Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (; 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.
Biography Childhood First World War and exile in Switzerland
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.
Brief return to Greece 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.
Prince Andrew was received triumphantly in Athens on 23 November 1920, and his wife and four daughters joined him a few days later. Sophie then returned to live in Corfu with her family. At the same time, Princess Alice found out that she was pregnant again. On 10 June 1921, the family welcomed Philip (1921–2021), later the Duke of Edinburgh. The joy that surrounded this birth, however, was obscured by the absence of Prince Andrew, who joined the Greek forces in Asia Minor during the Occupation of Smyrna. Despite worries about the war, Sophie and her siblings enjoyed life at Mon Repos, where they received a visit from their maternal grandmother and their aunt Louise in the spring of 1922. In the park near the palace, built on an ancient cemetery, the princesses devoted themselves to archeology and discovered some pottery, bronze pieces and bones.
During this period, Sophie and her sisters also participated, for the first time, in a number of great social events. In March 1921, the princesses attended in Athens the wedding of their cousin Helen to Crown Prince Carol of Romania. In July 1922, they visited the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids at the wedding of their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress and aristocrat Edwina Ashley.
However, the military defeat of Greece against Turkey and the political unrest that it caused disrupted the life of Sophie and her family. In September 1922, Constantine I abdicated in favor of his eldest son, George II. A month later, Prince Andrew was arrested before being tried by a military tribunal, which declared him responsible for the defeat of the Sakarya. Saved from execution by the intervention of foreign chancelleries, the prince was condemned to banishment and cashiering. After a brief stop in Corfu, the prince and his relatives hurriedly left Greece aboard HMS Calypso in early December 1922.
Exile in France
After a journey of several weeks, which led them successively to Italy, France and the United Kingdom, Sophie, her parents and her siblings settled in Saint-Cloud in 1923. Settled in a house adjoining that of Princess Marie Bonaparte, the family depended for seven years on her generosity, and two other aunts of Sophie: first Princess Anastasia and then Lady Louis Mountbatten. Marie Bonaparte financed the studies of her nieces and nephew, while Lady Mountbatten gained the habit of offering her nieces her "used" clothes. In fact, Sophie's parents had little income and the children were the regular witnesses to their money problems and their difficulty in maintaining a household.
Deprived of their Greek nationality after the proclamation of the Second Hellenic Republic in March 1924, Sophie and her family received Danish passports from their cousin King Christian X. In Saint-Cloud, the small group spent a relatively simple life. Sophie and her siblings continued their studies in private institutions, and, during their free time, their father took them regularly to Paris or to the Bois de Boulogne. He also spent long hours playing tennis with them. Every Sunday, the family was received for lunch by Princess Marie Bonaparte and Prince George of Greece and Denmark. Sophie and her family also regularly met Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and his wife Elena Vladimirovna of Russia, who had also chosen France to spend their time in exile with their daughters. Finally, they often saw their cousin Princess Margaret of Denmark, who settled in the Paris region after her marriage to Prince René of Bourbon-Parma.
Sophie and her relatives made frequent stays abroad, and in particular in the United Kingdom. In 1923, the princess was invited to London to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her aunt Louise Mountbatten to the future Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden. She returned to England in 1925 for the funeral of her great-aunt, Queen Alexandra. In 1926, she went to Italy for the funeral of her paternal grandmother, Queen Olga. A few weeks later, she returned to spend the summer in Great Britain, with her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Young adulthood First marriage and settling in Germany 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.