On November 16, 1937, a Junkers Ju 52 belonging to the Belgian airline Sabena was feeling its way down through fog toward an aerodrome at Steene outside Ostend. It was a scheduled service from Munich to London via Frankfurt, diverted because the weather over the coast had closed in.
On board were eight passengers and three crew. Among them was a family: a man of 31, his wife of 26, their two small sons aged six and four, the boy’s grandmother, a nurse, and a friend of the family due to stand as best man at a wedding in London in four days. The wife was eight months pregnant.
At 14:47, the aircraft struck a brick factory chimney about 50 meters tall. It lost a wing, came down on a roof, and burned. Nobody on board survived.
When the Belgian authorities went through the wreckage, they found something the passenger list did not account for: the remains of a newborn. The official inquiry concluded that the woman had gone into labor in the air, and that this birth in progress at several thousand feet may be why the pilot tried to land in weather no one should have landed in.
Back in Darmstadt, a 14-month-old girl had been left behind with her nurse. She was now the last of her immediate family alive.
The man was Georg Donatus, five weeks into being Titular Grand Duke of Hesse. The grandmother was the Dowager Grand Duchess Eleonore. The pregnant woman of 26 was Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark, a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a member of the Nazi party for six months and 15 days, and by every account the favorite sister of a 16-year-old boy currently at a boarding school in Scotland.
That boy would become the Duke of Edinburgh.
The version of this story most people know goes like this: Prince Philip had four older sisters. All four married German princes. All four princes were Nazis. One sister had Hitler round for lunch and named a baby after him. The whole lot were banned from Philip’s wedding for being an embarrassment.
The problem is that if you only know the “four sisters married Nazis” version, you have been sold the headline and about a third of the chronology. The record is both worse and stranger than the shorthand. The four marriages were the product of a family that had come apart at the seams. The four households ended up in four very different places on the map of Hitler’s Germany. And the brother who supposedly wanted them erased spent his last wish putting their grandsons in a chapel.
So, how many of the four husbands actually held a Nazi party card? And what did that card actually mean?
The four sisters and their brother were the children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, born in 1882, and Princess Alice of Battenberg, born in 1885. Alice was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria through Victoria’s daughter Alice, who had married into the Grand Ducal House of Hesse.
The children were raised between Athens and a villa called Mon Repos on Corfu. Margarita was born in Athens on April 18, 1905. Theodora at Tatoi on May 30, 1906. Cecilie at Tatoi on June 22, 1911. Sophie at Mon Repos on June 26, 1914, five weeks before Europe went to war. Then came a gap of seven years before the only boy, Philip, was born at Mon Repos on June 10, 1921.
He was not a sibling in the playmate sense. He was the baby that four girls, the eldest of them a grown woman, helped to raise.
In 1922, after the Greek catastrophe in Asia Minor, the royal family was thrown out and Prince Andrew was put on trial. The family left in a British warship, HMS Calypso. The baby was carried aboard in a cot improvised from an orange box. A prince of Greece evacuated in fruit packaging.
The children then scattered through the drawing rooms of European relations in France and Switzerland. That was the first loss. The second was slower and worse. In 1930, Alice was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium near Lake Constance. Andrew lived largely apart from his family and later settled on the Côte d’Azur.
When a family loses everything overnight, twice, its children reach for whatever looks like absolute security. Four daughters aged 16 to 26, with a mother in a clinic and a father on the Riviera, found it in the great German princely houses. The little brother in time found it in a British naval uniform.
Between December 1930 and August 1931, 14 months, all four sisters married German princes.
Start with the youngest, because the youngest went first. On December 15, 1930, at Kronberg im Taunus, the bride was Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark. She was 16 years, 5 months, and 19 days old. The groom was Prince Christoph of Hesse, 29, the son of Landgrave Friedrich Carl of Hesse and Princess Margaret of Prussia, which made his mother a sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Christoph was not, in December 1930, anyone’s idea of a political figure. He worked in insurance in Berlin. There were two ceremonies, a Protestant service and a Greek Orthodox one. The bride’s train was carried up the aisle by a boy of nine in what was, as far as the record shows, his first formal duty as a member of anything. That was Philip.
