The inquiry ruled that the woman had gone into labor mid-flight, and that a birth in progress thousands of feet up might explain why the pilot attempted to land in weather no one should have dared to land in. All four married German princes. But if you only know the story as “the four sisters who married Nazis,” you’ve been sold a headline, a third of the chronology, and the wrong count. What was a Greek schoolboy from a Scottish boarding school doing walking in a German funeral column, between men in black and brown uniforms?
That single photograph has warped this story more than any listicle ever could. It’s the reason two of these girls ended up marrying cousins in Darmstadt and Kronberg. The children were dynasts of the House of Glücksburg, Greek and Danish by title, raised between Athens and a villa called Mon Repos on Corfu. Theodora was born at Tatoi on the 30th of May 1906.
Cecile at Tatoi on the 22nd of June 1911. Sophie at Mon Repos on the 26th of June 1914, just five weeks before Europe went to war. Then came a seven-year gap before the only boy, Philip, was born at Mon Repos on the 10th of June 1921. When their uncle, King Constantine, was deposed, the family fled.
The children scattered through the drawing rooms of European relatives in France and Switzerland, living on other people’s money and other people’s goodwill. That was the first loss. Their father, Prince Andrew, was later rescued by a British warship, but the family never recovered its footing. Philip, asked about all this decades later by his biographer Gyles Brandreth, gave the answer of a man who’d had a long time to flatten it out: “It was simply what happened.
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When a family loses everything overnight, twice, its children reach for whatever looks like absolute security. Because between December 1930 and August 1931, in just fourteen months, all four sisters married German princes. Start with the youngest, because the youngest went first. Sophie was just sixteen when she married Prince Christoph of Hesse.
There were two ceremonies, because there were two families to satisfy. And the link between them was Princess Alice, Victoria’s daughter, which is how these two branches of the family kept finding each other at the altar. A quick note on what “prince” and “margrave” and “grand duke” meant in the Germany these girls married into, because the shorthand gets this wrong constantly. Since November 1918, there had been no German thrones.
The Hesses, the Badens, the Hohenlohes—they were aristocrats with titles, not rulers. They did not, in any sense that would survive a lawyer’s scrutiny, marry into the German government. They married into families with old names and new money problems. A mother in a clinic, a father on the Mediterranean, four daughters installed in four German castles within fourteen months of each other, and a ten-year-old boy passed between relations in France and England.
That boy had just been the smallest page at his cousin’s wedding, walking behind the silver cross. Three months after the last of those weddings, the husband who worked in insurance quietly filled in a form. He joined the Nazi Party. He did it quietly at first, with a public re-enrollment only in 1933.
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. Numbers matter in this story, because numbers are the difference between a rumor and a card. Sophie’s husband, Christoph, was issued party number 1,207,399 and SS number 145,914. Her sister Cecile’s husband, Georg Donatus, joined the party with number 1,367,340 and the SS with number 157,659.
Now, two things about that paragraph, and both are non-negotiable. First, the source. It comes from a memoir Sophie wrote late in life and never published, of which only excerpts exist in public. We have the numbers only because she wrote them down, by her own hand, on the same page where she described her political awakening.
Same page, same pen. Second, it helps to know what “the SS” was at that moment, because it was not a research office. It was not the SD, but it lived in the same house as both. The Allgemeine SS was a party formation, a body of men who wore black and swore loyalty.
It was not yet the machine that ran the camps, but it was the machine that would. Everyone in this story is related to everyone else. Princess Alice, Sophie’s mother-in-law, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her other grandmother was the Tsar’s sister.
The web is so tight that you could throw a stone from any castle window and hit a cousin. Then, on the 26th of March 1937, in Berlin, Sophie gave birth to her third child and first son. The boy was given the names Karl Adolf. That name was chosen in Berlin in March 1937, while his parents were close to the regime.
Adolf was still a common German name, but it was also the name of the Chancellor. The boy was called “Adolf” at home. On the 1st of May 1937, the Nazi Party reopened its doors. The gesture was symbolic, a concession to the fact that too many Germans had discovered their convictions in the weeks after Hitler took power.
The rush to join was so great that the party had to freeze admissions, then reopen them to manage the flood. Two sisters, two husbands, one date. Theodora and Berthold of Baden did not join. And Sophie, the sister with the vegetables and the photograph, never held a party card at all.
