On November 20th, 1947, inside Marianberg Castle, somewhere in the bombed countryside of Lower Saxony, three women lean toward a wooden radio set. Static crackles through the speaker. A BBC announcer reads a guest list from Westminster Abbey. foreign princes, exiled kings, dethroned emperors, ambassadors of countries no one in Europe could locate on a postwar map. The list grows long.
Not one of those names belongs to the women in the room. The bridegroom in London happens to be their younger brother. His name now reads as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatton, recently of his majesty’s Royal Navy, freshly minted Duke of Edinburgh, and within hours the husband of the future Queen of England. None of his sisters appear in any photograph from the day, and none ride in the carriage processions.
Their absence from the order of service required several months of careful drafting by Buckingham Palace courtiers who treated the exclusion with the cold mechanical attention diplomats normally reserve for border treaties. The news reels never mentioned them. Wedding albums printed for the gift shop trade left them out entirely, and for the next 18 years, the British press would behave as though Prince Phillip had grown up an only child.
So, how did three German princesses, blood relations of the future queen, end up listening to a royal wedding on a kitchen radio in a defeated country? Why did the crown work so hard to bury them? What exactly lay buried in the family history London needed to scrub before the cameras began rolling at Westminster Abbey? The answer involves four marriages, one plane crash, two vermarked uniforms, one SS rank, an intelligence agency that wiretapped half of Berlin, and a public relations operation so successful that even most modern royal biographers spent
decades trying to recover the truth. Long before everything happened, a family in Athens slowly lost its country. Prince Andrew of Greece, younger son of King George I, lived an unsteady existence of military command and royal procarity. His wife, Princess Alice of Battenburgg, born deaf at Windsor Castle, grew up across three languages and learned from childhood to read lips in any of them.
Four daughters arrived in rapid succession between 1905 and 1914. Margarita, Theodora, Cecilei, and Sophie. The boy came last. Philillip born in 1921 on a kitchen table at the family villa Monreos on Corfu arrived seven years after his closest sister as the only son in a household of girls who would scatter across Europe before he reached his teens.
In 1922, the Greco Turkish War ended in catastrophe. Greek armies broke under Turkish counterattack across Anatolia and King Constantine, Andrew’s brother, faced a second forced abdication. An Athens military tribunal executed six senior officers for treason. Prince Andrew, charged with disobedience for his conduct at the Battle of Sakaria, came within a week of joining them at the firing wall.
British intervention saved him. King George V, alarmed at the prospect of yet another murdered cousin so soon after the Russian massacres of 1918, dispatched the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Calypso to evacuate the family from Corfu. The infant Philillip traveled across the Mediterranean in an orange crate converted into a cot.
Family members disembarked in Bindesy and settled in a borrowed house in St. Cloud on the western edge of Paris. No savings cushioned them. The household ran on charity from wealthier Battenburgg relatives and the slow generosity of the French branch of the family while no Greek pension ever arrived to ease the situation.
Within a decade the family disintegrated. By 1930, Princess Alice had collapsed under a severe nervous breakdown and entered Belleview Sanatorium in Switzerland under the care of psychiatrists who included briefly and ineffectively Sigund Freud. Prince Andrew abandoned the household for the French Riviera, where he lived modestly on borrowed money and the affection of a mistress until his death in a Monte Carlo hotel room in 1944.
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Philip lost his mother at 8 and he would not see her again for 5 years. The four daughters, meanwhile, did what unprotected princesses of fallen houses had done for centuries. They married between 1930 and 1931. The sisters walked down the aisle in a rolling sequence of weddings across central Germany.
Sophie married first in December 1930 at the age of 16 to Prince Kristoff of Hess followed by Cecile who wed Gayogd Donatus of Hess in February 1931. Margarita took her vows opposite Gotfrieded hereditary prince of Hoen Loh Langenberg in April and Theodora joined herself to Berthold Margrave of Ben in August. The whole sequence took eight months.
