Prince Philip’s Forgotten Sisters: The Royal Secret Kept For 80 Years

Prince Philip’s Forgotten Sisters: The Royal Secret Kept For 80 Years 

There is a photograph from Germany, November 1937. A 16-year-old boy walks through the streets of a German city behind a row of coffins. The men standing around him have their right arms raised in a Nazi salute. He is not there for the salutes or the politics. He is there because one of his four sisters is in one of those coffins along with her husband, their two small sons, and a newborn with no name.

 The boy in that photograph will grow up to become the longest-serving royal consort in British history. He will stand for 70 years at the side of the most recognized woman on Earth. The world will photograph him 10,000 times. Almost none of those photographs feel as heavy as that one. This is the story of Prince Philip, his four sisters, and the weight a person can carry for nine decades without ever setting it down.

 Welcome to Tom Rewind and subscribe for stories you never knew existed. On June 10th, 1921, Philip was born on a dining room table in a villa called Mon Repos on the Greek island of Corfu. He was the fifth child and first son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. He had four older sisters: Margarita, Theodora, Cecil, and Sophie.

 In December of 1922, Prince Andrew was court-martialed by the Greek military government, found guilty of failures on the battlefield, and sentenced to permanent exile. A British warship intervened before the sentencing became something worse. The family had one night to leave Corfu. A Royal Navy officer improvised a cot from a fruit crate for the baby.

 That is how Philip left the only country that had technically been his, carried out in a wooden box in the middle of the night with nothing to return to. He arrived in the world on a dining room table, left it 18 months later in a fruit crate, and spent the 99 years in between inside every kind of improvised arrangement. The family settled in Paris in a house borrowed from a wealthy aunt.

 No income, no fixed future, and their parents’ marriage held together by proximity and necessity. Then, within a single stretch of months, the marriage came apart completely. By 1930, his mother, Princess Alice, had suffered a breakdown the family could not contain. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a Swiss sanatorium.

 Philip was nine. Nobody told him the full story. She was simply gone. His father found a companion on the Riviera and drifted south. He wrote occasionally, but the letters could not fill the space his presence had left. Philip was deposited in England, passed between distant relatives in a rotation of boarding schools.

 No mother, no father, no home address to write down when the term ended. He was, in every practical sense, an orphan. He just didn’t have the paperwork for it. And then, his sisters left, too. One by one, through 1930 and 1931, all four sisters married German princes and crossed to Germany. Sophie first, at 16, then Margarita, Theodora, Cecil.

 They had found households to belong to. Philip was 9 years old and didn’t belong anywhere. He described the whole sequence once, years later, in three sentences. The family broke up, my mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. So, I keep finding myself coming back to those three sentences.

 Not because they’re stoic, but because they show a sad acceptance. Philip didn’t get on with it. He ran out of other options and called it getting on. But in 1933, his sister, Theodora, made a decision that probably saved him. She had been watching him bounce between households for 2 years. She brought him to Germany and enrolled him at Salem, a boarding school on the grounds of her husband’s Berthold’s estate in Baden.

 The school was run by a brilliant Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn. For the first time in years, Philip had a dining table, a routine, and a household. Theodora fed him and kept him close. Philip was 12, and it was also the year Hitler became chancellor. Theodora understood quickly that the mismatch was dangerous.

 Philip was incapable of taking the Nazi policies seriously. He laughed when people did the Nazi salute, and that kind of thing attracted attention. Kurt Hahn was in more danger still. He was a Jewish intellectual dissident and was imprisoned within months. He would have suffered a darker fate, but eventually fled to Scotland, where he founded a new school called Gordonstoun.

 Theodora sent Philip after him. Look at what Theodora actually did there. She reached across the channel, pulled her homeless little brother in. Then, when the ground under his feet became dangerous, she pointed him toward safety and stayed behind. She couldn’t leave. Her husband ran the estate. Her children were German.

