Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark her noisy life and tragic death

The third daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and
Princess Alice of Battenberg, Cecilie was born at Tatoi Palace, near Athens, on
22 June 1911. Baptized on 10 July, her godparents were King George V
of the United Kingdom, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, Prince Nicholas of
Greece and Denmark and Grand Duchess Vera Konstantinovna of Russia.

Childhood

Cecilie spent a happy childhood within a united household that was already made up
of two daughters, Margarita (1905–1981) and Theodora (1906–1969), and was 

further expanded with the arrival of Sophie (1914–2001). 

Cecilie's early years were marked by the instability that the Kingdom of Greece 

experienced at the start of the twentieth century. Between 1912 and 1913, Greece 

engaged in the Balkan Wars, during which Prince Andrew served under 

Crown Prince Constantine while Princess Alice worked as a nurse for wounded soldiers. 

They were, however, especially affected by the First World War, which created d

ivision between different branches of their family as Greece set aside its neutrality 

due to the Triple Entente. Cecilie 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.

Exile in Switzerland

In June 1917, King Constantine I 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, Cecilie's family was in turn forced into exile 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.

Lucern, Luzern own pictures taken in 2010

Exile was not the only source of concern for the family, however. With the fall of the 

Russian Empire in 1917, several of Cecilie's relatives were murdered in Russia.

Shortly after these events, the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, to which Cecilie was 

closely related through her mother, was overthrown along with all the other German 

dynasties during the winter of 1918–1919.Finally, the family went through some 

health problems, with Cecilie contracting the flu and scarlet fever in 1920.

At the beginning of 1919, Cecilie nevertheless had the joy of reuniting with 

her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Queen Olga, spared by the Bolsheviks 

thanks to the diplomatic intervention of the Danes.

Brief return to Greece

On 2 October 1920, King Alexander, cousin of Cecilie, 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. Cecilie 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), the future
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, Cecilie 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, Cecilie 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 went to the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids
at the wedding of  their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress
Edwina Ashley, whose beauty fascinated Cecilie.

However, the military defeat of Greece against Turkey and the
political unrest  that it caused disrupted the life of Cecilie 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. The prince and his relatives hurriedly left Greece
aboard HMS Calypso  in early December 1922.

After a journey of several weeks, which led them successively to Italy,
France and the United Kingdom, Cecilie, her parents and her siblings
settled in Saint-Cloud in 1923.

Deprived of their Greek nationality after the proclamation of the
Second Hellenic  Republic in March 1924, Cecilie and her family
received Danish passports from their  cousin King Christian X.

Her first romance

Considered by her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness
of Milford Haven, as the prettiest of the four daughters of Andrew and
Alice, Cecilie made her debut in the United Kingdom, during the summer
of 1928. Aged 17, she took part in her first ball at the Earl and Countess
of Ellesmere's Bridgewater House, before attending the
Cowes Week and then being invited by King George V to stay a few days in 

Balmoral, Scotland.

Although her two elder sisters were still single, and the relative poverty of her 

parents was not unrelated to this situation, Cecilie's family did not give up on 

finding a good match for her. Now Princess of Sweden, her aunt Louise was 

planning to betroth her to Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark, but the plan did 

not succeed.

It was finally from Germany that a suitor for the young girl arrived. Since her
childhood, Cecilie had in fact been in contact with her cousins, Princes
Georg Donatus and Louis of Hesse, whom she first met in 1919, while
she was living in exile in  Switzerland.The relationship between the
princess and Georg Donatus turned into  a romance during the year 1929
and the two were unofficially engaged in early 1930.

At that time, Cecilie was just 18 years old and Georg Donatus,
the pretender to the  throne of Hesse, was 23.

The happiness of the princess was however clouded by the situation
of her mother, whose mental health deteriorated sharply after the
celebration of her silver wedding anniversary with Prince Andrew, in 1928.

He took advantage of his family's stay in Darmstadt, on the occasion of the 

celebration for Cecilie's official engagement in April 1930, to send Alice to a 

psychiatric hospital located in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.

A royal wedding

With her sister Sophie having become engaged almost at the same time as her to 

another member of the House of Hesse, Prince Christoph of Hesse, Cecilie made 

the preparations for her wedding in the company of her younger sister, aged 16.

The two princesses thus went to London, in the spring of 1930, in order to 

obtain new clothes. Shortly after, they returned to Paris to put together their 

trousseau and buy their wedding dresses.

The nuptials of Sophie and Christoph were celebrated at Schlosshotel Kronberg 

in Kronberg im Taunus on 15 December 1930. 

