In April 1915, with the First World War raging across Europe, a baby girl was born at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. She was the first daughter of the German Crown Prince and Crown Princess, and the granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The child carried a congenital condition that many aristocratic families of the era chose to conceal, yet before the year ended, her face appeared on postcards for the public to see. Within her own lifetime, her country would pass a law to sterilize people like her, and then begin murdering them.
She lived to 65. Princess Alexandrine Irene of Prussia arrived on 7 April 1915, the fifth child and first daughter of Crown Prince Wilhelm and Crown Princess Cecilie, who came from the ducal house of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Four older brothers preceded her. Her grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm II, presided over an empire at the height of the First World War.
Most accounts place her early years at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, and the family divided its life between Berlin and Potsdam. Alexandrine carried from birth the condition now known as Down Syndrome, though exactly when her parents and physicians recognized it is unknown. No formal diagnostic record from 1915 survives for her. What is not disputed is that her family chose to raise her in the open.
The proof survives on printed postcards, each roughly 13. 5 by 8. 7 centimeters, many of which remain at Wernigerode Castle and are listed in the digital archive of Saxony-Anhalt. Two postcards from 1915 show how early this public life began.
The first, a widely distributed state postcard, shows Crown Prince Wilhelm holding the hand of his infant daughter. The second shows Alexandrine lying on a lace-trimmed cushion in a white dress, gazing toward the viewer, with her name printed in the upper corner and a dedication in Crown Princess Cecilie’s own handwriting in the lower left, assigning the postcard to the benefit of her charity. A stamp on the reverse confirms it as an official postcard of the charity’s central association. Cecilie put her newborn daughter’s face into public circulation for a cause bearing her own name.
The family kept releasing postcards of her for more than 20 years. By 1917, the postcards show a toddler. On one captioned “Princess Alexandrine on the Baltic shore,” she stands on the sand at about two years old beside a canoe in a white dress and lace-trimmed hat, looking straight at the camera with the sea behind her. A second group from the same year moves outdoors, probably in the Neuer Garten in Potsdam.
In one, she stands beside a garden bench, laughing at the camera while ivy climbs a great tree behind her. Another shows her laying blossoms into a box on a small wooden cart, and a third catches her standing in a flowering meadow. Each carries the same printed caption, calling her the “little daughter of the German Crown Prince and Crown Princess. ” A royal court photographer in Potsdam took most of them.
A surviving postcard from 1919, the year Alexandrine turned four, shows her seated in a wingback armchair with flowered upholstery, wearing a white lace-trimmed dress and dark lace-up shoes. On the back, someone wrote her name and date of birth with the words “December 1919,” then later corrected the month in pencil to autumn. The backs of these postcards hold a quieter mystery. On nearly every one, someone recorded her birth date beside the year the camera caught her, as though keeping a running tally of her age.
Nobody knows who held the pen. A pet name appears on the back of one postcard, where a hand added the name “Addini” in brackets beside her formal name. She grew up with her four older brothers and, from 1917, a younger sister, Princess Cecilie. Of the brothers, Louis Ferdinand kept the closest ties with her into adult life.
A prominent postcard from Christmas 1923 captures Alexandrine at eight years old, seated beside her younger sister Cecilie in a window niche. The two sisters dressed identically, with long hair tied up with white bows. Cecilie leans against her older sister’s shoulder while Alexandrine turns her face toward the viewer. A companion postcard from the same Christmas shows Alexandrine alone, looking straight at the viewer.
Its reverse carries her name along with the place and occasion, Oels at Christmas 1923, and then, in ink of a different color, the word “Addini” added in brackets beside her date of birth. Another postcard followed in 1926, the year Alexandrine turned 11, a head and shoulders study by a Berlin photographer, issued by a Potsdam publishing house. In 1932, at around 17, Alexandrine left home for a residential school in Jena called the Sophienhöhe, often known as the Trüpersche Sonderschule after its founder. Johannes Trüper, a pioneering educator, founded it in 1890 and developed there a new approach to the therapeutic and educational support of developmentally disabled children, one that leaned heavily on practical activity.
Alongside the residential buildings, the grounds held a swimming pool, a gymnasium, workshops, farmland, and orchards. The school treated disabled children as people capable of education. The sterilization law arrived during her time in Jena. In 1933, the Nazi regime passed the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring, which mandated forced sterilization for a list of conditions that included congenital feeble-mindedness, the very category into which the medicine of the day placed people like Alexandrine.