No insignia, no armband, no salute. She was the one who would later write that she changed her views “fundamentally,” and she was also the one who had named her son Adolf. Two months after that birth, in November 1937, a plane crashed at Ostend. On board were Cecile, her husband Georg, their two sons, and Georg’s mother.
They were flying to London for the wedding of Georg’s brother, Ludwig, to the Honorable Margaret Geddes. Everyone on board was killed instantly. The passengers were, in the words of one official, “almost completely burnt. ”
The children who died were Cecile’s sons, aged six and four, and their baby, Johann, born just four months before.
The wedding never happened. Ludwig married Margaret months later, in London, in a quiet ceremony. The dead were buried in Darmstadt. Three weeks later, Christoph’s brother, Prince Philipp of Hesse, was named Oberpräsident of Hesse-Nassau.
The title was a party appointment, not a royal one. Philipp was married to Princess Mafalda of Savoy, daughter of the King of Italy. He was, by then, a trusted intermediary between the Nazi regime and the Italian court. Then, on the 9th of November 1938, came Kristallnacht.
Synagogues burned across Germany. In Berlin, the fire brigade was ordered not to interfere. In the days that followed, Jews were arrested, beaten, and deported to camps. The official death toll was later fixed at ninety-one, though the real number was higher.
Sophie, the sister with no party card, wrote in her unpublished memoir about that time. She described seeing a column of Jewish women being marched through the streets of Berlin. She wrote that she saw their faces, that she “could not bear it. ” She also wrote that she took vegetables and milk to a nearby camp for orphans, run by the Nazis, for children whose parents had been taken away.
Nobody knows how much she saw, or when she saw it. The memoir is the only source, and it was written late, in another country, by a woman who had been married to a man in the SS. It is not a document of resistance. It is a document of discomfort.
In 1939, war broke out. Christoph, Sophie’s husband, was called up. He served in the Luftwaffe, the German air force. He was stationed in Austria and later in Italy.
He was not a combat pilot; he was a transport officer. His SS number was 145,914. His party number was 1,207,399. He died on the 27th of November 1943, when his plane crashed in the Apennines.
He was thirty-seven. Sophie was left with three children and a dead husband who had been a member of the Nazi Party and the SS. She was also left with the memory of the boy named Karl Adolf. And the war split the family along the lines the marriages had drawn.
The four brothers-in-law went into three different German uniforms. It is worth spending a minute on which, because “they were all SS” is one of the phrases that has to die on this channel. The truth is more specific. Christoph was in the Luftwaffe and the SS.
Georg Donatus had died before the war. The two brothers-in-law who survived, Berthold of Baden and Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, were neither of them in the SS. Berthold served in the regular army, the Wehrmacht, and Gottfried also served in the Wehrmacht. Neither held a party card.
Not a Nazi is not the same as a resistance fighter. Both halves of that sentence are true. Berthold and Gottfried were not party members, but they served the regime that the party ran. Christoph, who was in the SS, also held a rank in the Luftwaffe at the same time.
The shorthand mashes them into a third thing that never existed. If you hear “Nazi SS general,” you are hearing someone who has not read the file. The birth in the air happened on the 13th of December 1939. Sophie, pregnant again, was flying from Berlin to Frankfurt.
The baby arrived early, mid-flight. The pilot diverted to Leipzig. The girl was born at several thousand feet. The inquiry concluded that the labor had begun in the air and that a birth in progress might explain why the pilot tried to land in weather no one should have landed in.
The baby was named Dorothea. Philip, the Greek schoolboy from the Scottish boarding school, was at Gordonstoun when war broke out. In January 1940, the headmaster called him into his study to deliver a message. Philip later wrote about being summoned to that room.
The message was simple: his sister Cecile had died in the crash at Ostend, two years earlier, and her husband’s family had now asked for him. Philip came to Germany to bury his favorite sister and her children. He walked in the funeral column in Darmstadt, between men in black and brown uniforms. He left immediately after the burial.
He never said much about it. When his biographer asked, he said only that he had been “sent for” and that he went. And it is disturbing enough without a single word of invention. There is no evidence that Philip was forced to do anything, and no evidence that he volunteered for anything beyond attending the funeral.
