‘You couldn’t invite the Hun to a Royal wedding so soon after the war’
THERE was never any question on of Prince Philip’s four sisters rs being invited to his wedding ng to Princess Elizabeth. King g George decided their connection to Nazi Germany was still ill too shaming.
All four had married German an aristocrats in the Thirties. Worse, two of Philip’s brothersin-law had been active in the he Nazi party, and had ended up joining the elite ranks of Hitler’s SS and SA (the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party.).
‘So soon after the war, you ou couldn’t have “the Hun”,’ ,’ recalled Philip’s cousin Lady dy Pamela Mountbatten.
‘I think Philip understood, but ut the sisters certainly didn’t. For or years afterwards, they’d say: y: “Why weren’t we allowed to come to your wedding?”
‘ T hey weren’t exactly y Stormtroopers.’
It wasn’t until 2006 that Prince ce Philip broke a 60-year public ic silence about his family’s Nazi zi ties. Like many Germans, he explained, his family had found much to admire in Hitler’s early attempts to restore Germany’s power and prestige.
‘There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building,’ Philip explained. ‘There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of t he Weimar Republic.
‘I can understand people latching onto 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 stressed, however, that he was never ‘conscious’ of anyone in the family expressing anti-Semitic views.
Whether they did or not, Philip’s mother, Princess Alice — whose father Prince Louis of Battenberg (later anglicised to Mountbatten) was German — actually risked her life to save persecuted Jews in Athens during the war.
For her actions, she was awarded Israel’s highest award for a foreigner.
In 1994, Philip and his sister, Sophie, went to Jerusalem to receive the award posthumously on behalf of their late mother. The prince himself never had any Nazi sympathies. One of the greatest influences in his life was Dr Kurt Hahn, a German Jew who helped found Germa- ny’s Salem school — then one of the finest in Europe.
Philip was sent there at 12 at the behest of his sister, Theodora, but he lasted less than a year.
First, he got into trouble for mocking the Nazi salute, and then — when the Hitler Youth began to infiltrate the school — Theodora agreed that he should return to England.
Meanwhile, Dr Hahn was running foul of the Nazis, who couldn’t allow a Jew to educate the youth of Germany. He was arrested and imprisoned, but influential people from all over Europe, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, petitioned Hitler to set him free.
As a result, Hahn was allowed to emigrate to Britain, where he established a new school in Scotland — called Gordonstoun — which Philip joined in the autumn term of 1934.
Apart from his brief German schooling and visits to his sisters, Philip spent hardly any of his childhood in Germany. And while he may have German blood in his veins, so, too, do the Windsors — who changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1917, during World War I.
Indeed, the Royal Family still retain the German custom — introduced by Prince Albert — of opening their presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas morning.