Although the visit, Larman notes, was a “propaganda coup” for Hitler, it had immediate ramifications for the Windsors. They received so much bad press that a planned tour of America had to be canceled. The couple eventually fled to Portugal, where they lived in constant fear of being kidnapped by the Nazis as collateral and the possibility of being installed on a puppet throne in England. There, they were surrounded by Nazi agents who encouraged the loose-lipped, tipsy duke to bad mouth his family and country.
The duke held strong to the belief he could prevent a war through diplomacy. Before war between the United Kingdom and Germany was declared in 1939, he sent Hitler a telegram, imploring him to find a peaceful solution. In England, a horrified Winston Churchill decided that the Windsors’ pro-Nazi sentiments were dangerous. He eventually convinced a reluctant duke to accept the governorship of the distant Bahamas. The wayward Windsors, with their reputation permanently sullied, sailed for Nassau in the summer of 1940.
The Windsors would get off easy in comparison to other royals who were entangled with the Third Reich. As the war progressed, they learned a hard truth: If you make a deal with the devil, you end up getting burned.
By 1940, the Nazis and nobles were becoming wary and distrustful of each other, as Hitler became increasingly jealous of their popularity and wary of their motives. “Since two years my eyes have been opened,” Prince Christoph’s wife Sophie wrote in 1943. “You can imagine what feelings one has now about those criminals.”
But it was too late. The nail in the coffin came in 1944, when the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler failed. Several princes were suspected of being involved, and eventually, a large number of aristocratic men, women, and children were thrown into concentration camps, including the anti-Nazi Princess Antonia of Luxembourg and her children.
In 1943, Prince Christoph of Hesse died in a mysterious plane crash. Prince Philipp of Hesse eventually found himself in the Flossenbürg concentration camp after being arrested, according to him, “because of the suspicion of the cooperation of the Italian royal family with the overthrow of Mussolini.” Extraordinarily, Petropoulos cites that Philipp “had always believed that no one could be put into a concentration camp without a good reason. I, however, was locked up without any grounds being given.”
Even worse was the fate of his wife, Princess Malfada (who Hitler allegedly called “the trickiest bitch”). She was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where the head of the camp was the Prince of Waldeck, a distant relative of her husband. On
August 24, 1944, the princess was severely burned when the camp was bombed by Allied forces. Her arm was amputated in a botched surgery, and she died from blood loss days later.
Many royal collaborators would be arrested and tried by the Allies after the war. To this day, royal houses are still grappling with the depth of their family’s collaboration with the Nazis, as fascism attempts to seduce the Western world once again.
