26 June 1914: Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

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.

Childhood

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. With the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, several of Sophie's 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 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.

In the months that followed, Sophie attended a family reunion with her maternal grandparents, and met her aunt Louise and uncle Louis.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.

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), 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, 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 went to the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids at the wedding of their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress 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.

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 got into 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.

Love and marriage

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 the manor of 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.

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. Struck by a mental health crisis, the princess convinced herself that she possessed healing powers
and that she was receiving divine messages about potential husbands for her daughters. She then took herself for a saint and soon declared herself the bride of Jesus. 

Distraught by the situation, Prince Andrew finally made the decision to place his  wife in a sanatorium. 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.

In the absence of their mother, Sophie and Cecilie made their wedding  preparations together.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 in Kronberg im Taunus on 15 December 1930. They were married in two religious ceremonies, with the Orthodox one held at  Friedrichshof Castle and the Lutheran one at a church in the city. A few weeks later, on 2 February 1931, Cecilie and Georg Donatus married in the presence of their family at the Neue Palais in Darmstadt.

With their honeymoon over, Sophie and Christoph moved into an apartment in Berlin's Schöneberg quarter. After working for a long time in the Maybach  car factory in Friedrichshafen, the prince had just been hired as a broker by  the Victoria insurance company. While the princess moved to Germany 

to start a family, Greece went through a tumultuous political period, marked by numerous coups d'état. Confronted with permanent instability,  the population gradually lost confidence in the institutions of the Hellenic   Republic and King George II (Sophie's cousin) was finally reinstalled on the  throne in November 1935.

Nazi

In October 1930,Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, introduced his cousin Christoph to the politician Hermann Göring, and it did not take long for the two to form a closer relationship. Under the influence of Göring, the prince and his wife then met Adolf Hitler, who deceived them with his charm and his apparent modesty.

Under these conditions, Christoph quickly joined the Nazi Party, first secretly in 1931, and then publicly in 1933. He also joined the SS in February 1932. However, in his family, Christoph was not an exceptional case. His older brother Philipp had become a member of the Nazi Party in 1930. 

Unlike her sisters Cecilie and Margarita, who joined the Nazi Party at the same time as their husbands in 1937, Sophie never became a member of the Nazi Party.  Like her sisters-in-law, Princess Mafalda  and Princess Marie Alexandra, she nevertheless joined the National Socialist Women's League in 1938.

In fact, Sophie had long shown enthusiasm vis-à-vis the new order that was established in Germany in the 1930s. Linked to the elite of the Hitler regime,  the princess thus maintained friendly relations with Emmy Sonnemann, and was  one of the guests of honor at the time of her marriage in April 1935 to Hermann  Göring, who notably had Adolf Hitler as a witness.

From a financial point of view, the coming to power of Adolf Hitler significantly  improved the situation of Christoph and Sophie. In 1933, the prince was appointed personal advisor to State Secretary to the Prussian State Ministry Paul Körner. Two years later, Göring placed Christoph in charge of  the Forschungsamt, an intelligence service responsible for spying on the telecommunications of Nazi Germany.

Under these conditions, Sophie and her husband left their old apartment for a new one in 1933, before moving into a large red brick villa located in Dahlem in 1936.

At the same time as these events, Sophie and Christoph's family grew larger with  the successive births of Christina (1933–2011), Dorothea (1934–2002), Karl (born 1937), and Rainer of Hesse (born 1939).The birth of their eldest son was also an opportunity for the couple to underline their support for
Nazism, since the child received, among his names, that of Adolf, in tribute to the Führer.

Sophie also continued to worry about the fate of her mother Alice, whom she visited several times during the latter's confinement in Kreuzlingen between 1930 and 1933 Sophie also happily attended the weddings of her two eldest sisters, Margarita and Theodora, to German princes Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and Berthold, Margrave of Baden in 1931. She was also present at the funeral of her  sister Cecilie and her family, who were killed in a plane crash in 1937.

Sophie and Christoph also maintained their ties to their foreign relatives. The princess made several trips to the United Kingdom, and also stayed
in Italy (1936) and Yugoslavia (1939).