To outside observers, this resembled a triumphant rescue. Within a single calendar year, four daughters of a broke, exiled, dishonored royal house, had married into the highest tier of the German hawk. The surviving princely families whose castles and estates had outlived the collapse of the Kaiser. Family finances stabilized, social standing recovered, and the younger brother, scattered between English boarding schools and occasional summer visits, suddenly enjoyed four wealthy households across Germany, willing to
take him in for the holidays. Philillip spent much of his childhood ricocheting between these four sisters. Shul Schllo Salem accepted him as a pupil through Theodora’s family connection until the rise of Nazi power forced his transfer to Gordontown in Scotland in 1934. Summers at Wolf’s garden with Cesily passed in long walks through Hessen Forest on Margarita’s estates in Bon Vertonberg he hunted and in the gardens at Friedri’s Hov Sophie’s small children played beside him.
By every available account, those years marked the happiest period of his disrupted boyhood. The trouble lurking behind those castles between 1931 and 1939 belonged to the Germany taking shape around them, the one about to absorb every one of his brothersin-law. The four brothersin-law experienced the Third Reich very differently.
Bertld Margarave of Ben ranked the cleanest. His family treated Hitler with open coldness from the beginning. Abaden grandfather had occupied the office of imperial chancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Berthold’s father had founded Schulish Los Salem in part to produce a German elite resistant to authoritarian politics, a project whose Jewish co-founder Curt Horn fled to Britain in 1933 to escape arrest.
Bertold himself protected what he could of the school and of Salem Abbey. When war came, the Vermachar conscripted him and posted him to the invasion of France in 1940 as a cavalry left tenant where Shellfire wounded him badly near Swissons. That wound ended his active military career, after which he spent the rest of the war managing his estates and quietly negotiating around the regime he never trusted.
Allied dennazification tribunals cleared him entirely. Gotfrieded of Hoen Lohi Langenborg occupied a grayer position. He formally joined the Nazi party on May 1, 1937 with membership number 4 million23,070. May 1, 1937 fell. On the same day, the party reopened its roles after a 4-year freeze on new members, and tens of thousands of opportunistic German aristocrats joined in a single coordinated wave designed to protect their estates and businesses.
Gotfrieded rose to obus lightnant in the vear. Eastern front shrapnel left him severely wounded. After the war, British military authorities classified him as a mitifer, a follower, which sat below the more serious categories of major offender or activist. He kept Schllo Langenburgg kept his name and carried that classification for the rest of his life.
His grandson still occupies that castle today. Gayorg Donatus of Hessa held roughly the same shade of gray. He and Cecilier joined the party together on May 1, 1937, swept up in the same enrollment wave as Gotfrieded. Hessian historians have generally read the membership as an attempt to protect family interests inside the Grand Duchy of Hessie and by Rin where the Nazi regional administration kept making increasingly aggressive demands on aristocratic estates.
Whether Gayogdatus held strong ideological convictions remains a question no archive has fully resolved. He died alongside Cecile before he could either prove or disprove them. And then there came Sophie’s husband, the fourth brother-in-law. He happened to be the one no quantity of post-war public relations could ever quite scrub clean. Prince Kristoff of Hess joined the Nazi party in 1931 at the age of 20.
The party still wielded no national power, still operated none of the institutions that would later make membership lucrative or coercive, and offered nothing in 1931 except ideology and street violence. He then entered the SS in 1932. By the time war broke out, Kristoff wore the rank of SS Oberfura, a senior officer grade roughly equivalent to a brigadier in modern terms.
He moved through the inner circles of the regime with the easy familiarity of someone present since the beginning. Herman Guring counted him as a personal friend. Kristoff named his first son, born in 1937, Carl Adolf. The middle name a tribute to the furer. His most consequential appointment came in 1935. The forong samp research office functioned as Guring’s secret intelligence service.
Officially, it studied radio frequencies. Actually, it tapped phones. Its lines reached foreign embassies in Berlin, cabinet ministers, generals, Jewish families, dissident, journalists, and rival Nazis whom Guring did not trust. It produced what its analysts called brown pages, daily intelligence summaries circulated to the top of the regime.
