Recalling when royalty and the Nazis marched in step

Royals and the Reich

The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany

Jonathan Petropoulos

Oxford University Press: 524 pp., $37.50

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ONE picture in particular stands out among the many revealing photographs included in this comprehensive and engrossing book. A teenage Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark (today Queen Elizabeth II’s consort, the Duke of Edinburgh) is shown in the front row of mourners at the 1937 funeral procession in Germany of his sister and brother-in-law (Nazi Party members both), who had died in an air crash.

But what immediately grabs the reader’s attention is not just the handsome young man in his dark formal clothes, so like his own grandson William at Princess Diana’s funeral 60 years later, but the contrast Philip presents with the relatives flanking him, all of whom are in Nazi uniform. They are his three remaining brothers-in-law, including Prince Christoph of Hesse in SS regalia, as well as Christoph’s brother, Prince Philipp of Hesse, decked out in the garb of the equally sinister SA, the Nazi Party’s own army. No wonder these relatives were not invited to his wedding to Princess Elizabeth a mere two years after the end of World War II.

In “Royals and the Reich,” Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College, has made an exhaustive study of the relationship between German royalty, major and minor, and the Nazi regime, with a particular focus on the Hessian princes, Philipp and Christoph, who penetrated its core.

Each was destroyed by being caught up in that foul web, Christoph dying as a Luftwaffe fighter pilot, while Philipp went from being one of Hitler’s closest confidants to being his prisoner. (Philipp’s wife, Princess Mafalda, a daughter of Italy’s King Victor-Emmanuel III, suffered an even worse fate, dying in Buchenwald concentration camp.)

In telling their stories, Petropoulos explores many intriguing aspects, including Philipp’s affair with Jewish poet Siegfried Sassoon as well as the rumor that Christoph piloted the plane that bombed Buckingham Palace in 1940 in an attempt to kill his cousin, King George VI.

The Hessians may have gotten further up the Nazi pecking order than many of their fellow German princes, but Petropoulos makes it quite clear that they were in many ways typical.

Appalled by the revolutions of 1918, which dethroned the various ruling houses throughout Germany along with the imperial Hohenzollerns in Berlin (to say nothing of the Bolshevik revolution, which resulted in the death of relatives in Russia), the German princely and ducal families were cool to the democracy of Weimar Germany, which finished the job of taking away any special legal status they still enjoyed, along with much of their property.

This attitude led them to welcome Hitler, whom they also saw as a bulwark against communism. For his part, Hitler was happy to use German royals, from the imperial crown prince on down (the kaiser, exiled to the Netherlands, was careful to keep clear of the Nazis), to help his upstart regime gain respectability.

Hitler’s appointment of Prince Philipp as Oberprasident (chief executive) of Hesse was a prime example of this.

In the Hohenzollerns’ case, they hoped their support for Hitler would lead to restoration of their ruling house to its former imperial position, a prospect he was wont to dangle before them.

But Philipp, a member of a minor, if well-connected, house (his father was a descendant of King George II of England and his mother was a sister of the kaiser and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), had only titles to recapture, so his Nazi bona fides seem to have been more genuine than some.

In the end, Hitler’s paranoia led him to cast the princes aside. The role played by the king of Italy in deposing Mussolini in 1943 brought down the Fuhrer’s wrath not only upon the king’s daughter and son-in-law, Mafalda and Philipp, but also upon royalty in general.

Even Christoph’s death in an air crash may have been no accident.

But Hitler’s expulsion of the royals from the armed forces and Nazi elite units may have been a blessing in disguise for them, at least as far as history and their immortal souls were concerned: Because of their expulsion, the royals were for the most part not involved in the atrocities that gained intensity as any thought of German victory ebbed. And their postwar denazification was easier than it otherwise might have been, given the enthusiasm many had displayed for Hitlerism.

“Royals and the Reich” is an enthralling book, well researched in archives and through interviews, including one with the Duke of Edinburgh himself, who goes to great lengths to say nice things about his late brother-in-law, Christoph.

German royalty is a complicated network, and some additional family trees (there is only one) would have been helpful for readers trying to negotiate this maze: There is not only the House of Hesse-Kassel, to which Christoph and Philipp belonged, but also that of Hesse-Darmstadt, which includes some of the book’s other players, among them the Duke of Edinburgh.

For the most part, Petropoulos has managed to keep things straight, although there are occasional slips: For instance, he refers to Philipp as the nephew of Ernst-Ludwig, grand duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, when in fact they were first cousins once removed. But his mistakes are generally small: “Royals and the Reich” gets the big picture right -- and a disturbing, even sickening, one it is.

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Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah

Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”