If you think the royal family has drama, wait until you hear about the side of Prince Philip’s clan.
The late royal consort, who died on Friday in 99, came from a family of Greek aristocrats who lived dramatic and colorful lives in the 20th century, including three sisters married to Nazis and a mother who was honored to save Jews during the ‘Holocaust.
Philip was the fifth and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and his wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg. Her older sisters were Princesses Margaret, Theodora, Cecilia and Sophie.
The prince would stay close to his mother, who came to live in Buckingham Palace in his later years, while he had a complicated relationship with his sisters, who were not even invited to his wedding.
Here’s a look at Philip’s family tree:
Philip’s father: Prince Andrew (1903-1944)
Andrew was a native prince of Demark and Greece and related to the Romanov dynasty. He served in both the Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish War and went into exile in Greece with his family in 1922.
By 1930, Andrew’s marriage to Alice was over, and although the couple never divorced, he moved to the Côte d’Azur with a mistress and died in 1944. Philip had not seen his father since 1939. .
Philip’s mother: Princess Alice (1885-1969)
Alice was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, making Philip and the Queen related. He was born deaf congenitally, but he knew how to speak clearly.
When Philip was only 18 months old, the family went into exile in Greece and settled in Paris, where they relied on relatives to obtain pamphlets. It was there that Alice became more and more religious, began to hear voices, and claimed to receive divine messages.
She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and, on the advice of Sigmund Freud, her belly was irradiated with X-rays to try to thwart her alleged sexual desires.
When Philip was nine years old, her mother was admitted to a Swiss sanatorium where she was detained against her will for more than two years.
After Alicia’s release, she became essentially homeless and lodged in several German inns. He did not see Philip again until the funeral of his daughter Cecilia, who died in a plane crash at the age of 26 in 1937.
Alice eventually settled in Athens, Greece, and during World War II hid a Jewish family on the top floor of her home, on the corner of a Gestapo headquarters.
His heroic actions were recognized by the center of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, in Israel. In 1993, the memorial center awarded Alice the title of Just Among the Nations and a year later, Philip traveled to Yad Vashem and planted a tree in her honor.
Alice sold her jewelry and founded her own religious order – the Christian Brotherhood of Martha and Mary – before building a convent and orphanage in a poor area of Athens.
After a military coup in Greece in 1967, the increasingly fragile Alice was convinced to live in Buckingham Palace with her son and family. He died two years later, leaving no possessions after giving away all his personal property.
Before he died, he wrote an emotional note for his youngest son, reading, “Dear Philip, be brave and remember that I will never leave you, and you will always find me when you need me most. All my devoted love, your old mother. “
Philip’s sisters: Princess Margaret (1905-1981)
Philip’s older sister married Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a German aristocrat who became a Nazi, although he eventually ignited Hitler.
Gottfried was one of the officers involved in the “Operation Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, which was portrayed in the 2008 war film “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise.
He managed to avoid being executed like many others linked to the plan and lived until 1960.
Margarita had six children (five of whom survived to adulthood) and kept in touch with her brother, even visiting after Princess Anna was born.
Theodora (1906 – 1963)
Theodora was the only one of Philip’s brothers who did not believe that the Nazis were her husband’s material, but chose to marry her second cousin Berthold, the Margrave of Baden.
He had three children and died in 1969, weeks before his mother died.
Cecilia (1911-1937)
Philip is said to have had a close relationship with Cecilie, who married his cousin Georg Donatus, hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine.
The couple joined the Nazi party in May 1937.
Months later, the family experienced a violent end when Cécilie, eight months pregnant with her third child, died in a plane crash alongside her two children and her husband. Firefighters also found the remains of a baby.
At the funeral, family members were photographed in Nazi uniforms.
Sophie (1914-2001)
Sophie married her second cousin, Prince Christoph of Hesse, when she was only 16 years old.
Christoph was director of the Ministry of Air Force of the Third Reich and held the rank of Oberführer in the SS. He also served in the Luftwaffe Research Office.
Sophie was invited to Herman Goering’s wedding in 1936 and, after having dinner with Hitler, wrote that he was a “charming and seemingly modest man.”
The couple named one of their five children, Karl Adolf, in honor of Hitler.
Christoph died in a plane crash in 1943 and Sophie married Prince George William of Hanover three years later and had three more children.
Sophie also remained in contact with her brother and was the godmother of Prince Edward.