Tea with Hitler

The Secret History of the Royal Family and the Third Reich

Dean Palmer

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750995641
• eBook ISBN: 9780750997034
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

After the Second World War, war crimes prosecutors charged two of King George VI's closest German relatives with 'crimes against humanity'. American soldiers discovered top-secret documents at Marburg Castle that exposed treacherous family double-dealing inside the Royal Family. Two of the King's brothers had flirted dangerously with the Nazi regime in duplicitous games of secret diplomacy.

To avert a potential public relations catastrophe, George VI hid incriminating papers and, with Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt's help, whitewashed history to protect his family. Three of Philip Mountbatten's sisters were banned from Westminster Abbey and the wedding of their brother to Princess Elizabeth because their husbands were senior Nazi officers.

This dilemma was Queen Victoria's fatal legacy: she had hoped to secure peace in Europe through a network of royal marriages, but her plan backfired with two world wars.

Tea With Hitler is a family saga of duty, courage, wilful blindness and criminality, revealing the tragic fate of a Saxe-Coburg princess murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme and the story of Queen Victoria's Jewish great-grand-daughter, rescued by her British relatives.

1

CLAREMONT

Claremont House, Surrey. 19 July 1884.

Twenty steps led from the drive to a giant portico supported by four Corinthian columns. Claremont is a vast Palladian-style mansion set in leafy parkland designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Prince Charles Edward, Queen Victoria’s twenty-eighth grandchild, was born here on 19 July 1884. He was named after the romantic, failed Scottish rebel, Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) because his father, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, was obsessed with Scottish history.

Leopold never held his son in his arms; he died from a cerebral haemorrhage caused by haemophilia four months before Charles Edward was born, leaving behind a 13-month-old daughter, Princess Alice, and a German wife, Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont. Resultantly, at the moment of his birth, Charles Edward immediately became His Royal Highness, Prince Charles Edward, the Duke of Albany.

Princess Helen was from an insignificant German principality near Darmstadt. Pictures show that the princess was tall with a beautiful figure, very dark hair, deep-set dusky brown eyes and a sweet smile.¹ Growing up in Waldeck, she excelled academically and worked as the superintendent of the local infant schools, where she devised the curriculum. Helen was never told of her husband’s illness until the Royal Family announced their engagement. Her family, particularly her pushy mother, was so overjoyed about the prospect of an advantageous marriage into the prestigious British Royal Family that health details did not matter.²

At 25 years old, Helen became a dowager, with two small children and reduced status. Her annual income was cut from £25,000 to £6,000 and suddenly she was a poor relation.³ However, Helen’s biggest problem was the constant interference from her mother-in-law. Queen Victoria pried into every aspect of Helen’s life. The Queen refused to allow Helen to install central heating at Claremont and she even appointed the children’s nanny, Nanna Creak, feeling that Helen was too young to decide such matters. Nanna Creak doted on Alice but could not handle Charles Edward’s temperament, which was ‘delicate, nervous and tiresome’.⁴ His jumpy behaviour frustrated her so much that she left, and Queen Victoria felt distinctly annoyed by her disloyalty.

As was customary with aristocratic Victorian children, Charles Edward and Alice saw their mother at set periods only, usually in the late afternoon when they ate their supper at a little table in their mother’s sitting room. When the children finished their food, they stayed with her until bedtime. The family would sit there in the gaslight, their mother reading while the children worked on painting or knitting. Even little Charlie learnt to knit. By way of incentive, the Duchess would hide a small bronze animal in a giant ball of yarn which the children could have on finishing the wool.⁵ Helen kept the animal curios in tins decorated with pictures of Alice in Wonderland, gifts from Lewis Carroll who had been at Oxford University with her late husband.

For the most part, Alice and Charles Edward enjoyed an idyllic English childhood – picnics in the woods at Claremont, visits to their grandmother at Windsor Castle, and summer holidays on the Balmoral estate. To Charles Edward and Alice, the Scottish castle was a paradise: long walks across the heath-covered hillsides and enormous teas with scones and jam.⁶

A sensitive child, Charles Edward relied on Alice, his older, more dominant sister. Both loved to play-act in classic war stories. Alice always chose to be on the winning side: she was Julius Caesar to Charles Edward’s Pompey and Alexander the Great to his Darius.⁷ This pattern was to continue throughout their lives.⁸ At Claremont there was almost no contact from the outside world, as the class distinction between royalty and even the upper-middle classes was so enormous, it restricted the pool of companions severely. A lady-in-waiting told Princess Alice not to partner so often with two girls at her dancing class, because they were not quite ‘U’.⁹ Alice remained home-schooled, but Charles Edward went to Sandroyd, a preparatory school nearby, riding there each day on his Shetland pony called Puck. Later, he was sent to Lyndhurst to prepare him for Eton.

At 14 years old, his life suddenly changed when his syphilitic and drunkard cousin, Prince ‘Affie’ of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, shot himself with a handgun over a failed love affair with a young Irishwoman called Mabel Fitzgerald on 22 January 1899. The blast from the pistol echoed throughout the palace-fortress in Coburg, leaving the household in shock, but the suicide was botched. With guests arriving to stay at the castle, the lovesick prince was quickly bundled into a carriage and dispatched on a bumpy 350-mile journey to the Martinsbrunn Sanatorium in the South Tyrol, where he died on 6 February.¹⁰

Coburg Castle, Germany. 22 January 1899.

