, ``Heil Hitler!'' William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana:
``Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when ... Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.'|''
This is the man who recruited Prince Philip to eco-facism, but Prince Philip's Nazi roots had been laid much earlier.
Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism
Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold's father, Max von Baden, working through his longtime personal secretary, Kurt Hahn. During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry's intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis' ``strength-through-joy'' system. At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger's friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a ``universal fascist,'' in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with.
Although Hahn's powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip's arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn's school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi ``race science.'' Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the ``centrist'' Nazis.
Philip's Relatives Work for the SS
The husband of Philip's sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labor organizations. When rumors of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt's eavesdroppers, and ordered the ``Night of the Long Knives'' as a result. The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie's children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Later, Prince Philip would promote his education.
Prince Christoph's brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring's Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg's brother's wedding. According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.
In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip's uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of ``Dickie'' Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip's aunt.
Although Buckingham Palace's rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip's secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: ``The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.''
Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph's Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned ``Surveyor of the King's Pictures,'' Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip's patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten's sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip's brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.
http://tinyurl.com/32htld
Prince Philip pictured at Nazi funeral
by ANDREW LEVY, Daily Mail
6th March 2006
Prince Philip has broken a 60-year public silence about his family's links with the Nazis.
In a frank interview, he said they found Hitler's attempts to restore Germany's power and prestige 'attractive' and admitted they had 'inhibitions about the Jews'.
The revelations come in a book about German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never published in the UK.
They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms.
One row back in the cortege in Darmstadt, western Germany, was his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, wearing a Royal Navy bicorn hat.
Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering.
Explaining the attraction of the Nazis, 84-year-old Prince Philip told an American academic: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic.
"I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was."
He added that there was 'a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?'
Philip stressed that he was never 'conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views'. But he went on to say there were 'inhibitions about the Jews' and 'jealousy of their success'.
Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. All four of his sisters married German princes and three - Sophie, Cecile and Margarita - became members of the Nazi party.
Sophia's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering's secret intelligence service and they were frequent guests at Nazi functions.
Philip went on to fight with distinction for the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen. He served with the Royal Navy where, by 1945, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant on a destroyer and was mentioned in despatches.
All of his sisters and brothers-inlaw are now dead but he keeps in contact with his German relatives.
His comments on the family's Nazi connections appear in Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos, to be published in Britain in May.
http://tinyurl.com/zkxek
Royal Family Nazi History
July 14th, 2007
One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a “black sheep,” an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British monarchy, and the City of London’s leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer’s election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain’s planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia. Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links.
So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be “reincarnated as a deadly virus” to help solve the “population problem,” he is just “doin’ what comes naturally” for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy.
To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.
Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.
The marriages of Prince Philip’s sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip’s four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England’s Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.
Three of Philip’s brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.
Enter Prince Bernhard
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, royal consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of the current Queen Beatrix, co-founded and became the first head of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in October 1961. When the Lockheed scandal forced Prince Bernhard to resign from his most important public functions in 1971, he was replaced by Prince Philip. Prince Bernhard, like Prince Philip, whom he recruited to the eco-fascist cause, had strong roots in the Nazi movement. In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana’s daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth.
Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht’s slave labor camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard’s role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.
When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, “Heil Hitler!” William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana:
“Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when … Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.’|”
This is the man who recruited Prince Philip to eco-facism, but Prince Philip’s Nazi roots had been laid much earlier.
Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism
Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold’s father, Max von Baden, working through his longtime personal secretary, Kurt Hahn. During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry’s intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis’ “strength-through-joy” system. At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger’s friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a “universal fascist,” in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with. Although Hahn’s powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip’s arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn’s school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi “race science.” Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the “centrist” Nazis.
Philip’s Relatives Work for the SS
The husband of Philip’s sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labor organizations. When rumors of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt’s eavesdroppers, and ordered the “Night of the Long Knives” as a result. The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie’s children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Later, Prince Philip would promote his education. Prince Christoph’s brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring’s Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg’s brother’s wedding. According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.
In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip’s uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of “Dickie” Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip’s aunt.
