Royals and the Reich

http://www.newkerala.com/news2.php?action=fullnews&id=21615

Prince Philip discusses family and Nazis

LONDON: Britain's Prince Philip broke his 60-year silence about his family's link to Germany's Nazis, admitting they had "inhibitions about the Jews."

In Jonathan Petropoulos' "Royals and the Reich," the 84-year-old prince said his family was attracted to Adolph Hitler's attempts to restore Germany power and prestige, the Daily Mail reported Monday.

"There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building," he is quoted as saying. "There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic."

Philip said although he was never "conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views," they did express "inhibitions about the Jews" and "jealousy of their success."

is that they came in on the middle of a hideous depression in two countries that had just lost the last big war and were saddled with debt and hopelessness. It wasn't unusual to find people, especially people with money, who admired their abilities when it came to rebuilding their countries. I don't think anybody paid enough attention to the antisemitic rhetoric from either because people tend to tune out what they consider to be political ranting and dismiss it as propaganda and manipulation, and antisemitism was fashionable and considered sensible. In any case, both men had a lot of successes to point to during the 1930s, the type of successes that would impress anyone with money and even some without.

Then they decided they were successful enough to show the world just how nuts they really were and by the end of the war, the world was ashamed of ignoring all that ranting about the Jews. They'd been crazy enough to put it all into practice. The world was finally, if temporarily, shamed out of most vocal antisemitism.

So I can't say I'm surprised by the royal admiration of Hitler during the 1930s. It was fairly common, as scrapbooks kept by my Irish granny of a lot of newspaper articles from that time show. The papers alternated between making fun of his speaking style and mustache and admiring him for Germany's recovery. I'm sure it was the same among the royals.

"the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic" was brought on by the allies as a result of world war 1. They were in a terrible position when the depression hit. Couple that with a major fear of communism next door in russia and we all know the results.

breeds blame & exploitation of the worst order...then it spirals out of control.

He's talking about his own family, the Danish Royals, not the British Royals, correct?

Queen Victoria. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the cousin of George IV. Both were monarchs at the time of WWI and the royal family changed its name from the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor. It seems that Sauerkraut were re-named 'Liberty Cabbage' during the anti-german backlash during the war! It has been a running joke since the Hanoverian monarchy that the royals are really a bunch of Huns.

George IV, the former Prince Regent, died in 1830. Both belonged to German royal houses. In fact the Kings of England have had one common characteristic since 1066 - none of them have been English.

Both Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth II are descended from Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria was an almost completely ethnic German with a wee tad of Scots through James I via his grandaughter Sophia, the wife of the Elector of Hanover who became George I's father. When Phillip speaks of family, he might be speaking of the Danish or Greek royal families, as well as the larger clan of Mountbattens or Battenbergs who sprang from a morganatic marriage in the House of Hesse and married all over the place. Phillip is also a close relative of the ill-fated Czarina Alexandra, and a more distant relative of her husband Czar Nicholas II. And a cousin, I believe, of both the present King and Queen of Spain. It's a royal mess to sort out. Hoards of dispossessed German nobility and royalty fought on both sides of World War II and some even died in concentration camps for their opposition. Phillip's Uncle Earl Mountbatten of Burma was Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia. And his father was First Lord of the Admiralty in Britain when WWI broke out. This is all coming from my memory, but I believe it is correct in the essentials. The British royal closest to the Nazis was Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, who was by all accounts a stupid ninny.