It grew into one of the most powerful instruments of Nazi state surveillance. The office’s founder, Hans Shyf, died in April 1935 from what official records labeled suicide. The historian Jonathan Petropolis, who spent years inside the Hessie family archives, has noted that the circumstances never received satisfactory explanation, and that several senior figures inside the regime carried reasons to want Shy dead.
Whatever happened to Shyf, his replacement already stood ready. Guring appointed Prince Kristoff of Hess, the husband of Prince Philip’s favorite sister, Sophie, as the new lighter of the forong Sant. Petropolis has documented the next several years in detail. Kristoff and his elder brother Philip of Hess functioned as aristocratic ornaments for the regime, lending old names and older castles to the Nazi project of legitimizing itself before the European elite.
They appeared in news reels, their photographs running in glossy Reich propaganda magazines beside their wives and children. Hitler dined at family estates. Sophie, by every account she later gave, threw herself into the role with the same enthusiasm. Decades later, in an unpublished memoir written near the end of her life, Sophie described a 1935 dinner with Hitler.
She recalled finding him charming and seemingly modest. Hugo Vickers, who reproduced the passage in his work on Princess Alice, also recovered the qualification that always disappears in the internet versions of the quote. Sophie added that she and Kristoff had changed our political views fundamentally after the war began. Whether that change felt real, retrospective, or convenient depends on which historian you ask.
Kristoff died on October 7th, 1943. His plane crashed into a mountainside in the Italian Aenines during a Luftvafa transport flight. After the war, family members floated the story that he had grown disillusioned with the regime and that Himmler’s people had quietly murdered him. Petropolis working from the actual flight records and the contemporaneous Luftvafa accident report found no evidence for that account.
The crash matches exactly what officials recorded at the time, a wartime aviation accident in poor weather. Sophie reached 28 that autumn. She had five children to raise on her own. The youngest, Clarissa, born only two months before her father’s plane crashed into the Apenines. Prince Phillip’s brother-in-law had run Guring’s wiretap service.
No public relations operation in Buckingham Palace history could ever make that disappear. On November 16, 1937, a Sabina Airlines Junkers J52 lifted off from Frankfurt that morning bound for Cuddon Aerod Drrome south of London, but weather over the English Channel had collapsed into thick autumn fog.
Visibility along the Belgian coast dropped to almost nothing. At approximately 10:50 in the morning, the pilot Tony Lamot attempted an unscheduled landing at Steen Aerad Drrome near Ostend. The aircraft clipped a brick factory chimney at low altitude and burned on impact. 11 people died, including the entire passenger manifest. Six of those passengers belonged to the house of Hess.
Princess Cecile, Prince Philip’s third sister, then 26 years old and 8 months pregnant, sat among them. Her husband, Gaog Donatus, who had inherited the titular Grand Duchy of Hessie, only 5 weeks earlier, occupied another seat. Their two young sons, Ludvig and Alexander, aged six and four, traveled with them. Their traveling companion, Guorg Donatus’ mother, Elleonor, the Daaja Grand Duchess, completed the family party.
An infant daughter, Johanna, had stayed behind on the ground with a Dharmstat nurse, and Menitis would take her life the following year. The family had traveled toward London for the wedding of Gayorg Donatus’ younger brother, Prince Louie of Hess. The ceremony had originally fallen on a date in October. Ernst Ludvig, the head of the house of Hessie, had died in early October before the wedding could take place.
Family members postponed by six weeks out of morning and then chose this particular November flight to reach England in time for the rescheduled ceremony. A widely repeated detail from royal biographies asserts that Princess Cecile went into labor during the flight and that the pilot attempted his desperate ostend landing precisely because a woman lay giving birth in the cabin.
The story has stuck for nearly 90 years. It traces back to contemporaneous press coverage which reported that rescuers found the remains of a newborn infant in the wreckage near Cecilia’s body. Aviation forensics specialists familiar with high energy crash dynamics have long pointed out that the violent decompression and blunt force trauma of an aircraft impact can produce what pathologists call post-mortem fetal expulsion.