Seven weeks later, on February 2, 1931, in Darmstadt, Cecilie, 19, married Georg Donatus, 24, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and her first cousin once removed. This was the other Hesse, the Darmstadt line, the one descended from Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice.
Their first son, Ludwig, arrived on October 25, 1931. Alexander on April 14, 1933. A daughter, Johanna, on September 20, 1936. You already know how many of those children were on the aircraft.
On April 20, 1931, at Langenburg, the eldest sister Margarita, 26, married Prince Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, 34, later the eighth prince, and himself a great-grandson of Queen Victoria through her son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. A first son died in infancy. Then came Kraft in 1935, Beatrix in 1936, Georg Andreas in 1938, and the twins Ruprecht and Albrecht in 1944.
On August 17, 1931, at Baden-Baden, Theodora, 25, married Berthold, Margrave of Baden, also 25, the son of Prince Max of Baden, who had been the last imperial chancellor of Germany. Berthold and Theodora lived at Schloss Salem on Lake Constance, a few miles from the sanatorium holding the bride’s mother. At Salem, Berthold was associated with a school run by a Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn. Hahn would shortly be forced out of Germany and would found another school in Scotland called Gordonstoun. Philip would be sent there.
Since November 1918, there had been no German thrones. The Hesses, the Badens, the Hohenlohes were heads of non-reigning houses, and their titles were in law part of their surnames. The sisters married into land, into castles, into networks of cousins reaching to Windsor and Potsdam. They did not, in any sense that would survive a lawyer, marry into the German government.
In November 1931, three months after the last of those weddings, Prince Christoph of Hesse, 11 months married to a girl of 17, joined the National Socialist German Workers Party. He did it quietly at first, with a public re-enrollment only in 1933 once membership had become respectable. In February 1932, he went further and joined the Allgemeine SS, the General SS, then still a black-uniformed party formation rather than an army.
Somewhere in that same window, Sophie’s own memoir says around 1931 to 1932, the youngest sister had the future chancellor of Germany round to lunch. The pressure to host, by her own account, came from Hermann Göring, who urged the couple to meet the man in person. She had been warned that the guest was a vegetarian, and so, as she put it, she settled for an assortment of vegetables.
What survives is her own verdict written near the end of her life, that they came away impressed by this charming and seemingly modest man. In the same passage, she wrote that she and Christoph changed our political view fundamentally some years later.
From 1933, Christoph was personal referent, in effect the right-hand man, to state secretary Paul Körner in Göring’s new air ministry. From 1935 he ran something called the Forschungsamt. It was not a research office. The Forschungsamt was Göring’s signals intelligence service sitting inside the air ministry, and its job was to listen to phone calls and telegraph traffic, domestic and foreign, on the order of tens of thousands of messages a day at its peak.
On April 10, 1935, in Berlin, Göring married the actress Emmy Sonnemann with Adolf Hitler standing as his witness. Sophie attended as a guest of honor. There is a photograph in which she is seated directly across the table from the chancellor.
On March 26, 1937, in Berlin, Sophie gave birth to her third child and first son. He was registered as Karl Adolf Andreas of Hesse. In the same year, Christoph’s brother Prince Philip of Hesse had a son christened Otto Adolf, and the godfather was Hitler in person. Adolf was still a common German name. Sophie is said to have named her son after him. Nobody has produced her saying so.
On May 1, 1937, the Nazi party reopened its doors. It had frozen mass enrollment four years earlier precisely because too many Germans had discovered their convictions in the weeks after Hitler took power. When the freeze lifted, the aristocracy queued.
On that one day, the list acquired Prince Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, number 4,023,070, and Margarita alongside him. The same day in Darmstadt, Georg Donatus and Cecilie joined. Two sisters, two husbands, one date.
The other two, Theodora and Berthold of Baden, did not join. Not that day, not later. And Sophie, the sister with the vegetables and the photograph, never held a party card at all. In 1938, she joined the NS-Frauenschaft, the Nazi women’s organization. That is not nothing. It is also not a party card.