World War II

While Adolf Hitler imposed an increasingly totalitarian grip on German society, Christoph warned Sophie about the need to beware of prying ears and never to speak politics with people other than her sisters and cousins. Even though he probably moved away from the SS from 1934, the prince  nonetheless remained a staunch supporter of the Nazi regime. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, he spontaneously enlisted in the Luftwaffe,while retaining his post as director of the Forschungsamt.

Sophie and her four children then left Berlin to settle in Friedrichshof, near her husband's parents the Landgrave and the Landgravine of Hesse.Then began a close correspondence between the couple, which testified to the love that Sophie and her husband had for each other. Shortly after Sophie moved to Kronberg im Taunus on 28 May 1940, her father-in-law  died in Wilhelmshöhe, making his eldest surviving son Philipp the new head of the House of Hesse-Kassel. 

At the same time, most of Europe fell under Nazi rule and Sophie's parents found themselves isolated far from their children. After the invasion of France, Prince Andrew was stuck on the French Riviera
in June 1940.

For her part, Princess Alice chose to stay in Athens despite the occupation of Greece and the departure into exile of other members of the Greek royal family in April 1941.This did not prevent Sophie
from continuing to support the Nazi regime,  as illustrated by the continuation of her visits to Emmy and Hermann Göring.

Things gradually changed from 1942, when the Nazi authorities began to distance themselves from the German aristocracy.In January and October 1943, Princes Wolfgang and Richard of Hesse-Kassel
were successively dismissed from the army, without  being threatened by the Nazi regime. 

In April, the Führer placed Landgrave Philipp under house arrest, before having him confined in the Flossenbürg camp after Italy's surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943. 

A few days later, on 22 September, it was Philipp's wife, Mafalda's turn to be arrested.After two weeks of interrogation, Mafalda, who was the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, was imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she died on 27 August 1944, after being seriously wounded following an aerial bombardment. 

At the same time, searches were carried out by Obergruppenführer Josias, Hereditary Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, in the residences of Philipp and  his mother.  All these events led Sophie to open her eyes completely to the true nature of  the Nazi regime.

The tragedies of the House of Hesse-Kassel did not end there, however.  On 7 October 1943, Prince Christoph died under mysterious  circumstances  during a plane crash in the Apennine Mountains, near Forlì.

A few months later, Princess Marie Alexandra of Baden (wife of Wolfgang) perished buried during an air-raid on Frankfurt am Main on 29–30 January  1944.Widowed and pregnant with her fifth child (Princess Clarissa, who was  born on 6 February 1944), Sophie therefore found herself in a precarious 

situation, with her mother-in-law, Landgravine Margaret as her main support. Tired and emaciated, the princess was now responsible for bringing up her  children on her own, while also taking care of Philipp and Mafalda's  four children.

As Christoph's death was not made public by the Nazi regime, Sophie published a simple death notice for her husband in the Völkischer Beobachter on 18 October 1943. 

A few weeks later, in November 1943, the princess and her mother-in-law received a visit from Obergruppenführer Siegfried Taubert, commissioned by Heinrich Himmler to discreetly spy on the family. Aware of their vulnerability, the two women then refrained from expressing doubts about the conditions surrounding Christoph's death. 

Eager to know more about the fate of Philipp and Mafalda,Sophie tried, on the other hand, to obtain information from Emmy Göring, without success. At the same time, several relatives of the princess visited Friedrichshof, including her mother, Princess Alice, who managed to obtain a pass for
Germany at the end of January 1944 and stayed with her daughter until April. 

Other relatives, including her brother-in-law Wolfgang and their cousin  Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia arrived at the castle in February 1945. The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies brought new difficulties in the life of Sophie and those close to her. The United States Army entered Kronberg on 29 March 1945 and Friedrichshof was then partially occupied.

