[images and
captions added by this website] Sunday, January 16, 2005
German roots
still a royal embarrassment by Richard Woods WHEN Harry appeared in Nazi
uniform it left the rest of his family suddenly
looking naked. In an instant, years of painstaking
effort to smooth over the royals' past were
stripped away as memories and suspicions of royal
links to Hitler's Germany were
resurrected. The house of Windsor springs from the marriage
of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert in
1840. He was the son of the Duke of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in Germany and his name became
that used by the British royal
family. David
Irving comments: THUS, four days late,
The Sunday Times, London, though
without acknowledgment, picks up the
threads of the story I revealed
on
January 13 --
Hermann Göring's birthday, as
folks of a certain age will recall. They have still
played down Prince Philip's other
next of kin -- the gauleiters and SS
generals who married all his
sisters, all of whom lived in Nazi Germany
during WW2. I wonder why. |
A bit of a mouthful, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha turned
out not to be Albert's real surname, which was
Wettin, the name of another aristocratic German
dynasty. It was only in 1917 that George V, worried by
the anti-German feeling caused by the first world
war, ordered the royal family to scrap
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Wettin for Windsor. Matters are still not that simple. The name of
the royal house is Windsor, but the surname of the
Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh
[Prince
Philip] is Mountbatten-Windsor. The duke
is also from the house of
Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg and so,
arguably, are his heirs. However, more
embarrassing than names the length of a bus are
the family's links to Nazi Germany. The duke is
Greek and some of his relatives sympathised with
the Nazis; others joined them. One brother-in-law, Prince Christoph of
Hesse, was a member of the SS and flew fighters
that attacked allied troops in Italy. In fact, so
many of Philip's relatives had Nazi links that when
he married Princess Elizabeth he was
severely limited on the guests he could invite. Like most of the British aristocracy in the
1930s, George VI and his wife, the late
Queen Mother, hoped to
avoid war with Germany. The king sent
birthday greetings to Hitler weeks before Germany
invaded Poland. More notoriously, his brother, the former
King Edward VIII, who became the Duke of
Windsor after abdicating in 1936, was sympathetic
towards Hitler. Even in 1970 he told one
interviewer: "I never thought Hitler was such a bad
chap." The
duke and his wife, Wallis Simpson, had
visited Germany in 1937 and were taken to meet the
Führer. When they left, Hitler said of
Simpson: "She would have made a good Queen." Suspicions lingered that if Hitler had
successfully invaded Britain, he might have tried
to make the duke king again. Confidential files
released in 2003 revealed that Nazi officials
thought the duke was "no enemy to Germany" and
would be the "logical director of England's destiny
after the war". Last year files released from the national
archives revealed how a former head of British
naval intelligence thought the duke's return was a
real possibility. The British admiral, who had
attended Hitler's 1937 Nuremberg rally, featured in
an MI5 report as having said that Hitler "would
soon be in this country, but that there was no
reason to worry about it because he would bring the
Duke of Windsor over as king". Other royals also had links to the Nazis. Baron
Gunther von Reibnitz, the father of
Princess Michael of Kent, was a party member
and an honorary member of the SS. And the brother
of Princess Alice, a great-aunt to the Queen, was a
Nazi who said that Hitler had done a "wonderful
job". Picture
above: Duke of Windsor (and Robert Ley his host)
greeted by Hitler, October 1937 (from David
Irving's archive. Walter Hewel colelction -
Hewel is standing on the steps in dark
suit.) Related item on this website: -
Queen
Mum wanted peace with Hitler
-
Churchill's
fury at Duke of Windsor
|