Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

Greek-Danish princess

Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (Greek: Σοφία, romanized: Sofía; 26 June 1914 – 24 November 2001) was by birth a Greek and Danish princess as well as Princess of Hesse-Kassel and 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).For the young princess and her relatives, these conflicts had dramatic consequences and led to their 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 Edwina 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 was struck by 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: Christina (1933–2011), Dorothea (1934–2002), Karl (1937–2022), Rainer (born 1939) and Clarissa of Hesse (born 1944).

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.

Deceived by Adolf Hitler, whom she saw as a modest and charming man, the princess became close to Emmy Sonnemann, who became her friend and later married Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Göring in April 1935.

Attached to Nazism, Sophie and her in-laws therefore served as unofficial intermediaries between Nazi Germany and the European dynasties to which they were related.

Under these conditions, the social status of Christoph and Sophie continued to improve and they moved into a large house located in Dahlem, in 1936.

The outbreak of the Second World War, however, forced the couple to separate.An SS officer since 1932, Christoph joined the Luftwaffe, which led him to various European theaters of operation.

For her part, Sophie moved with her children to her mother-in-law at Friedrichshof Castle in Kronberg im Taunus.The Führer'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 thus 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 under way as well as the children of Philipp and Mafalda.

The tragic events made Sophie realize the true nature of Hitler's regime and 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 jewelry 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: Welf Ernst (1947–1981), Georg (born 1949) and Friederike of Hanover (born 1954).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 and attended major events of the aristocracy afterwards.

She nevertheless led a discreet and withdrawn life, spending her time through reading, listening to music and gardening.The last of the Duke of Edinburgh's sisters to die, she died in a retirement home in Schliersee in 2001, after losing one of her sons in 1981 and a grandson in 1994.

She was the paternal aunt of Charles III.