Affie’s father was Duke Alfred of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son, who inherited the Dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in August 1893, when his uncle, Prince Albert’s older brother Duke Ernest, had died. Victoria’s dynastic masterplan was for the Prince of Wales to succeed her, while Duke Alfred, as son number two, would be sent to Germany to rule his father’s ancestral homelands. By 1893, Alfred, once a shy and handsome young man, full of early promise, was a silent, moody, friendless drunk.¹¹ Family members tactfully referred to his ‘intemperance’ as code for his alcoholism.¹² The sudden death of his only son exacerbated these dark moods.

For Queen Victoria, the question of Coburg’s succession was now critical as she regarded the town as the cradle of her dynasty. Duke Alfred had throat cancer, too severe for any medication or treatment, and Victoria was determined to keep the duchy within her family’s direct ownership.¹³ Legally, the next heir to Coburg was Victoria’s third son: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught. Arthur was his mother’s favourite, and the Queen proclaimed his inheritance without consulting the German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was her eldest grandson.¹⁴

Germany had changed since Victoria had visited Coburg as a young bride, and Wilhelm understood the new tide of nationalistic feeling occurring on the continent. The Kaiser now insisted that whoever became the next Duke of Coburg must move to Germany and join the German army. Under the German constitution, the Kaiser was ‘First Amongst Equals’ with the other German princes and minor kings, but in practice, the Emperor dominated. Prince Arthur was a British general, and understandably, the German press was hostile. The Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (Leipziger Latest News) adopted the slogan, ‘German thrones for German princes’.¹⁵ The German people viewed mixed Anglo-German heritage as a malignant influence, and the Berlin Tageblatt wrote that, as the princes were the custodians of the Reich, they had to be German: ‘It is impossible to have two souls inside one’s breast – a German and a foreign one.’¹⁶ Nationalists were questioning whether international royal families, with estates scattered throughout Europe, could be capable of genuine loyalty to one country.

The Kaiser threatened his grandmother Queen Victoria with new legislation, which would declare that a foreign prince was incapable of succeeding to a German ducal throne.¹⁷ Coburg itself was rapidly becoming the most xenophobic town in Germany, and the current Duke Alfred, considered more British than German, was highly unpopular. In any case, Prince Arthur had no wish to leave his career in the British army and his wife, Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, had led a wretched life in stuffy Berlin and did not want to return to Germany.

Victoria, therefore, decided that Arthur would ‘decline’ the throne of Coburg in favour of Prince Charles Edward, who was next in line. ‘The whole family is united in thinking it must be Charlie,’ wrote Queen Victoria.¹⁸ After all, Charles Edward’s mother was a German, and the widowed Duchess of Albany agreed to move with her son to Coburg, permanently, where he would serve in the German army. Only just a teenager, Charles Edward was young enough to be turned into a proper German, an essential factor in appeasing both the Kaiser and the influential Chancellor Bismarck.¹⁹

Reinhardsbrunn Castle, Coburg. March 1899.

Drunk, alone and grieving after his son’s suicide, Duke Alfred shut himself inside the remote fairy-tale castle at Reinhardsbrunn in the Thuringian Forest.²⁰ In this grand Gothic folly, surrounded by an English landscaped garden, he escaped the criticism of Coburgers, who believed him to be too foreign. Dying of cancer, the Duke agreed that his nephew Charles Edward should inherit.

Charles Edward was small, blue-eyed and handsome. An introverted teenager, he found the gruelling process of transformation into a German bewildering and alien. His mother shrewdly understood that in the nationalistic hothouse of Bismarck’s Second Reich, the current Duke Alfred’s Englishness was a significant handicap to her son’s new career as a German duke. She had to convert her English schoolboy into a German: ‘I have always tried to bring Charlie up a good English man. And I now have to turn him into a good German.’²¹ Her son was too young to resist, but he complained: ‘I’ve got to go and become a beastly German prince.’²²

After an arduous ten-day journey from Claremont, Duchess Helen presented herself at Reinhardsbrunn, expecting to have tea with the family’s new benefactor. However, she found Duke Alfred inebriated and aggressive. Worse behaviour followed. Not only was Alfred unwilling to offer the Duchess a permanent home, but he also wanted to adopt Charles Edward into his own family.²³ Helen had never agreed to this plan. She had left Claremont with the sole purpose of staying with her son. Angered by Duke Alfred’s unreasonable demands and bad manners, she refused to let Charles Edward move in with him. The neighbouring King of Württemberg (who had married her sister Marie) came to her rescue and provided a suite of rooms at his nearby palace in Stuttgart. This gave the Duchess breathing space to consider her options, while her entire family in both Germany and Britain hovered around her, waiting to interfere.

Duke Alfred wanted to send Charles Edward to a local village school which Princess Alice described as ‘a horrid, scruffy place’.²⁴ Swiftly rejecting this suggestion, Charles Edward’s education became a tug-of-war between the Kaiser and his liberal-minded English mother, the Dowager Empress Vicky (Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter). Vicky wanted the young Duke to attend a liberal progressive school in Frankfurt. Never one to refrain from expressing her prejudices, Princess Alic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Claremont
• 2 Separate Ways
• 3 Fear
• 4 Anything Goes
• 5 High Society
• 6 That American Woman
• 7 Abdication
• 8 Tea with Hitler
• 9 Hitler’s Peace
• 10 To Catch a King
• 11 World on Fire
• 12 Into the Abyss
• 13 Captives
• 14 Downfall
• 15 The Reckoning
• 16 A Precarious Dynasty
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Character Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Archive References & Abbreviations
• Notes