The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor

Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links.

So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be ``reincarnated as a deadly virus'' to help solve the ``population problem,'' he is just ``doin' what comes naturally'' for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy (see page 8 for more quotes from Prince Philip).

To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.

Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.

The marriages of Prince Philip's sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip's four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England's Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.

Three of Philip's brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.

Enter Prince Bernhard

In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana's daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth.

Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labor camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.

When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, ``Heil Hitler!'' William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana:

``Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when ... Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.'|''

Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism

Although Hahn's powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip's arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn's school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi ``race science.'' Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the ``centrist'' Nazis.

Philip's Relatives Work for the SS

Prince Christoph's brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.

Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring's Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg's brother's wedding. According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.

In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip's uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of ``Dickie'' Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip's aunt.

Although Buckingham Palace's rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip's secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: ``The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.''

Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph's Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned ``Surveyor of the King's Pictures,'' Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip's patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten's sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip's brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.