Although Buckingham Palace’s rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip’s secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: “The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.”
Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph’s Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned “Surveyor of the King’s Pictures,” Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip’s patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten’s sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip’s brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.
http://tinyurl.com/2taod7
Nov 30, 2007
By MICHAEL THORNTON
Behind the Queen’s diamond wedding is the extraordinary untold story of how her marriage was almost scuppered by Philip’s links to one of Hitler’s closest henchmen…
The scene was one of devastation and squalor.
At a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, in the weeks following the death of Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich, a 60-year-old man, crippled by arthritis, stumbled painfully round a rubbish dump.
He scrabbled in the rotting refuse until he discovered an old tin can. Starving, he pulled up grass to add to the thin soup his American captors allowed him for sustenance.
No one looking at him would have believed that this forlorn figure had once been one of the richest and highest-ranking men in Britain, a royal duke, the grandson of Queen Victoria, a Knight of the Garter, and the first cousin of kings and emperors.
Against his own wishes, fate had exiled him to a land where he never chose to live and placed him on the losing side in two World Wars.
Now he was a prisoner, ostracised by his royal relations and branded a traitor to his country.
The tragic history of Prince Charles Edward, to be explored next week in a TV documentary, has a certain ironic relevance to the recent diamond wedding anniversary celebrations of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.
Sitting quietly in Westminster Abbey at the service of thanksgiving two weeks ago was a small group of former royal personages with names and faces hardly known to the British public.
Their presence was significant.
It testified to the fact that the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip, though a popular fairy tale in the glamour-starved years of post-war austerity and now regarded as a source of stability to Britain’s monarchy, was by no means hailed with rejoicing in royal circles 60 years ago.
In fact, evidence that is still held off-limits in secret archives suggests that it almost never happened at all.
The little group of ex-royals to whom I have referred were described in the media as “Prince Philip’s distant German relations”.
Relations, yes. Distant, no.
They were Philip’s nieces and nephews, the children of his sisters, all three of whom were excluded from receiving invitations to the royal wedding in 1947, owing to the fact that their husbands were German officers, in some cases with strong Nazi connections.
Philip’s youngest sister, Princess Sophie of Hanover, had married Prince Christopher of Hesse-Cassel, who was an SS Colonel attached to Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and became head of the sinister Forschungsamt - a security service under Hermann Gˆring’s command that carried out surveillance on anti-Nazis.
Sophie and Christopher even named their eldest son Karl Adolf in Hitler’s honour.
Christopher’s brother, Prince Philip of Hesse-Cassel, had joined the National Socialist party in 1930, becoming the Nazi governor of Hesse in 1933, and later acted as the liaison between Hitler and Mussolini.
Our own Prince Philip, who Anglicised his name to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, really had the Germansounding family name of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburgs.
Although his marriage to the young Elizabeth was skilfully promoted and manipulated by Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, and the Princess had been deeply infatuated with the tall, blond, Viking Prince for at least eight years, the match was bitterly opposed at the very highest levels.
Leading the opposition was Philip’s future mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, afterwards the hugely popular Queen Mother.
One of her brothers, Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, had been killed at 26 fighting at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Queen Elizabeth had a dislike of Germans, and this had increased through the scenes of destruction she had witnessed during her visits to the blitzed areas of Britain.
Now, here was her daughter, who would one day be monarch, proposing to marry - only two years after the defeat of the Third Reich - a Prince of German blood, whose four sisters had all married Germans and whose brothers-in-law had fought for Hitler.
Queen Elizabeth, who had great shrewdness and a highly-developed sense of expediency, was aware that there was a new, post-war spirit of republicanism in the air.
She thought this marriage - to a man she referred to in private as “The Hun” - was dangerous, and that it risked reminding people that her husband’s family was German in origin, descended from the Hanoverians, and that her own mother-in-law, Queen Mary, was a German Princess.
“Queen Elizabeth opposed the marriage,” said her friend, the Dowager Lady Hardinge of Penshurst.
“She distrusted the Mountbattens, and felt that her daughter ought to marry a British duke. 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.’”
In the end, with deep misgivings, the King and Queen gave their consent and the marriage went ahead.