The wedding of Cecilie and Georg Donatus took place at the Neue Palais in Darmstadt 

on 2 February 1931. To the surprise of the foreign guests, who expected a much 

colder welcome from a population that had dethroned Grand Duke Ernest Louis in 

1918, the wedding aroused the enthusiasm of the people, who gathered in droves to 

attend the event and cheer their former princely family.

The couple were married in a double religious ceremony, both Orthodox and
Lutheran.The ceremony brought together some fifty guests from all over Europe,

but took place in the absence of the bride's mother Princess Alice, who was still 

hospitalized in Switzerland.

After their marriage, Cecilie and Georg Donatus moved to Schloß
Wolfsgarten, the main residence of Grand Duke Ernest Louis and
his wife Grand Duchess Eleonore,  since their deposition.
In Hesse, the young couple led a relatively simple life, punctuated 

by frequent stays abroad. Cecilie was involved in several charitable
organizations and  became the head of Alice Frauen Verein, an
association dedicated to women.She also 

quickly gave birth to three children: Prince Ludwig (born 25 October 1931), 

Prince Alexander (born 14 April 1933) and Princess Johanna of Hesse 

(born 20 September 1936).

Nazi

During the 1930s, Nazism spread in Germany and several personalities of the 

elite gradually joined the movement led by Adolf Hitler. Prince
Christoph of Hesse, Cecilie's brother-in-law, thus joined the Nazi Party in 1931.
He  then joined the SS in  1932.

For their part, the princes of Hesse kept their distance from the far-right party
for a long time because the Grand Duke Ernest Louis had no sympathy for the 

Führer's ideas.However, things changed in May 1937. On that date, Georg 

Donatus and Louis, the two sons of the former sovereign, joined the Nazi Party. 

Following the example of her husband and her brother-in-law, Cecilie joined the 

party at the same time.

While in Germany the establishment of the Nazi regime prevented any plans to 

restore the monarchy, in Greece the republic collapsed after the putsch of 

General Georgios Kondylis in November 1935. Reinstalled on the throne by a 

referendum,King George II then lifted the banishment sentence issued against 

Cecilie's father in 1922. 

In November 1936, the King of the Hellenes also organized the return of the 

remains and ashes of members of the Greek royal family who died in exile. 

This event was the opportunity for Cecilie and her family to return, for the 

first time, to Greece after fourteen years of banishment.

Plane accident and death

With Prince Louis' wedding approaching, Cecilie and her family went to
Frankfurt on 16 November 1937 to get on board a plane of the Belgian company 

Sabena which was to take them to London, via a stopover in Ostend where it was 

planned to pick up two other passengers. The small group, which consisted of 

Cecilie (eight months pregnant), Georg Donatus, their two sons Ludwig (aged 6) 

and Alexander (aged 4) and the Dowager Grand Duchess Eleonore, was 

accompanied by Baron Joachim von Riedesel, chosen by Louis to be his 

witness, and Alice Hahn.

The journey started under normal weather conditions, but a thick fog
developed as the plane approached the North Sea. Despite the poor visibility, 

the pilot followed the flight plan and attempted to land at Ostend-Steene airport. 

However, during the maneuver, the aircraft struck the chimney of a factory, causing 

the destruction of a wing and an engine of the aircraft. It then crashed against the 

roof of a building, before being thrown several meters away and catching fire. 

The accident caused the immediate death of all passengers

including a newborn baby which Cecilie seemed to have given birth to in the 

middle of the flight.

Funeral

Despite the death of his family, Prince Louis married Margaret
Campbell Geddes, in London, the day after the plane crash. After
the wedding, which took place in a  climate of extreme gloom,
the couple went to Belgium to collect the remains of 

Cecilie and her family, kept until then at the civil hospital in Ostend.

Once back in Darmstadt, Louis and his wife adopted their niece Johanna,
the only  child of Cecilie and Georg Donatus not to have taken part in the
plane trip due to  her very young age.Johanna, however, died of meningitis
two years later, on 14 June 1939.

The funeral of Cecilie and her relatives took place in Darmstadt on
23 November 1937.  The event gave rise to a mass gathering but also
served as a pretext for a large deployment of soldiers in Nazi uniform.
It was also an opportunity for Cecilie's parents to meet for the 

first time since 1931.

Reconciled by tragedy, Andrew and Alice nevertheless continued separate lives 

after the funeral.The trauma of her daughter's death healed Alice, whose mental 

state returned to a completely normal level once the funeral was over.

After the ceremony, the remains of Cecilie and her family were buried in a family 

vault at the Grand Ducal mausoleum of Rosenhöhe, not far from the graves of 

Grand Duke Ernest Louis and his daughter Elisabeth.

Notes from Allaboutroyalfamilies

Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark was thus the sister of Prince
Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and a descendant of Queen Victoria as well.
This is always very interesting for the royal family ties. 👑