On paper, nothing exempted her. How the Hohenzollerns handled that threat is unknown. The documents that might settle the matter, if they survive at all, still sit unpublished. Her schooling in Jena ended in 1934, and in the same year, according to accepted accounts, Alexandrine received confirmation together with her younger sister, Princess Cecilie.
In 1939, the regime launched Action T4, a systematic campaign of murder that killed hundreds of thousands of disabled people. Alexandrine turned 24 in the year it began. Her condition placed her inside the group Action T4 targeted, but the campaign drew its victims systematically from state asylums and public medical facilities. The records of those places supplied the people it killed.
A disabled person cared for privately, outside that system, left no trace in the files Action T4 drew upon. Alexandrine lived exactly that way. Her family possessed wealth and rank, so she lived in private care at home rather than in a state asylum, and she never became part of the public medical bureaucracy that supplied Action T4. Class protected her.
In 1936, three years after the sterilization law passed, a Potsdam publisher issued yet another postcard of Alexandrine. Now a young woman of 21, she is shown in profile in a white dress with pearls at her neck. Under a regime that branded people with her condition as carriers of hereditary disease, her face still reached print under her own name. A claim now common online asserts that Crown Prince Wilhelm defied Hitler to protect his daughter, sometimes in vivid detail.
No archival evidence supports that claim. Most likely writers built it backward from the simple fact of her survival, and it risks obscuring a less flattering explanation: that a disabled woman’s life in Nazi Germany could depend on her family’s money. In 1936, the year she turned 21, Alexandrine moved to Niedernpöcking in Bavaria. She spent the years of the killing in private care rather than inside any state asylum.
Other royal families of the same decades chose very differently. The British royal family supplies two documented cases. Prince John, the youngest son of King George V, was born in 1905 and suffered from severe epilepsy and probably intellectual disabilities. In 1916, the year after Alexandrine’s birth, his family sent him to live in total seclusion at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate.
Official family photographs stopped including him after 1913, and the British public knew nothing of his condition until his sudden death in 1919 at the age of 13. In the very years when postcards of the toddler Alexandrine reached print in Germany, Prince John vanished from his own family’s photographs. The second case unfolded more slowly. Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, born in 1919, and her sister Katherine, born in 1926, shared grandparents with the future Queen Elizabeth II.
Both sisters lived with severe intellectual disabilities and never developed speech. In 1941, their mother placed them in the Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital in Redhill, Surrey. A generation later, the 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage listed Nerissa’s death in 1940 and Katherine’s in 1961, although both sisters still lived at Earlswood. For more than two decades, Burke’s Peerage treated two living sisters as dead.
The error came to light only in 1987, when a tabloid photographer gained access to Katherine by posing as a relative. Nerissa died at Earlswood in 1986 at the age of 66, and according to later reporting, no one from her family attended the funeral. Katherine lived until 2014, dying at 87. Born four years after Alexandrine, Nerissa died at 66 and Alexandrine at 65.
The two women lived almost exactly the same span of years, yet their endings could hardly differ more. Alexandrine settled in a small house near Lake Starnberg, where she spent the rest of her life. Marriage and children never came her way. She lived quietly, but not in isolation, keeping close contact with her family and above all with her brother Louis Ferdinand.
Her father, the last German Crown Prince, died in 1951, and her mother, Crown Princess Cecilie, died in 1954. Her younger sister Cecilie died in 1975, and Alexandrine outlived her by five years. Alexandrine died in Starnberg on 2 October 1980 at the age of 65. Few people with Down syndrome born in 1915 lived so long.
She lies today in the family cemetery at the ancestral Hohenzollern Castle, among the same Hohenzollerns whose court photographers once placed her face on postcards for anyone to see. Formal academic history barely mentions her. No definitive scholarly biography exists. Her modern visibility owes far more to archivists who digitized the old postcards and to internet history communities that resurface them.
Alexandrine of Prussia left no published letters and no recorded words of her own, so her view of her own life escapes us almost entirely. Small printed postcards carry her through public memory from a lace cushion in 1915 to a Potsdam photographer’s profile of her in 1936. None of them can tell us whether she felt happy. What they do reveal is that in an age when a British king hid his son and a British aristocratic family saw two living daughters listed as dead, her family put her name and face into public circulation again and again.
In a country whose laws came to brand people like her as carriers of hereditary disease, every printed caption on those postcards calls her Princess Alexandrine, and not one mentions her condition.