But 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 she was requested to divest herself of the sombre grey nun’s habit she had adopted after suffering a nervous
breakdown when her bisexual husband, Prince Andrew of Greece, left her for a mistress in Monte Carlo.
But there was one royal figure whose scandalous life and career perhaps did more than anything else to unite the opposition to Philip’s entry into the Royal Family.
This was his cousin, the British-born Prince Charles Edward.
At the time of Philip’s marriage, Charlie was living in obscurity and utter disgrace, ostracised by all but one of his royal relations and reviled as a traitor to Britain.
The Channel 4 documentary traces the tragic tale of how this man, born into the British Royal Family, was forced against his will into accepting a German dukedom, found himself fighting for theKaiser in World War I, was deprived of all his British titles and branded a “traitor peer” - and then, even more tragically, assisted Hitler’s rise to power and ended his days as a convicted Nazi.
His Royal Highness Prince Leopold Charles Edward, second Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence and Baron Arklow, was born at Claremont House, Surrey, on July 19, 1884.
He was Queen Victoria’s favourite grandson. King George V was his first cousin - as were Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Russia’s last Czar, Nicholas II.
“He was a very happy little boy,” says his granddaughter, Victoria Huntington-Whiteley.
But Charlie, as he was known in the family, had a tragic destiny in store for him.
When he was a carefree 14-year-old schoolboy at Eton, his mother, the widowed Duchess of Albany, wrote to him: “Don’t forget work and duty over your pleasures. Don’t be lazy and indolent.
“If my words read hard, understand that they come out of a full heart, full of love and anxiety, to help you become a good man, so that you bring no shame on Papa’s name.”
But while he was still only a boy, his grandmother, Queen Victoria, made a decision that was to ruin his life.
She decreed that Charlie should become Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the German principality from which the Queen’s husband Albert had come.
Charlie’s granddaughter Victoria says: “He didn’t know anything about Germany. He couldn’t even speak the language. He didn’t want to go”.
But Queen Victoria insisted.
And so, at 16, Charles Edward was forced to leave his home and become Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with 13 castles in Germany and Austria, hunting lodges, hotels, a power station, tens of thousands of hectares of rich arable farmland in Bavaria and a duchy with an income worth £17million in today’s value.
He was enrolled at Germany’s top military academy by the bombastic Kaiser, who then married off Charlie to his own niece, Victoria, by whom he had three sons and a daughter.
And when, in 1914, war was declared following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Charlie found himself in the nightmare situation of fighting for the Kaiser against the country of his birth.
In Britain, as the great monarchies of Europe - the Hapsburgs of Austria, the Romanovs of Russia, and finally the Hohenzollerns of Germany - tumbled from power, Charlie’s first cousin, King George V, hastened to dump the German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and adopted Windsor as the new title of Britain’s royal dynasty. Charlie was left high and dry.
After the war ended in 1918, worse was to follow. George V removed all Charlie’s British titles as well as the status of Royal Highness, and struck his name from the register of the Knights of the Garter. He was declared ‘a traitor peer”.
Germany was now a republic, and Charlie, believing that Communism was responsible, tragically allied himself with the extreme right-wing group led by a charismatic and ranting former army corporal - Adolf Hitler.
By 1933, when Hitler seized power as Chancellor of Germany, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg was among his most fervent supporters.
Charlie returned to Britain in 1936 to attend George V’s funeral, but because he no longer had the right to wear a British uniform, he shockingly wore German military attire, complete with a stormtrooper’s metal helmet.
As president of the newly-formed Anglo-German Fellowship, he tried to engineer personal dealings between his cousin, the new pro-German King Edward VIII, and Hitler.
When Edward’s abdication only 11 months later scuppered that plan, Charlie again found himself out in the cold, treated with icy distance by the new King, George VI, and his dominant and strong-minded consort, Queen Elizabeth, who wanted no part of him.
Hitler made him president of the German Red Cross, in which he presided over the horrific programme of enforced euthanasia, in which some 100,000 mostly disabled people, including children, judged by the Nazis unworthy of life, were murdered. The extent of his involvement in this barbarism was never really established.
