Buckingham Palace Calls Revelation ‘Total Shock’ : Cover-Up Alleged on Princess Michael’s Nazi Father

The admission by Princess Michael of Kent, wife of Queen Elizabeth II’s first cousin, that her father was a Nazi SS officer sparked allegations today of a cover-up by Britain’s Royal Family.

Buckingham Palace said in a terse statement Monday night that the report first revealed by the Daily Mirror that morning was a “total surprise” and a “total shock” to the 40-year-old princess, unpopular with the Royal Family and known among them as “Princess Pushy.”

Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son, once said he would give his worst enemy dinner with Princess Michael.

The London tabloid said today that it was unbelievable that the princess had never known the truth about her father until now. She was born in Carlsbad, Bohemia, now part of Czechoslovakia, in the closing months of World War II. Her parents moved to Austria and later were divorced. She was reared in Australia.

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported Monday: “It is believed the princess was able to confirm the report first given in this morning’s Daily Mirror only after checking the details with other members of her family.”

At the time of the 1978 wedding of the princess, a blonde divorcee born Marie-Christine Von Reibnitz, press reports stated that her father, Silesian nobleman Baron Gunter von Reibnitz, had been thrown into a concentration camp in 1944 for anti-Nazi sympathies.

But another London paper, the Daily Express, wrote today: “If Baron von Reibnitz was in a concentration camp, it now seems likely he was a jailer rather than a prisoner.”

Von Reibnitz died two years ago in Germany.

Historian Philip Hall told the British Broadcasting Corp. that he found while researching a book on the Royal Family that Von Reibnitz was German, not Austrian as the princess claimed.

“It struck me that someone was covering something up,” he said.

The Mirror said Von Reibnitz joined the SS in 1933, obtained a position on the recommendation of Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering and ended up a major.

“The SS was Hitler’s elite. It ran the concentration camps. No one could be an officer in that fanatical corps without being implicated in its crimes,” the Mirror said.

Marie-Christine came to England in the late 1960s. In 1971, she married banker Tom Troubridge and was divorced in 1977. The marriage was later annulled.

Prince Michael, who was 16th in the line of succession to the British crown at the time he married, had to renounce his claim to the throne because the princess is a Roman Catholic.