Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (Greek: Σοφία, romanized: Sofía; 26 June 1914 – 24 November 2001) was by birth a Greek and Danish princess, as well as a princess of Hesse-Kassel and a princess of Hanover through her successive marriages to Prince Christoph of Hesse and Prince George William of Hanover. An elder sister of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (husband of Queen Elizabeth II), she was, for a time, linked to the Nazi regime.
The fourth of five children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie spent a happy childhood. Her early years, however, were affected by the First World War (1914–1918) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), leading to the family's exile in Switzerland (between 1917 and 1920), and then in France (from 1922 to 1936). During their exile, Sophie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Louis Mountbatten (who supported them financially). At the end of the 1920s, Sophie fell in love with one of her distant cousins, Prince Christoph of Hesse. Around the same time, her mother had a mental health crisis which led to her confinement in a Swiss psychiatric hospital between 1930 and 1933. Married in December 1930, Sophie moved to Berlin with her husband. She then gave birth to five children.
Close to the Nazi circles, in which her husband and several of her in-laws were involved from 1930, Sophie joined the National Socialist Women's League in 1938. Sophie and her in-laws served as unofficial intermediaries between Nazi Germany and the European dynasties to which they were related. Christoph and Sophie moved into a large house located in Dahlem, in 1936. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, forced the couple to separate; Sophie moved with her children to her mother-in-law at Friedrichshof Castle in Kronberg im Taunus. Adolf Hitler's growing distrust of the German aristocracy (from 1942) and the betrayal of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (in 1943) led the Nazi regime to turn against the House of Hesse-Kassel. Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian monarch and sister-in-law of Sophie, was imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she was seriously wounded and died shortly after, while her husband, Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, was confined in Flossenbürg until the victory of the Allies. At the same time, Christoph was found dead in mysterious circumstances, leaving Sophie almost alone with her four children and a fifth one on the way, as well as the children of Philipp and Mafalda. The tragic events made Sophie turn against Nazism.
The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies brought new difficulties in the life of Sophie, who found herself in a precarious financial situation due to the theft of her jewellery by American soldiers in 1946 and the sequestration of the property of her first husband until 1953. After living for several months in Wolfsgarten, she began a relationship with another cousin, Prince George William of Hanover, whom she married in 1946. She had three more children by her second husband. The couple moved to Salem, where George William worked as director of Schule Schloss Salem (1948–1959), before settling in Schliersee (from 1959). Excluded from the 1947 wedding of her brother Prince Philip to Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom (later Queen Elizabeth II) because of her past links to the Nazi regime, Sophie was reintegrated into the royal circles in the early 1950s. She nevertheless led a discreet and withdrawn life, spending her time reading, listening to music and gardening. The last surviving sibling of the Duke of Edinburgh, she died in a retirement home in Schliersee in 2001. She was the paternal aunt of the Prince of Wales, who later became King Charles III.
Contents
Biography
Childhood
The fourth daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie was born on 26 June 1914 at Mon Repos, a palace in Corfu that her parents inherited after the assassination of King George I in 1913. Nicknamed "Tiny" by her family, the princess grew up within a united household, together with her elder sisters Margarita (1905–1981), Theodora (1906–1969), and Cecilie (1911–1937). With their mother, Sophie and her sisters communicated in English, but they also used French, German, and Greek in the presence of their relatives and governesses.
Sophie's early childhood was marked by the instability that the Kingdom of Greece experienced due to the First World War. The conflict divided her family into opposing branches, and Greece eventually set aside its neutrality due to the Triple Entente. Sophie and her sisters were in the royal palace of Athens when it was bombarded by the French Navy during the battle in the capital on 1 December 1916. In June 1917, King Constantine I, Sophie's uncle, was finally deposed and driven out of Greece by the Allies, who replaced him on the throne by his second son, the young Alexander. Fifteen days later, Sophie's family was in turn forced into exile and had to leave Mon Repos in order to remove the possibility of the new monarch being influenced by those close to him. Forced to reside in German-speaking Switzerland, the small group first stayed in a hotel in St. Moritz, before settling in Lucerne, where they lived with uncertainty about their future.
Homesickness caused by exile was not the only source of anguish for the family, however. Following the Russian Revolution, Sophie's Romanov relatives were murdered in Russia. Shortly after these events, the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, to which Sophie was closely related through her mother, was overthrown along with all the other German dynasties during the winter of 1918–1919.
At the beginning of 1919, Sophie reunited with her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Queen Olga, spared by the Bolsheviks thanks to the diplomatic intervention of the Danes. In the following months, Sophie attended a family reunion with her maternal grandparents, and met her aunt Louise and uncle Louis Mountbatten. For Sophie, who now formed a duo with her third-eldest sister Cecilie, exile was not only synonymous with sadness; it was also an opportunity for long family reunions and walks in the mountains.