 There was no equivalent exit available to her. So, she gave him hers. Theodora and Berthold kept their distance from the Nazi regime throughout the 1930s. By 1944, Berthold was dismissed during the aftermath of the aristocratic conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. When the plot failed, he was dismissed from the army.

The households Philip’s older sisters were moving in a very different direction. Margarita’s husband, Gottfried, joined the Nazi party in 1937. He was not really a fanatic, though. He was a German army commander moving with the current. He, too, ended up in the 1944 assassination plot. The war, it changed something in him.

Sophie’s husband, Christoph, never had that arc. He was an SS officer running intelligence operations out of the Reich Air Ministry under Hermann Göring. And around 1931, before Hitler had even taken power, Sophie and Christoph invited him to their apartment for lunch. Sophie wrote about it in her old age.

 She described Hitler as charming, modest, impressive in his vision for Germany. She named her first son, Karl Adolf, after him. She acknowledged in the same memoir that she and Christoph came to see things very differently in later years. But in those early years, she had believed. She named a son after Hitler and spent the last 60 years of her life walking that back.

 Then there was Cecil. Cecil and her husband, George Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, joined the Nazi party together in May 1937. They had three children: sons Ludwig and Alexander, and a daughter, Johanna, who had just turned 1. Six months after joining the party, Cecil boarded a plane in Frankfurt. It was November 16th, 1937.

 She was 8 months pregnant. The flight carried her husband, her two young sons, and her mother-in-law. Johanna stayed behind in Darmstadt, too small for the journey. They were flying to London for a family wedding. The weather closed the Brussels airport and forced the pilot towards Ostend instead. Somewhere over Belgium, Cecil went into labor.

 The pilot began his descent through heavy fog. At 27 minutes to 3:00 in the afternoon, the aircraft clipped the chimney of a brick factory near the airfield. The wing tore away. The plane’s fuselage hit a building and the plane burst into flames. Everyone aboard died. When investigators reached the wreckage, they found the body of a newborn boy.

 Seconds ago, the boy had a mother, a father, two older brothers, and a grandmother, but he lost all of them at once, and they lost him, too. He has no name in any record. The documents just list him as unnamed son. Philip heard the news in his headmaster’s study at Gordonstoun, and the shock nearly consumed him.

 He traveled to Germany for the funeral. It was there that the photograph was taken. And then, there was Johanna, 14 months old, the only surviving member of Cecil’s immediate family. Her uncle Ludwig, who had been the intended groom on that London trip, married his bride days after the crash and adopted Johanna.

 20 months later, in June 1993, she developed meningitis and died at only 2 and 1/2 years old. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, who had recovered from her breakdown, was at Johanna’s bedside near the end. She said afterward that the unconscious child so closely resembled her mother at the same age that it felt like losing Cecil all over again.

 Johanna’s whole existence was a sequence of survivals. She survived the crash that killed her entire family. She survived 14 months as an orphan, but she didn’t survive being 2 and 1/2 years old. In 1938, Philip’s English guardian, Lord Milford Haven, died of cancer. His father was still on the Riviera. His sisters were in Germany.

 In September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. If you’ve stayed this long, you already know what the channel’s called. Please subscribe. He joined the Royal Navy at 18. His brothers-in-law reported to their fronts. Gottfried to the Eastern Front, Christoph to the Luftwaffe. They were, in all in a technical sense, doing their duty.

 What that word means depends entirely on which side of the channel you’re standing on. Philip went to the Mediterranean on British destroyers. He was 19 at the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, helping track Axis cruisers through the dark. His commanding officers described him as outstanding. But this is the part of the war that almost nobody talks about.

 While he was scanning the night sky for enemy aircraft, somewhere in those same formations was a man who had sat across the table from him at his sister’s house. A man he had met. Man whose children were his nephews and nieces. Philip was 19 years old and firing at his family’s husbands. He didn’t call it that. He never called it anything.