Catastrophic abdominal injury forces a near-term fetus out of the body in the moments around death. An infant’s presence in the wreckage proves only that Cecile had carried the child close to term. It does not prove she had entered active labor in the cabin. Lambot’s exact motivation for descending into the ostend fog will probably never come to light.
What the record documents in detail begins with what came afterward. The funeral took place 6 days later in Dharmstat. Prince Louie, the bridegroom whose wedding had vanished into delay, married his bride Margaret Gettis in a quiet civil ceremony in London on the morning of November 17, then traveled directly to Germany for the burial of his entire immediate family.
Princess Alice of Battenburgg, released from a Bavarian sanatorium for the occasion, met her son Philillip in Dharmmstat for the first time in years. Heavy press coverage followed the procession. 16-year-old Prince Phillip walked at the front of the Cortez, the youngest male member of the family present, dressed in a dark suit and overcoat against the November cold.
He marched between Lord Mount Batton on one side and his cousin Prince Philillip of Hessie on the other. Behind him followed relatives in the full uniforms of the SA and the SS. Crowds lined the streets of Dharmstat and many raised their right arms in the Hitler salute as the coffins passed. That photograph survives. It appears in almost every serious account of the British monarchy’s complicated relationship with the Third Reich, and it exists as the visible, undeniable evidence that one of the future Queen of England’s brothersin-law would soon
become a permanent diplomatic catastrophe. In November 1937, the image resembled nothing more than a family in mourning. By 1947, the same photograph would become a document the palace urgently needed to keep out of newspapers. 2 years after the funeral in Dharmstart, the British and German branches of Prince Philip’s family went to war with each other.
Philip entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in May 1939, three months before the invasion of Poland. He had renounced his Greek titles only the year before, and now traveled for naval purposes as Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, 18 years old, foreign by birth and uncertain by nationality. The British state had no idea what to do with him.
An extinct king for an uncle, cousin, relationships across British royalty and brother-in-law connections to multiple serving vermarked officers created a diplomatic puzzle. He also ranked demonstrably among the most able cadets the college had seen in years. The Royal Navy decided to take the chance. He commissioned as a midshipman in January 1940.
By the autumn of that year, he sailed aboard HMS Valiant in the Mediterranean. In March 1941, during the night battle of Cape Matapan against the Italian fleet, he ran the search lights that illuminated the Italian cruisers Zara and Fume for the British battleships to destroy. The action sank three Italian heavy cruisers and two destroyers and killed more than 2,300 Italian sailors.
Philillip received a mention in dispatches and the Greek war cross. At precisely the same period, two of his brothersin-law fought on the Eastern Front. Gotfrieded of Hoen Loh Langenborg suffered serious wounds near Smolinsk in 1941. Gayorg Donatus’ younger brother, Prince Phillip of Hess, worked as a liaison officer between Hitler and Mussolini, a role he performed inside the inner circles of the regime until Italy’s surrender in 1943, brought his arrest by the Gestapo and imprisonment in Flossenberg and Darow concentration camps. Kristoff of Hessie
remained at the forong samp transferred to a Luftvafer staff position and then died in the 1943 plane crash. Berthold of Ben inided out after his wound in France sat the war out on his estates. The three surviving German sisters did what their class did during war. They managed households and sometimes sheltered refugees moving west ahead of the Red Army.
Sewing, cooking with rationing cards, raising their children, and listening anxiously to news from Russia filled the days while they tried not to think about the brother fighting on the wrong side. Philip and his sisters held almost no contact for 6 years. Mail across the lines remained impossible. Diplomatic channels stayed closed.
The Red Cross occasionally passed brief notes between separated families, but the rules limited messages to 25 words and forbade any reference to military matters, location, or politics. Notes that survive between Philillip and Sophie, between Philillip and Theodora, between Philillip and Margarita read brief, blank, and almost unbearably restrained. I am well.
The children are well. Mother is in Greece. Sentences that could pass any sensor in Berlin or London. Decades later, in a rare moment of reflection, Philillip would describe the period with the flat practicality that became his lifelong defense against sentimentality. It was simply what happened. The family broke up.