So the count is three husbands, not four.
On October 9, 1937, the old Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse died at Darmstadt, and Georg Donatus became Titular Grand Duke. Cecilie was in name a Grand Duchess for 38 days. The family had a wedding to go to in London. Georg Donatus’ brother Ludwig was to marry Margaret Campbell Geddes on November 20. On the 16th, they boarded the Sabena flight.
Ludwig’s wedding was cancelled. He and Margaret married privately the next day, and the first thing they did as a married couple was travel to Belgium to bring the bodies home.
On November 23, 1937, in Darmstadt, the coffins of Cecilie, Georg Donatus, the two boys, and the infant born in the air were being taken to the Rosenhöhe, the family’s burial ground. In the procession walked the men of the house of Hesse. Prince Christoph in the black uniform of the SS. His brother Prince Philip in the brown of the SA. And between and beside them, a boy in a dark civilian overcoat staring straight ahead, no insignia, no armband, no salute.
He was 16 years and 5 months old. A few days earlier he was at school in Scotland. The headmaster called him into his study to tell him. He came to Germany to bury the sister who had been by every account his favorite.
The photographs are real. The boy in the overcoat is not in uniform. The men on either side of him are. A 16-year-old Greek prince, a pupil at a school founded by a Jewish exile, walking behind his sister’s coffin in Hitler’s Germany, flanked by in-laws in party dress. Nobody has ever produced a Philip party file or a Hitler Youth file because there is none. He was a mourner. He was a child, and he was standing exactly where the family had put him.
One child of that family was not on the plane. Johanna, 14 months old, had been left in Darmstadt. Ludwig and Margaret adopted her. On June 14, 1939, she died of meningitis, aged two.
Eleven weeks after Johanna’s funeral, Germany invaded Poland. The war split the family along the lines the marriages had drawn. Philip, 18, went into the Royal Navy and spent the next six years in a British uniform at sea. His four brothers-in-law went into three different German uniforms.
Berthold of Baden, Theodora’s husband, the one without a party card, was conscripted into the army as an ordinary officer, was wounded in France in 1940, was exempted from further service, and spent the rest of the war at Salem. Not a Nazi is not the same as a resistance fighter. He was a wounded Wehrmacht officer sent home.
Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Margarita’s husband, card number 4,023,070, served as a Wehrmacht officer, chiefly on the Eastern front, rose to Oberst, and was badly wounded. Army, not SS.
Christoph of Hesse, Sophie’s husband, held two ranks in two systems at once. By June 1939, he was an SS-Oberführer, a senior colonel in the Allgemeine SS, the general political SS, which is not the Waffen-SS and not a generalship. In the war itself, he served as a Luftwaffe staff officer with the rank of major, attached at various times to Fliegerkorps and to Jagdgeschwader 53 in the Tunisia, Sicily, and Malta theater.
You will also hear that he bombed Buckingham Palace or flew the 1940 raid meant to kill George VI. No flight log places him over Buckingham Palace. Until one does, the story stays in the bin.
In 1943, after Stalingrad, Hitler’s trust in the old dynasties collapsed, and an order known as the Prinzenerlass removed princes from frontline commands. Christoph was recalled from the Mediterranean that autumn.
On October 7, 1943, late afternoon in the Apennines, a Siebel C-204, a small twin-engined transport, was flying north from the Rome area toward Mannheim, carrying two men: the pilot, Wilhelm Stew, and a passenger, Major Christoph of Hesse, 42 years old. At about 5 p.m., in fog, the aircraft flew into a mountain near Monte Collino, roughly a thousand meters up, about 30 kilometers southwest of Forlì. It took two days to find the bodies.
At Schloss Friedrichshof near Kronberg, his wife was 29, with four children and about five months pregnant with a fifth. That daughter, Clarissa, was born 118 days later on February 6, 1944, to a father already in the ground in Italy.