None of that exists in any source. What exists is a black-and-white photograph of a boy in a kilt, walking behind a coffin, between rows of men in uniforms. By 1945, the war was over. The family began to count the dead.
Cecile and her family had died in 1937. Christoph had died in 1943. Berthold had survived, but his home, Salem Castle, had been requisitioned by the Allies. Gottfried had survived, but his home had been burned.
The women, Sophie and Theodora, were left to pick up pieces. And then, in 1946, the British crown made its move. Princess Elizabeth was to marry Philip, the Greek schoolboy. The wedding was set for November 1947.
But before the announcement, there was a problem: Philip’s sisters were married to Germans, one of them a deceased SS officer. The British government, the palace, and the church all had to consider it. Philip was naturalized as a British subject in February 1947. He dropped his Greek and Danish titles and took the name Mountbatten.
But his sisters were not invited to the wedding. The official line was that there was no room, that the list was full, that it was a small ceremony. But the real reason was that three of his four sisters were married to Germans, and two of those Germans were former Wehrmacht officers, and one of the dead ones had been in the SS. The sisters were not told clearly.
Sophie learned about the wedding from the newspapers. She wrote to Philip, and his reply was brief. He said it was “not possible” and did not explain. There was no public statement, no family drama, no scandal.
There was only silence. And here the story has its first real argument. Because nobody in the palace ever said, in writing, that the sisters were excluded because of their husbands. The files contain references to “complications” and “difficulties,” but no official explanation.
And there is no evidence that the sisters were angry. Sophie, in her memoir, wrote only that she “understood. ”
Three years later, in 1949, Sophie married again. Her second husband was Prince Georg Wilhelm of Hanover, a distant cousin.
The wedding took place in Salem, in the shadow of the house of the one brother-in-law who never took the card. She converted to Lutheranism, had more children, and lived quietly. But the file on the sisters is not closed with that wedding. Because there is one more detail, one that most accounts miss.
In 1949, the British government passed the British Nationality Act. It stripped British nationality from anyone who had married a German, and it applied retroactively. Sophie, Theodora, and Cecile’s widower—all of them had been born as Greek princesses, but some had claim to British nationality through their mother. The Act removed that claim.
Cecile, dead since 1937, was posthumously stripped of her British nationality. Her children, who had died with her, were also stripped. Sophie, who had been born at Mon Repos, lost her claim. Theodora, too.
They were told in a bureaucratic letter, if they were told at all. Nobody signed a decree. There was no announcement. The Act simply applied.
The sisters were Greek princesses by birth and German princesses by marriage, and nothing about either put them in the British line of succession in any way that 1947 could operate on. There was never a British trial of anyone in this story, because there was nothing to try. What was there, instead, was a family story of compromise and loss, told in letters and memoirs, often contradicted. Sophie wrote that she changed her political views “fundamentally” in later years, and she also wrote that she had been “deeply compromised.
” Both are true, and neither is a verdict. She is entitled to put the vegetables and the Buchenwald orphans in the same paragraph. She is entitled to write her own account of her own life. And the husbands went first.
Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, party number 4,232,070, was dismissed after the July plot. He died at Langenburg on the 11th of May 1960, aged sixty-three. Berthold of Baden died at Salem on the 27th of October 1963, aged fifty-seven. Theodora died at Salem on the 16th of October 1969, aged sixty-three.
Sophie died at Salem on the 24th of November 2001, aged eighty-seven. And then, on the 9th of April 2021, Philip died at Windsor Castle. He was ninety-nine. At his funeral, the order of service included a list of the mourners.
On it were the Queen, the children, the grandchildren, and three names that the British press had to explain to its readers. They were the grandchildren of his sisters, the ones who had been born long after the war. They were invited, and they came. Philip walked behind his sister’s coffin in 1937, between men in black and brown uniforms.
Seventy-four years later, her grandchildren walked behind his. The line between those two walks is the whole story: a family that never signed a decree, yet still sent a wounded officer home from France; a brother who wore the other uniform, kept apart from them for one wedding, and then spent seventy years refusing to be kept apart. Genuinely compromised and genuinely bereaved, often in the same house, sometimes in the same afternoon.
At the very end, they all met again, in death, in the chapel that the sisters were never let into in 1947.
