LONDON: Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband has said that his family had admired Hitler and the Nazis and found the dictator’s attempts to restore Germany’s power and prestige ‘attractive’.
The surprising revelations have been made in a book about German royalty bending their knees to the Nazis and secretly approving of their policies including those towards the Jews. The book Royals and the Reich by Jonathan Petropoulos containing his comments will be published in Britain in May.
The Duke of Edinburgh was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on Corfu in 1921. He was the youngest of five children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg and their only son. All four of his sisters were married to German princes, three of whom actually become members of the Nazi party.
Prince Philip’s family links with the Hitler and the Nazis have been an open secret but this is the first time that the 84 year-old consort to the Queen has talked about them publicly. “There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building. There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic,” the Prince told an American academic. “I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was,” he added.
Talking about Hitler’s attitude towards Jews, Prince Philip said he was never ‘conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views’, but there were ‘inhibitions about the Jews’ and ‘jealousy of their success’.
Prince Philip’s brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse became head of Goering’s secret intelligence service and attended many Nazi functions. One of the rare pictures in the book shows Prince Philip’s youngest sister Sophia sitting opposite Hitler at marriage of Hermann Goering. There is also a picture of Prince Philip attending the funeral of his elder sister Cecile in Germany in 1937 where he is flanked by other relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms. Prince Philip himself fought on the side of the Allies in the Second World War before marrying the young Princess Elizabeth in 1947, five years before she became Queen.