 I wonder if that silence was discipline or maybe something heavier than discipline. The kind of weight that you carry by never naming it. Meanwhile in Athens, his mother was doing something that nobody would know about for 50 years. Princess Alice had recovered from her breakdown and returned to Greece. She had no money and almost no influence.

When the Nazi occupation of Athens began in 1941, she was living a building that happened to sit yards from a German garrison. Yet, she used it to hide Rachel Cohen, the widow of a Jewish parliamentarian the royal family had known for decades. Along with Rachel’s daughter, Tildy, and her son, Michael. They lived there for 13 months.

 The Gestapo came to question Alice at least once. She was congenitally deaf and she used it pretending not to understand the questions until the officers gave up and left. Now, I’m not sure that I know a cleaner example of someone turning a limitation into a weapon. At some point during those 13 months, some of Alice’s daughters came to visit with their husbands.

 SS officers in her home while a Jewish family was hidden on another floor of the same building. There is no record of what Alice said or did in those moments. There’s only the fact that Rachel Cohen and her children survived the occupation. One floor apart. The same war, two entirely different choices about what to do with it.

 As the war raged on, Christoph’s Luftwaffe aircraft went down over Italy in October 1943. Sophie was 29 years old with five children and now no husband in the middle of a war her country was losing. Then Philip’s father died in 1944 still in Monte Carlo. The war ended in 1945 and life moved on. Philip was 24 years old and in love with the king’s daughter.

 He had been writing to Princess Elizabeth since 1939. He asked King George VI for permission to marry her. The king said yes with one condition. No announcement until Elizabeth’s 21st birthday. He must have understood even then what the wedding would cost him. On November 20th, 1947 in Westminster Abbey, Princess Elizabeth walked down the aisle in a silk and crystal gown designed by Norman Hartnell in front of 2500 guests and a BBC radio broadcast reaching 200 million listeners.

 Philip waited at the altar in his naval uniform. On the family side of the church, the pews were almost empty. His mother was there in the gray habit of the small religious order that she had founded, the only representative of a family he had been born into. His three surviving sisters were not there. King George VI had made the decision.

Two years after the war, the British public was still raw. German-born sisters-in-law with documented connections to the Nazi regime sitting in pews at a royal wedding broadcast to the world, that was not a calculation that would end well for anyone. Philip understood. His cousin, Lady Pamela Hicks, later said that he grasped the necessity.

 He had been compressing the gap between who he was privately and what his public position required since he was a teenager. One more sacrifice. One more thing filed under duty. But his sisters didn’t fully understand. Privately afterward, they asked him, “Why weren’t we allowed to come to your wedding?” There is no record of what he said back.

 Theodora had crossed the channel in 1933 and given him the only stable ground he’d known since Paris. Cecil was dead, but Margarita was alive. Sophie was alive. They were the only people on Earth who had known him before he was anybody. They watched the broadcast from Germany like everyone else. What came after the wedding is not a reconciliation story.

 In 1994, he traveled to Jerusalem for a ceremony at Yad Vashem. His mother had been recognized as righteous among the nations for sheltering the Cohen family. He stood at the memorial and planted a tree in her name. Sophie came with him. The woman who had named a son after Hitler stood at the Holocaust memorial with her brother to honor their mother for hiding Jewish people from the Holocaust. It’s not ironic.

 It is what 60 years of Sophie living with her choices actually looks like. Sophie became godmother to his youngest son, Edward. When she died in November of 2001, 87 years old in a care home near Munich, Philip was 79. He didn’t make the funeral. He went to the memorial service. In April 2021, Philip’s coffin was carried into St.

 George’s Chapel at Windsor. He had made one explicit request about the arrangements. His German relatives were in the pews. Donatus, the current head of the House of Hesse, a great nephew, a grandson of the world Philip had been required to leave behind was there. The boy in that 1937 photograph was carrying five coffins that day.

 He spent the next 84 years adding to that weight quietly, without complaint, and without ever once putting it down.