The official cause recorded in the German military records was weather. Fog in the mountains, a small aircraft, a pilot who could not see the ridge. The revisionist version goes like this: the timing stinks. The Prinzenerlass had just stripped the princes of Hitler’s confidence. Christoph’s brother Philip had been arrested in September. A man who ran Göring’s wiretaps knew too much to be left wandering around a regime that had turned on his family.
Which version is correct? Almost certainly the first, with an asterisk nobody will ever remove. No Allied and no German document proving sabotage has ever been published. Fog in the Apennines in October is not a conspiracy. But the asterisk is real.
What Sophie did next is the part the convinced Nazi summaries leave out. Philip of Hesse was in Gestapo custody. His wife, Princess Mafalda, was deported. She died at Buchenwald on August 27, 1944. Their children needed a house. From 1943, they lived at Friedrichshof in the care of the widow of the SS-Oberführer, a woman who now in one household had her own five children and the children of a man in a concentration camp orbit and a woman who died in one.
On July 20, 1944, a bomb went off under a table in East Prussia, and the regime began hunting its own officer corps. Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg was dismissed from the army in the aftermath. The establishment version goes like this: Gottfried was implicated in the July plot, involved in Operation Valkyrie, and paid for it with his career. The revisionist version goes like this: read the documents actually cited, and you find a dismissal in the wake of the plot, and a set of biographical notices that use the word implicated without ever producing Gottfried as a named member of the inner circle.
He was dismissed after July 20. That sentence is safe. Every sentence past it is inference.
In December 1944, Prince Andrew of Greece died in Monte Carlo. Not one of his children was at his side. Europe was still at war.
In the spring of 1945, the Americans reached Kronberg and requisitioned Friedrichshof. Sophie and the children were ordered out within hours. They went to Schloss Wolfsgarten, the Hesse-Darmstadt house, and were taken in by Princess Margaret of Hesse, the British-born Margaret Geddes, whose own wedding had been cancelled by the Ostend crash eight years earlier.
The Hesse jewels, which had been hidden at Friedrichshof, were later found to have been stolen by American officers. The episode became known as the Hesse heist, and by the family’s account, only something like 10 percent was ever recovered.
On April 23, 1946, at Salem, in the shadow of the house of the one brother-in-law who never took the card, Sophie married again. She was 31. So was the groom, Prince George William of Hanover, son of Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick, and of Victoria Louise of Prussia, the Kaiser’s only daughter.
The bride’s brother came. Philip, a 24-year-old Royal Navy lieutenant, traveled into occupied Germany to attend, and he brought food, because in April 1946, that was the wedding present.
There was one guest who did not answer the invitation: the King of England. The groom was a descendant of George II, which meant that under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, his marriage needed the sovereign’s consent signified under the Great Seal and declared in council, or it would be void in British law. The Duke of Brunswick duly applied.
The paperwork survives in the National Archives as file LCO 2/3371A. What it records is this: the Foreign Office and the Lord Chancellor advised that a state of war still technically existed with Germany, and that formal consent in the manner of the act was, in their phrase, not practicable or necessary. No reply was sent. The couple married anyway, and under German law, nothing was the matter.
Two things the file does not say. It does not say a word about Sophie’s politics. The stated ground is the state of war. And it does not record consent being granted and then withdrawn.
Nineteen months later, the same brother would marry the King’s daughter in Westminster Abbey. His sisters would learn about it from a letter.
It is November 20, 1947, and Westminster Abbey is full. About 2,500 guests, two years and three months after the end of the war in Europe, watching a princess of 21 marry a naval lieutenant of 26 who has for the occasion stopped being a Prince of Greece and become Philip Mountbatten.
The number of the groom’s sisters present is zero. Margarita, Theodora, and Sophie, the three who survived Ostend, were not invited. Their mother was. Princess Alice came from Greece.
Afterwards, Alice wrote to them an account of the day for the people who had been kept out of it. And to her son, she wrote, what a pity they could not have been invited. According to Vickers, Philip sent a piece of the wedding cake to Germany. According to Philip Eade’s biography, the sisters passed the day at Marienburg near Hanover, following what they could of it on the radio.