My mother was ill. My sisters were married. My father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. He carried on, fought, survived, and returned to a Britain whose surviving public memory held no patience for the complications of a divided family. In the late summer of 1947, the British government, the royal household, and the personal advisers of King George V 6th sat down to draft the guest list for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth.
The bride’s side drafted itself. A groom’s side opened a nightmare. Philip’s mother passed every political test. Princess Alice of Battenburgg had spent the war in Athens where she sheltered a Jewish family, the Coins, in her apartment for the duration of the Nazi occupation. Yadvashm would later honor her as righteous among the nations.
Deaf, eccentric, and about to found an Orthodox nursing order and wear a gray nun’s habit to the ceremony, she still carried a clean political record. Philip’s father had died years earlier. That problem solved itself. Philillip’s surviving sisters opened a different matter entirely. Margarita’s husband Gotfrieded had carried a Nazi party card and a vermarked commission.
Theodora’s husband Bertold had worn the vermarked uniform, though minimally. Sophie remained the widow of an SS Oberfura who had directed the forong samp and her second husband Gueorg Vilhelm of Hanover had also held a vermarked commission. Cecile lay dead killed at Ostend a decade earlier but the absence of one sister could not compensate for the presence of three.
In the autumn of 1947 the British public held no appetite for German aristocrats on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Bread rationing had begun in 1946, two years after the war ended. Meat still came under ration, as did tea, while whole districts of the east end of London still lay in rubble. The Nuremberg trials had concluded 11 months earlier.
News reels had shown the British public the gates of Bellson, the ovens of Avitz, the bodies stacked along the rail sidings. anti-German feeling in Britain in 1947 ran higher than at any point during the war itself. The decision came down through Buckingham Palace. Three German sisters would not receive invitations. In private memoranda, the decision traced back to King George V 6th and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother working in consultation with the Foreign Office and the Lord Chamberlain.
Royal household courtiers received instructions to manage the matter discreetly. No formal announcement would issue. Press desks would simply not learn of the existence of the German relatives. Photographs from Philip’s childhood that included his sisters would not reach release. Official engagement portraits would foreground his Mountbatten heritage and his British naval career.
The word German would never appear in any official statement about the bridegroom. Margarita, Theodora, and Sophie learned of the exclusion through private letter. They accepted without public complaint, knowing their realities and understanding, perhaps better than anyone in London, what the optics of a German princess in the abbey would do to their brother’s marriage.
They listened to the wedding on the radio at Marionberg Castle. When the BBC announcer signed off, they switched off the set and walked to lunch. No record survives of what they discussed. Behind the exclusion of the three sisters stood one of the most determined image management operations in 20th century royal history.
Its architect, Lord Mountbatton. Louie Mountbatton, born Prince Louie of Battenburg in 1900, had spent his entire adult life remaking himself as the most British member of his German family. His father resigned as first sea lord in October 1914 during a wave of anti-German hysteria over the family’s Battenburgg surname.
The same hysteria had pushed King George V to abandon Sax Cobberg Gothur in 1917 and rebrand the dynasty as the House of Windsor. Mountbatton grew up watching his family disappear behind a screen of English nouns and English uniforms. He understood with surgical clarity what it took to gain admission into the inner ring of British royalty.
He spent the 1930s and 1940s applying the same lessons to his nephew. Philip arrived in Britain in 1928 as a Greek prince of mixed German, Danish, and Russian heritage. Born on a Greek island raised in France with most of his immediate family resident in Germany, Mount Batton began the long, slow work of converting him into a credible English naval officer.
He arranged Philillip’s transfer from Shul Schlloth Salem to Gordontown, paid much of the school fees from his own income, supervised the boy’s holidays, and pushed him toward the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. Renunciation of Greek and Danish titles followed. So did the use of Mount Batton, the anglicized version of Battenburg, as a new surname when Philip received naturalization as a British subject in February 1947.