On 2 October 1920, King Alexander, cousin of Sophie, was bitten by a domestic monkey during a walk in Tatoi. Poorly cared for, he contracted sepsis, which prevailed on 25 October, without any member of his family being allowed to come to his bedside. The death of the sovereign caused a violent institutional crisis in Greece. Already stuck, since 1919, in a new war against Turkey, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos lost the 1920 Greek legislative election. Humiliated, he retired abroad while a referendum reinstalled Constantine I on the throne.
Young adulthood
In 1927, Sophie met one of her distant cousins, Prince Philipp of Hesse-Kassel. Shortly after, she met two of his brothers, the twins Christoph and Richard of Hesse-Kassel at Schloss Hemmelmark, the home of her great-aunt Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine. Despite her being 13 years their junior, the two German princes soon attempted to court her and it was Christoph who managed to grab her attention. Their romance eventually ended in an engagement, which was officially celebrated when Sophie turned 16, in 1930. Around the same time, Cecilie, Sophie's favorite sister, became engaged to another member of the House of Hesse, Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse.
The happiness of the princess was however clouded by the situation of her mother, whose mental health deteriorated sharply after the celebration of her silver wedding anniversary with Prince Andrew, in 1928. Struck by a mental health crisis, the princess convinced herself that she possessed healing powers and that she was receiving divine messages about potential husbands for her daughters. She then took herself for a saint and soon declared herself the bride of Jesus. Distraught by the situation, Prince Andrew finally made the decision to place his wife in a sanatorium. He took advantage of his family's stay in Darmstadt, on the occasion of the celebration for Cecilie's official engagement in April 1930, to send Alice to a psychiatric hospital located in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
In the absence of their mother, Sophie and Cecilie made their wedding preparations together. The two princesses thus went to London, in the spring of 1930, in order to obtain new clothes. Shortly after, they returned to Paris to put together their trousseau and buy their wedding dresses. The nuptials of Sophie and Christoph were celebrated in Kronberg im Taunus on 15 December 1930. They were married in two religious ceremonies, with the Orthodox one held at Friedrichshof Castle, owned by her mother-in-law Princess Margaret of Prussia, and the Lutheran one at a church in the city. A few weeks later, on 2 February 1931, Cecilie and Georg Donatus married in the presence of their family at the Neue Palais in Darmstadt.
With their honeymoon over, Sophie and Christoph moved into an apartment in Berlin's Schöneberg quarter. After working for a long time in the Maybach car factory in Friedrichshafen, the prince had just been hired as a broker by the Victoria insurance company. While the princess moved to Germany to start a family, Greece went through a tumultuous political period, marked by numerous coups d'état. Confronted with permanent instability, the population gradually lost confidence in the institutions of the Hellenic Republic and King George II (Sophie's cousin) was finally reinstalled on the throne in November 1935.
Post-war years
The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies affected the lives of Sophie and those close to her. The United States Army entered Kronberg on 29 March 1945 and Friedrichshof was then partially occupied. Before the arrival of the US Army, the Hesse-Kassels removed compromising documents, such as books of a political nature from their library. They also hid some of their belongings, especially family gems and jewels. This precaution was not unnecessary since the American troops engaged in numerous thefts in the castle. Many objects were stolen there, and its cellars were looted while the estate's peacocks were killed and roasted in front of their owners.
In the days following the beginning of the occupation, the American intelligence services arrested Princes August Wilhelm of Prussia (7 April) and Wolfgang of Hesse (12 April). With Landgravine Margaret suffering from pneumonia, Sophie found herself in the situation of having to represent her family alone before the authorities. However, on 12 April, the American army ordered the evacuation of Friedrichshof, leaving to Hesse-Kassel family only the use of its dependencies. A week later, on 19 April, they gave them the order to leave, within four hours, the cottages they occupied in the area. Sophie and her mother-in-law had to find refuge with neighbors, and in particular with the parents of the future MP Walther Leisler Kiep.
While Friedrichshof was transformed into an officers' club by the American army, the Hesse-Kassels settled in Wolfsgarten in May, where they were received by Louis, Prince of Hesse and by Rhine and his wife Margaret Campbell Geddes, who soon took care of the younger children of Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse. The landgrave was in fact kept in detention by the Americans until 1947 and the investigation which was carried out against him as part of the denazification initiative did not end until 1950. Deprived of her husband's property, which was placed in receivership until 1953, Sophie found herself in a very precarious financial situation. Under these conditions, the death of her father Prince Andrew (who died in Monaco in December 1944) brought her a mediocre, but welcome inheritance.