When war inevitably came in 1939, Charlie once again found himself on the wrong side.
His three sons were sent to fight for the Germans, and one of them, Prince Hubertus, was killed on the Eastern front.
As the Allies advanced, Hitler, before committing suicide in his crumbling Berlin bunker, sent a telegram to Charlie in Coburg, warning him not to fall into the hands of the Americans.
Yet that is precisely what happened.
In spite of being a cousin of King George VI, he was held in the harshest internment camps.
The one member of the British Royal Family who had always stood by him, his sister Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, flew to Germany with her husband and was horrified to find him starving, “scavenging on a rubbish dump to find a tin to eat from”.
Put on trial as a Nazi, Charlie pleaded not guilty.
He claimed he had acted honourably and did not know of any crimes by the regime. He was not believed.
Though he was exonerated of complicity in actual war crimes, he was judged to have been “an important Nazi”.
His houses and estates were confiscated, and he was almost bankrupted by heavy fines. Only his failing health saved him from remaining in prison.
Now a penniless, convicted criminal, he was given a chauffeur’s cottage in the stables of one of his estates.
“He thought it was wonderful,” relates his granddaughter Victoria.
“He had everything he loved.
“He had his wife, he had pictures, he had his little dog. And it didn’t matter how small, it could have been even one room, he would have been happy not to be in prison any more.”
By this time, Charles Edward had cancer, he was crippled by arthritis and blind in one eye.
He was exiled for ever from Britain and would never be permitted to return to the land it was deemed he had betrayed.
Yet, even in his disgrace, he was unable to let go of his royal birthright.
In 1953 he made one last journey from his house to a cinema in Coburg, to watch a colour film of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey.
His granddaughter Victoria says: “I think he would have cried, seeing all his relations, especially his sister, and he would have thought: ‘So sad I can’t be there with them. It could have been me sitting there, too.’
“And for him, I think that must have been the worst moment.”
The man ordered to leave his homeland as a 16-year-old Eton schoolboy clung on to one last memento he had brought with him from England.
“He always slept in a particular bed, which came from Claremont House. He said it was his little bit of England, as he could never come to England again.”
He died in that bed on March 6, 1954, at the age of 69.
Prince Charles Edward, sometime Duke of Albany, and later, at his grandmother Queen Victoria’s insistence, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is never mentioned today in the British Royal Family.
He has been airbrushed from the history of the House of Windsor.
Yet his adored sister Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, became one of Britain’s best-loved royals, a game old lady who was the only member of the Queen’s family to travel on public transport.
She made her final appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in 1977, at the age of 94, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, standing in almost the same place as she had as a child, 90 years earlier, for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. She died in 1981.
Elizabeth II has made four State visits to Germany, but Coburg, where her disgraced cousin Charlie reigned as Duke, remains one town she has never entered.
http://tinyurl.com/3392y3
The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor
by Scott Thompson
Printed in The American Almanac, August 25, 1997
One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a ``black sheep,'' an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British monarchy, and the City of London's leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer's election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain's planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia.
Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links.
So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be ``reincarnated as a deadly virus'' to help solve the ``population problem,'' he is just ``doin' what comes naturally'' for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy (see page 8 for more quotes from Prince Philip).
To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.
Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.
The marriages of Prince Philip's sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip's four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England's Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.
Three of Philip's brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.
Enter Prince Bernhard
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, royal consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of the current Queen Beatrix, co-founded and became the first head of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in October 1961. When the Lockheed scandal forced Prince Bernhard to resign from his most important public functions in 1971, he was replaced by Prince Philip. Prince Bernhard, like Prince Philip, whom he recruited to the eco-fascist cause, had strong roots in the Nazi movement.
In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana's daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth.
Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labor camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.
When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, ``Heil Hitler!'' William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana:
``Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when ... Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.'|''
This is the man who recruited Prince Philip to eco-facism, but Prince Philip's Nazi roots had been laid much earlier.
Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism
Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold's father, Max von Baden, working through his longtime personal secretary, Kurt Hahn. During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry's intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis' ``strength-through-joy'' system. At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger's friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a ``universal fascist,'' in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with.
