Within the barbed wire of Buchenwald, a 41-year-old princess, the second daughter of Italy’s king, met a brutal end in August 1944. Mafalda of Savoy was not an anonymous inmate. She was a member of European royalty, a woman who had once dined with Nazi leaders, now reduced to a prisoner marked for death. When Allied bombs struck a munitions factory inside the camp complex, she was gravely wounded.
The surgery performed on her arm by Nazi doctors, conducted with almost no care, became the instrument of her demise. Born Mafalda Maria Elisabetta Anna Romana in Rome in November 1902, she was the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena of Italy. As a girl, she was close to her mother, sharing a love of art and music. During World War I, while still a teenager, she visited Italian military hospitals near the front lines alongside the queen, earning her genuine affection from the Italian people.
For a European princess, marriage was a matter of state. In September 1925, Mafalda married Prince Philip of Hesse, a grandson of the German Emperor Frederick III. They had met at a garden party. But Philip and his brother Christopher were members of the Nazi Party.
Christopher later became an SS officer and was killed in a plane crash during the war. Through marriage, Mafalda gained German citizenship while remaining an Italian princess. Her husband’s political position became powerful: he acted as a go-between for the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascist government, which had taken power in Italy in 1922. Mafalda was drawn into this world of high-level Nazi dealings.
In March 1935, she was invited to a diplomatic dinner hosted by Hitler at Hermann Göring’s home in Berlin. She sat beside the British Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Anthony Eden. She and her husband were regular guests at Karinhall, Göring’s lavish hunting lodge, and were repeatedly invited to his parties. There she mingled with the wives of senior Nazis and prominent foreign figures, moving through a house full of stolen art that had become a symbol of Nazi corruption.
As war approached, Hitler’s opinion of the Italian princess soured dramatically. He came to believe she was working against the Nazis and causing problems. He described her with vicious contempt, and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, made his own crude remarks about her character. However deep her opposition to the regime, her husband Philip had come to a point of rupture.
He tried to leave his position serving Hitler but was not permitted to do so. He then began working against the Nazis, obtaining passports for persecuted people to escape the Reich, an act the regime considered high treason. Italy’s war effort was collapsing in a series of defeats. When Mafalda was informed of Italy’s surrender to the Allies, she was also told that her husband had been placed under house arrest and that her children had been moved to the Vatican for their safety.
Hitler believed she had been involved in negotiating the Italian surrender and ordered the Gestapo to arrest her. She went to the German embassy, and there she was detained. Charged with spying for the enemy, she was sent to Munich for interrogation and then to a Gestapo facility in Berlin. She gave up little information, frustrating her captors.
The historical record remains unclear on whether she was actually involved in any anti-Nazi activity. It is certain that her aristocratic status would not protect her. She was transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp. Other Italian prisoners immediately recognized her, astonished that a princess was among them as an ordinary inmate.
She was known for her kindness toward her fellow prisoners, regularly sharing the extra food rations she received as a privileged detainee with those around her. But her time in the camp was short. On August 24, 1944, Allied aircraft bombed a munitions works located within the Buchenwald complex. The destruction was massive.
A huge explosion killed 400 prisoners when the bombs fell. Mafalda was in a cell near the factory. The building collapsed on top of her, burying her under debris and severely burning her left arm. As prisoners worked to free her, she told them, “I am dying.
Do not remember me as a princess, but as your Italian sister. ” Once pulled from the rubble, her wound quickly became infected in the filth and brutal conditions of the camp. After a brief examination, the SS doctors decided that rather than treat the infection, the better course was to amputate her arm. By that stage of the war, little or no anesthetic was used in operations on camp prisoners.
The greatest immediate danger was that she would die from pain shock during the procedure. During the operation, she hemorrhaged heavily, and the doctors could not stop the bleeding. Some of her fellow prisoners believed that she was denied proper medical treatment at first, and that the SS found it convenient to let a high-value prisoner die on the operating table. She had been a prominent inmate, so there may have been attempts to save her, a fate most ordinary prisoners were not afforded.
Whether the failure was deliberate or the result of sheer medical incompetence, the outcome was that Princess Mafalda of Italy bled to death on August 26, 1944. The fate of her remains is told in conflicting accounts. One version claims her body was smuggled out of the camp and buried in a cemetery near Weimar in a coffin numbered 262, later exhumed and reburied at Kronberg Castle. Another account holds that her body was thrown out but identified, and that her fellow prisoners hurried to cremate it, cutting a lock of her hair that was smuggled to her German relatives.
The war continued, and the Nazis began clearing the camps of their prisoners, meaning she would very likely have been shot had she survived. But her path to death was sealed the moment she entered Buchenwald. Ordered by Hitler himself, her treatment was brutal and unforgiving.
In the end, the princess who had once sat at the tables of the Nazi elite died not as a political prisoner receiving a quick execution, but through a slow and agonizing end inside one of the Reich’s most infamous camps.