Before the arrival of the "G.I.", the Hesse-Kassels removed compromising documents, such as books of a political nature from their library. They also hid some of their belongings, especially family gems and jewels. This precaution was not unnecessary since the American troops engaged in numerous thefts in the castle. Many objects were stolen there,and its cellars were looted while the estate's peacocks were 

killed and roasted in front of their owners. 

In the days following the start of the occupation, the American intelligence services arrested Princes August Wilhelm of Prussia (7 April) and Wolfgang of Hesse (12 April).  With Landgravine Margaret suffering from pneumonia, Sophie found herself in the situation of having to represent her family alone before the authorities.

However, on 12 April, the American army ordered the evacuation of  Friedrichshof, leaving to Hesse-Kassel family only the use of its dependencies. A week later, on 19 April, they gave them the order
to leave, within four hours, the cottages  they occupied in the area.Distraught, Sophie and her mother-in-law had  to find refuge with neighbors, and in particular with the parents of the future  MP Walther Leisler Kiep.

While Friedrichshof was transformed into an officers' club by the American army, the Hesse-Kassels settled in Wolfsgarten in May, where they were received by Louis, Prince of Hesse and by Rhine and his wife Margaret Campbell Geddes,who soon took care of the younger children of Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse.

The landgrave was in fact kept in detention by the Americans until 1947  and the investigation which was carried out against him as part of the denazification initiative did not end until 1950. Deprived of her husband's property, which was placed in receivership until 1953,Sophie found herself
in a very precarious financial situation. Under these conditions, the death of her father Prince Andrew (who died in France in December 1944) brought her a mediocre, but welcome inheritance.

Love and marriage (2)

Widowed since October 1943 and mother to five children, Sophie got close to Prince George William of Hanover, son of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, and brother of Frederica, Queen of the Hellenes.
Encouraged by Princess Margaret of Hesse and by Rhine, their romance ended in an engagement, which was celebrated in  January 1946. As the House of Hanover was related to the British royal family,  George William's father had previously sought permission from King George VI to proceed with the

engagement. However, with the UK and Germany still at war, the UK government banned the monarch from responding to it, except in an informal capacity.

As her wedding was scheduled for April, Sophie was trying to convince to the American authorities to allow her to use the jewelry she left in Frierichshof and wished to wear during the ceremony. Having obtained the necessary permit, the princess and Landgravine Margaret went to the castle, where they thought they would find the jewelry that Prince Wolfgang hid in the cellar in 1943.To their dismay, 

however, the two women realized that the jewels had been stolen and an investigation was soon opened to find out what happened to them.

It was then established that on 5 November 1945, Captain Kathleen Nash,  Major David Watson and Colonel Jack Durant had discovered the jewels, whose value was estimated at £2 million at the time, and that they eventually  stole them in February 1946. Brought to justice, the three American soldiers 

were found guilty, but only some of the stolen pieces are found intact, the rest having been dismantled to be more easily sold in Switzerland.In addition,  the American government procrastinated for several years around the question of  the return of the remaining pieces, which were not given back to their owners until  1 August 1951. In the end, the family recovered around 10% of the stolen jewelry.

Under these conditions, the marriage of Sophie and George William took on a simpler form than expected. Organized at Salem Castle, property of Berthold,  Margrave of Baden (husband of Princess Theodora), the event was the occasion  for the bride to reunite with her brother Prince Philip, whom she had not seen  since 1937 and who came to Germany with his arms laden with food and gifts. 

In the years that followed, Sophie gave birth to three more children: 

Welf Ernst (1947–1981), Georg (born 1949) and 

Friederike of Hanover (born 1954).

Once the monarchy was restored in Greece in 1946, Sophie was invited to  Athens by her mother, Princess Alice, some time later, in 1948. In the years that  followed, Sophie and George William got closer to their brother-in-law,  King Paul of Greece, and to his family. Queen Frederica thus came to consider  Sophie as her best friend. 

As a result, the princess and her husband were regularly welcomed at the Greek Court, and the couple was among the many personalities invited by the Greek sovereign to the "cruise of the kings" in 1954.

Sophie and her family were also invited to Athens on the occasion of the wedding of Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark and Juan Carlos, Prince of Asturias in 1962. They were also present at the wedding of King Constantine II of Greece and Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark in 1964.