Although Hahn's powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip's arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn's school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi ``race science.'' Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the ``centrist'' Nazis.
Philip's Relatives Work for the SS
The husband of Philip's sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labor organizations. When rumors of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt's eavesdroppers, and ordered the ``Night of the Long Knives'' as a result. The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie's children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Later, Prince Philip would promote his education.
Prince Christoph's brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring's Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg's brother's wedding. According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.
In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip's uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of ``Dickie'' Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip's aunt.
Although Buckingham Palace's rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip's secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: ``The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.''
Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph's Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned ``Surveyor of the King's Pictures,'' Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip's patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten's sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip's brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.
http://tinyurl.com/32htld
Prince Philip pictured at Nazi funeral
by ANDREW LEVY, Daily Mail
6th March 2006
Prince Philip has broken a 60-year public silence about his family's links with the Nazis.
In a frank interview, he said they found Hitler's attempts to restore Germany's power and prestige 'attractive' and admitted they had 'inhibitions about the Jews'.
The revelations come in a book about German royalty kowtowing to the Nazis, which features photographs never published in the UK.
They include one of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms.
One row back in the cortege in Darmstadt, western Germany, was his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, wearing a Royal Navy bicorn hat.
Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering.
Explaining the attraction of the Nazis, 84-year-old Prince Philip told an American academic: "There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic.
"I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was."
He added that there was 'a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti-Communist and who knew what was going to happen to the regime?'
Philip stressed that he was never 'conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views'. But he went on to say there were 'inhibitions about the Jews' and 'jealousy of their success'.
Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921, the youngest of five children and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. All four of his sisters married German princes and three - Sophie, Cecile and Margarita - became members of the Nazi party.
Sophia's husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became chief of Goering's secret intelligence service and they were frequent guests at Nazi functions.
Philip went on to fight with distinction for the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen. He served with the Royal Navy where, by 1945, he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant on a destroyer and was mentioned in despatches.
All of his sisters and brothers-inlaw are now dead but he keeps in contact with his German relatives.
His comments on the family's Nazi connections appear in Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos, to be published in Britain in May.
http://tinyurl.com/zkxek
Royal Family Nazi History
July 14th, 2007
One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a “black sheep,” an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British monarchy, and the City of London’s leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer’s election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain’s planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia. Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links.
So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be “reincarnated as a deadly virus” to help solve the “population problem,” he is just “doin’ what comes naturally” for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy.
To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.
Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.
The marriages of Prince Philip’s sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip’s four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England’s Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.
Three of Philip’s brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.
Enter Prince Bernhard
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, royal consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of the current Queen Beatrix, co-founded and became the first head of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in October 1961. When the Lockheed scandal forced Prince Bernhard to resign from his most important public functions in 1971, he was replaced by Prince Philip. Prince Bernhard, like Prince Philip, whom he recruited to the eco-fascist cause, had strong roots in the Nazi movement. In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana’s daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth.
Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht’s slave labor camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard’s role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.
When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, “Heil Hitler!” William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana:
“Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when … Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.’|”
This is the man who recruited Prince Philip to eco-facism, but Prince Philip’s Nazi roots had been laid much earlier.
Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism
Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold’s father, Max von Baden, working through his longtime personal secretary, Kurt Hahn. During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry’s intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis’ “strength-through-joy” system. At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger’s friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a “universal fascist,” in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with. Although Hahn’s powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip’s arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn’s school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi “race science.” Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the “centrist” Nazis.
Philip’s Relatives Work for the SS
The husband of Philip’s sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labor organizations. When rumors of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt’s eavesdroppers, and ordered the “Night of the Long Knives” as a result. The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie’s children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Later, Prince Philip would promote his education. Prince Christoph’s brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring’s Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg’s brother’s wedding. According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.
In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip’s uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of “Dickie” Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip’s aunt.
Although Buckingham Palace’s rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip’s secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: “The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.”
Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph’s Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned “Surveyor of the King’s Pictures,” Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip’s patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten’s sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip’s brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.
http://tinyurl.com/2taod7
bin66 - 8. Dez, 00:39