That naturalization involved its own quiet slight of hand. Philip’s three German brothersin-law could not appear in the parliamentary documents. Foreign relative lists required for a home office application underwent careful truncation. The foreign office collaborated as did the home office as did the Privy Council.
By the time Philillip walked into Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947, his official British identity contained no German relatives at all. Mount Batton had achieved his life’s project. He had successfully converted a foreignb born prince of a deposed dynasty into the husband of the next queen of England with no diplomatic incident and no public scandal.
The sisters paid the price of the operation and Mountbatton paid it without apparent regret. Queen Mary, the bridegroom’s grandmother-in-law, supported the effort with the cold institutional memory of someone who had lived through 1917. She remembered crowds throwing rocks at German shop windows in London and her own husband signing the proclamation that erased Saxs Cobberg Gothur from the family name.
She had no intention of repeating the experience. King George V 6th signed off because his throne required it. The crown had outlived four European monarchies in the space of 3 years. Italy voted out the Seavoi dynasty in 1946. Bulgaria scrapped its kingdom that same year. Romania pushed out its king in December 1947. Yugoslavia had abolished its monarchy back in 1945.
The British monarchy remained the only one of the original Saxs Cobberg Gotha cousinhood still standing in Western Europe and George V 6th held no intention of testing public patience with a balcony full of Hessian princesses. The exclusion of November 1947 stretched into permanence. The sisters visited the United Kingdom privately and saw their brother and their sister-in-law in small family gatherings at Windsor and Sandringham.
Theodora and Margarita became godmothers to several of Philip and Elizabeth’s children. Sophie remained particularly close to Princess Anne, the secondborn, and would later become her informal European confidant. They wrote, they telephoned, they sent presents at Christmas, and the relationship endured behind a wall of silence the British press maintained without ever putting the policy in writing.
That relationship simply never reached photographs. The coronation of 1953 illustrates the policy at its most precise. All three sisters received invitations. None appeared in the carriage processions or reached the official coronation portraits. They sat in Westminster Abbey, but at positions the photographers briefed by the royal household did not cover.
The ceils that defined the public image of the new queen included Philillip’s mother in her gray habit, but none of his sisters. A casual viewer of the coronation footage in 1953 could have watched the entire broadcast and concluded that Prince Philillip had grown up with his mother and no one else.
Authorized biographies of Philillip during the 1950s and 1960s repeated the same omission. Basil Booth’s 1971 official biography written with the Duke’s full cooperation discusses his German sisters with the brevity of a man trying to clear a throat. Their names appear without descriptions. Marriages get mentioned, the husbands do not, and the war years fold over while the page turns.
When pressed by occasional journalists, the palace returned the same line. The Duke maintained close family relations with his surviving sisters. His sisters had not received invitations to certain public events out of consideration for their own privacy. Nothing further to add. A great deal further could indeed have been added.
The royal household simply preferred not to add it. The sisters themselves rarely spoke to the press. When they did, they did so in German to German publications in tones that made British editors uncomfortable enough to leave the material alone. Sophie gave one notable interview in the early 1980s in which she discussed her first marriage with unscentimental honesty, acknowledging her family’s support of the regime and her own youthful enthusiasm for it.
The interview ran in stern. It did not reach British newspapers in any detail until decades later. The silence held. Across 18 years, the British monarchy operated a kind of half-agnowledged, neverstated, fully understood policy of editorial erasia regarding the German wing of the Mountbatton Windsor family.
That policy came up for review in May 1965. In May 1965, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip made the first state visit of a British monarch to West Germany since the 1909 visit of King Edward IIIth. The trip lasted 11 days and covered seven cities. Diplomats on both sides treated it as the largest single act of repair between the two countries in the 20 years since the end of the war.
That same trip quietly opened the door for Philip’s sisters to return to the official photographic record. On May 24, the royal party visited Schllo Langenberg, the seat of the Hoen Loey Langenburgg family in Bardenberg. Princess Margarita had reached 60 years of age. She greeted her sister-in-law, the queen, on the steps of the castle, in front of carefully arranged press photographers and a delegation of West German officials.