There was no decree. Nothing was stripped, no letters patent issued, no attainder. The exclusion was guest list politics, the reasoning of a palace that had just fought Germany for six years in a country still on rations. With photographs of certain brothers-in-law in certain uniforms readily available.
Lady Pamela Hicks, Philip’s cousin and one of the bridesmaids, summarized the logic decades later with the bluntness of someone who was there: you couldn’t have the Hun.
And it lasted about a season. Before 1947 was out, Sophie and George William of Hanover were staying privately at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate as guests of Elizabeth and Philip, well away from the cameras. On June 2, 1953, at the coronation of Elizabeth II, the surviving sisters and their families were in the abbey they had been kept out of six years earlier. Too toxic for the wedding, quietly seated for the crowning.
The same year, Christoph’s coffin came home from Forlì to Kronberg.
The husbands went first. Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, card number 4,023,070, dismissed after the July plot, died at Langenburg on May 11, 1960, aged 63. Berthold of Baden, the one who never signed, collapsed suddenly at Spichingen on October 27, 1963, aged 57. A heart attack.
Then the sisters. Theodora, the pragmatic one, died at Büdingen on October 16, 1969, aged 63. Her brother was on an official tour of North America and did not make the funeral. Seven weeks later, on December 5, 1969, Alice died at Buckingham Palace, having spent her last years there as her son’s guest.
Margarita, the eldest, the sister Vickers calls the family’s resilient anchor, died at Bad Wiessee on April 24, 1981, aged 76.
In October 1994, there was a scene that no obituary of the four Nazi sisters ever seems to have room for. Philip, 73, and Sophie, 80, stood together at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to plant a tree for their mother. Alice had been named Righteous Among the Nations because in occupied Athens, according to Vickers, she had hidden a Jewish family from the Gestapo. When its officers came to question her, she used her deafness to play the bewildered old woman until they left.
The mother of four German princesses, the mother-in-law of an SS-Oberführer, a woman who the year her daughters married was in a clinic. Standing beside the tree was the sister whose first husband had run the wiretaps for Göring. Nobody made a speech about it. They planted the tree.
Sophie died at Schloss Ettal in Bavaria on November 24, 2001, aged 87, the last of the four, 64 years after Ostend. Philip, 80, flew to Germany for the funeral, as he had flown to the wedding at Salem with a parcel of food.
He died at Windsor on April 9, 2021, aged 99. He had outlived Cecilie by 83 years and 4 months. His funeral was on April 17, 2021, in St. George’s Chapel in the middle of the pandemic, which meant a congregation capped at 30. Thirty seats for the longest-serving consort in British history, and the list was drawn up according to his own wishes.
Buckingham Palace published it. On it were the Queen, the children, the grandchildren, and three names that the British press had to explain to its readers: Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden, Theodora’s grandson. Prince Philipp of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Margarita’s grandson. And Donatus, Landgrave of Hesse, head of the house that Cecilie and Sophie had married into.
Prince Philipp called the invitation an incredible honor. None of the three was a party member. All three were born long after any of this. They were there because he asked.
So, the count and the verdict. Three party cards out of four, not four. Cecilie’s and Margarita’s dated May 1, 1937, the day the freeze lifted. Christoph’s from 1931, with an SS number attached and a wiretapping office to run, which is the gravest charge in this story. One household that never signed and still sent a wounded officer home from France. One sister who never held a card, hosted the chancellor for lunch, and spent 1943 raising the children the regime had orphaned.
And a brother who wore the other uniform was kept apart from them for one wedding, and then spent 70 years refusing to be kept apart. Genuinely compromised and genuinely bereaved, often in the same house, sometimes in the same afternoon.
Four girls who had watched a country vanish and a mother taken away reached for the most solid thing on the map. And the map turned out to be Germany in 1931. Not as an excuse, but as the only explanation the calendar supports.
Thirty seats. A grandson of Theodora, a grandson of Margarita, and the head of Cecilie’s and Sophie’s house. In the chapel the sisters were never let into in 1947. A man who wanted his sisters erased does not spend one of his last 30 seats on each of their houses.