In the early 1950s, relations between the British royal family and their German  relatives in turn normalized,  and Sophie, her sisters and their husbands were all  invited to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The princesses and their families were then frequently invited to Buckingham  Palace and Sandringham House. In 1964, Sophie was chosen as godmother to her nephew Prince Edward. 

In 1978, she attended the wedding of Prince Michael of Kent (son of her cousin Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark) and Baroness Marie Christine von Reibnitz.

In 1997, she was invited, with her husband, to the celebrations for the golden wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Over the years, Sophie also developed a special relationship with Prince Charles, who received her on several occasions at his residence in Highgrove, once he had become an adult.

In 1958, Sophie and George William bought a large chalet located in Schliersee, Bavaria. Well integrated with the local population, the couple led a relatively simple and discreet life in the village. When she was not taking care of her children, Sophie would devote herself to gardening, reading and listening to  music while her husband went about his professional tasks. 

Schliersee own picture taken in 2014

In the same years, the elder children of the princess formed their own families. Princess Christina was the first of Sophie's eight children to marry, in 1956.

Over the years, Princess Alice's state of health became a source of concern  for Sophie and her family. Despite repeated requests from her children, the old  lady refused to move abroad and continued to live almost alone in Athens most of the year.

After the establishment of the Regime of the Colonels in 1967, however, Sophie went to the Hellenic capital to persuade her mother to leave Greece and settle in the United Kingdom, which she finally agreed to do.Two years later, in 1969, Alice died at Buckingham Palace and Sophie and her family traveled to London to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, she had also lost her sister Theodora, who died in Salem a few weeks before their mother.

Struck by these successive losses, Sophie accompanied, in the weeks that followed, her sister-in-law, Queen Frederica and her niece Princess Irene on a spiritual journey to India. 

Unfortunately for Sophie, this trip was not the last she would make to the Indian  subcontinent. In 1975, her son Welf Ernst left Germany with his wife and their  five-year-old daughter to settle in an ashram in Pune, with the guru Bhagwan  Shree Rajneesh. He died of an aneurysm in 1981 and was cremated in a 

joyful ceremony that deeply affected his parents. A long legal battle ensued during  which Sophie and George William challenged their daughter-in-law,  Wilbeke von Gunsteren, to win the custody of their granddaughter, Princess Saskia of Hanover, who was finally entrusted to her aunt Princess Christina.

Final years

In 1988, Sophie had the satisfaction of making her mother's last wishes come true by transferring her remains to the Church of Mary Magdalene, on the Mount of Olives, in Jerusalem. 

A few years later, in 1993, the Yad Vashem Memorial honored Princess Alice  as "Righteous Among the Nations" for supporting a Jewish family during the  Second World War.  Sophie and Philip, her last surviving children since Margarita's death in 1981,were  invited to the Israeli capital in 1994, for a ceremony in honor of their mother.

The year 1994 also brought the accidental death of one of Sophie's grandsons, Christophe of Yugoslavia. A science teacher at a high school in Bowmore,  Scotland, the 34-year-old prince died when he was hit by a car on his way home  on his bicycle. Informed by the Duke of Edinburgh while staying in the UK,  Sophie was shocked by the news.

Death

The princess spent the last months of her life in a nursing home in Schliersee, where she died on 24 November 2001 and was survived by her husband, seven  children, fourteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren.

on and around the Schliersee in Germany near Munich
own pictures taken in 2014

Her funeral was held at Wolfsgarten Castle in the presence of many members of  the aristocracy, and her remains were buried at the cemetery of St Martin's Church  in Schliersee, where she was eventually joined by her second husband, in 2006. 

Notes from the allaboutroyalfamilies blog

What an eventful life Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark had! Not only she was high royalty as the sister of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh  and a great- great granddaughter of Queen Victoria she made choices during World War II and for her family as well. Very impressing!  

Source pictures royal family of Greece: Wikipedia

Source pictures Schliersee: own pictures taken in 2014