Widowed since October 1943 and mother to five children, Sophie got close to Prince George William of Hanover, son of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, and brother of Frederica, Queen of the Hellenes. Encouraged by Princess Margaret of Hesse and by Rhine, their romance ended in an engagement, which was celebrated in January 1946. As the House of Hanover was related to the British royal family, George William's father had previously sought permission from King George VI to proceed with the engagement. However, with the UK and Germany still at war, the UK government banned the monarch from responding to it, except in an informal capacity.
Return to normal life
With George William having completed his law studies at the University of Göttingen in 1948, he was approached by his brother-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, to take over the management of the Salem Castle School, which had since been closed due to the Second World War. A former student of the institution, the prince then went to Scotland with his wife to meet with Kurt Hahn, the founder of the school, and to visit Gordonstoun, the establishment that the latter founded when he had to flee Nazi Germany because of his Jewish origins. For Sophie, who was very affected by the way she was treated at the time of her brother's wedding, this trip to the United Kingdom was an opportunity to discreetly reconnect with Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth.
Once in Salem, George William and Sophie settled in a large house provided by the Margrave of Baden, and the children of the princess were educated in the institution run by George William. In fact, the financial situation of Sophie and her husband remained precarious for a long time. For the princess, however, things gradually improved from 1950, when she received a small inheritance from her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. The conclusion in 1951 of the case of jewelry theft from the residence of Hesse-Kassels, and the end of the investigation into the role of Sophie's first husband Christoph in the Nazi regime in 1953 then helped to normalize her financial situation and that of her five elder children.
Sophie and her family remained in Salem until 1959, when George William gave up his post of school director. In the meantime, the couple welcomed their nieces to their home, Princesses Sophia and Irene of Greece and Denmark, sent to Salem by their father, King Paul, to complete their studies.
Once the monarchy was restored in Greece in 1946, Sophie was invited to Athens by her mother, Princess Alice, some time later, in 1948. In the years that followed, Sophie and George William got closer to their brother-in-law, King Paul of Greece, and to his family. Queen Frederica thus came to consider Sophie as her best friend. As a result, the princess and her husband were regularly welcomed at the Greek Court, and the couple was among the many personalities invited by the Greek sovereign to the "Cruise of the Kings" in 1954. Sophie and her family were also invited to Athens on the occasion of the wedding of Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark and Juan Carlos, Prince of Asturias in 1962. They were also present at the wedding of King Constantine II of Greece and Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark in 1964.
Final years
In 1988, Sophie had the satisfaction of making her mother's last wishes come true by transferring her remains to the Church of Mary Magdalene, on the Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem. A few years later, in 1993, the Yad Vashem Memorial honored Princess Alice as "Righteous Among the Nations" for supporting a Jewish family during the Second World War. Sophie and Philip, her last surviving children since Margarita's death in 1981, were invited to the Israeli capital in 1994, for a ceremony in honor of their mother. As the Spanish historian Ricardo Mateos Sainz de Medrano pointed out, there was a certain irony here, considering Sophie's past links to the Nazi regime.
The year 1994 also brought the accidental death of one of Sophie's grandsons, Prince Christopher of Yugoslavia. A science teacher at a high school in Bowmore, Scotland, the 34-year-old prince died when he was hit by a car on his way home on his bicycle. Informed by the Duke of Edinburgh while staying in the UK, Sophie was shocked by the news.
The princess spent the last months of her life in a nursing home in Schliersee, where she died on 24 November 2001 and was survived by her husband, seven children, fourteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren. Her funeral was held at Wolfsgarten Castle in the presence of many members of the aristocracy, and her remains were buried at the cemetery of St Martin's Church in Schliersee, where she was eventually joined by her second husband, in 2006.
In popular culture
Documentaries
Prince Karl of Hesse briefly discusses his mother's childhood and her ties to the Nazi regime in a documentary about his uncle, Prince Philip: The Plot to Make a King (2015). In the same documentary, it is mentioned that Princess Sophie is the author of an as of yet unpublished memoir.
Princess Sophie is also mentioned in episode 6 ("Hesse Jewels") of the second season of the documentary series Daring Capers (2001).
Film and television
Sophie features as a character in the 2009 Belgian pseudo-film noir The Hessen Affair (The Hessen Conspiracy on DVD), the plot of which centers around the theft of her jewels and the entirely fictional post-1871 Imperial German crown jewels from Kronberg Castle.
Sophie is briefly portrayed by actress Eliza Sodró in the episode "Paterfamilias" of the second season of the television series The Crown (2017).