Photographs ran in the British papers the next day, captioned with brief neutral descriptions. Princess Margarita, sister of the Duke of Edinburgh. Schllo Langenberg, family seat of the Hoen Lohi Langenberg family. A first visit by the queen. Later in the same trip, the royal party traveled to Salem, the estate of the Margrave of Ben, where Theodora hosted her sister-in-law for lunch.
Sophie attended the same gathering. Three sisters, two of them widowed, all of them in their 50s and 60s, sat at the lunch table with the Queen of England for the first time in any setting. The British press received permission to acknowledge. Photographs from that lunch read, “By royal standards, almost domestic in their ordinariness.
” The sisters wear pearls, the queen a printed silk dress, and Philillip stands behind his chair with his arms folded. Nothing dramatic emerges from the images, and that fact carries the point. Those images had to look undramatic, suggesting that the German relatives had always sat quietly there, always received visits, always belonged to the family.
Previous absence from the public record vanished retroactively through the simple production of new images. The 1965 visit did not erase 18 years of editorial suppression, but it did establish that the suppression no longer applied. From 1965 forward, the sisters held visible status again, free to appear in photographs, in names, and in mentions across British newspapers that had behaved for two decades as if they did not exist. The press relaxed its grip.
Margarita died in 1981 at Bad We See. Theodora having died in 1969. Sophie, the last surviving sister, lived until November 2001. She outlived her brother’s wife by a year, her brother by 20 years, and her first husband’s regime by 56 years. In her last interview given in German to a regional Bavarian paper, she discussed her brother with deep affection and her first marriage with what her interviewer described as a kind of weary archaeological precision.
The interviewer asked whether she had forgiven the British press for the years of silence. She replied that nothing required forgiveness because she had never expected anything different. That answer carried perhaps the most honest assessment any member of the family ever gave of the situation. On April 17, 2021, Prince Phillip received burial at St.
George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. The Duke had died 9 days earlier at the age of 99. Pandemic regulations restricted the funeral to 30 guests. The royal household, working with Philillip’s own pre-arranged plans, drew up the guest list with the careful precision of an estate executive. Three of the 30 seats went to German relatives.
Bernhard, hereditary prince of Ben, Theodora’s grandson, attended on behalf of his line. Prince Donatus, landrave of Hessie, the head of the modern house of Hessie and descendant of Sophie’s second marriage, attended on behalf of his. Prince Philip Hoen Lohi Langenburgg, Margarita’s grandson, attended on behalf of his.
The princes numbered three, one for each surviving German line. three men whose grandfathers had worked for the regime that Britain had spent the autumn of 1947 trying to scrub from the family record. They arrived because Philillip had asked for them to arrive. He had drafted the list himself over the preceding decades, reviewed it, updated it, and insisted against the natural caution of the palace that the three German lines receive representation at his own burial.
Footage of the funeral ran on every British network. The German princes received names in the official commentary. Their relationships to the Duke received description, and their grandfathers received no mention. Royal household policy had moved after 74 years from active erasia to selective acknowledgement, but not yet to full disclosure.
The grandfathers with their party numbers and their SS ranks and their forung offices remained outside the official narrative. Philillip’s final correction landed here, incomplete. Given what had undergone suppression for the previous three quarters of a century, it amounted to the most that the institution could publicly admit. Even today, the family the palace tried to bury has not gone anywhere.
The Hohen Lohee Langenburgg still live at Schllo Langenburgg. The house of Ben still owns Salem. And the house of Hess still occupies its estates near Frankfurt. grandchildren and great grandchildren of Margarita, Theodora, and Sophie hold their titles, manage their forests, run their wine estates, and occasionally appear in the foreign news pages of British papers when one of them marries.
That institution, Buckingham Palace, spent 18 years pretending did not exist, remains, as of this recording, very much in business. Their brother walked into Westminster Abbey on November 29, 1947 and joined the royal family of the United Kingdom while the cameras of the British Empire recorded every step. They listened on a radio in Lower Saxony.
