Queen Victoria’s great-grandson ‘persuaded Pope to overlook Nazi persecution of Jews’

A BISEXUAL Nazi prince who was a descendant of Queen Victoria held secret talks with the Vatican on behalf of Adolf Hitler to strike a deal under which the Holy See stayed silent about the persecution of Jews, a book claims.

In return, the Nazi regime promised to stop confiscating the assets of the Catholic Church in Germany and clamping down on religious freedom.

Hitler had replaced Catholic schools with state schools, supplanted Christian teachings with Nazi doctrine and shut down religious institutions in Germany and Austria.

The claims of a deal lend further weight to critics who accused Pope Pius XII – elected in 1939 and derided by some as “Hitler’s Pope” – of a cynical policy of preserving Catholic influence in Germany while turning a blind eye to the plight of the Jews.

The claims about the secret negotiations, based on documents found in Vatican archives after they were opened to scholars in 2020, are contained in The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler by David Kertzer, an American academic.

In the months leading up to the Second World War, Hitler sent Prince Philipp von Hessen, a German aristocrat, to open up a clandestine backchannel for talks with Pius XII. The prince was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and a lover of Siegfried Sassoon, the British war poet. He went to prep school at Bexhill-on-sea in Sussex, had an English governess and married the daughter of the king of Italy.

As a result of his negotiations, the Pope agreed to stay out of “partisan politics” in Germany, including what Hitler called the “racial question” – the Nazi persecution of Jewish people. His predecessor, Pius XI, had been a critic of the Nazis and Hitler was keen for the Vatican’s disapproval to end.

The talks between Von Hessen and the Pope were “so delicate that not even the German ambassador to the Holy See knew about them”, writes Prof Kertzer.