Why Did the British Royal Family Erase Him From History? (Documentary)

November 20th, 1947, Westminster Abbey. 200 million people around the world listened as Princess Elizabeth married a tall blonde naval officer named Philip Mountbatton. The wedding of the century, a fairy tale for a country still digging itself out of the rubble of war. But something was missing.

Philip walked down that aisle essentially alone. His mother sat quietly in a simple dress. The palace had forced her to remove the nuns habit she’d been wearing for years. His father was dead and his four sisters banned, forbidden from attending by direct order of King George V 6th. The official reason they’d married Germans and the war had only ended 2 years earlier. The real reason was darker.

Philip’s sisters hadn’t just married Germans, they’d married Nazis. One dined with Hitler and called him charming. Another married an SS colonel who ran Guring’s secret intelligence service. For 75 years, the palace buried this story. Philip almost never spoke about his sisters publicly.

When journalists asked about his childhood, he gave the same answer. The family broke up. I just had to get on with it. But these weren’t strangers he abandoned. They were the only family he had. When his mother was locked in an asylum and his father ran off with his mistress, his sisters raised him. They were his protectors.

And to marry the future queen, he had to pretend they never existed. Philip wasn’t born in a palace. He was born on a kitchen table. June 10th, 1921, the Greek island of Corfu. No electricity, no running water. His mother, Princess Alice, gave birth in a villa called Mong Ray Poe, while his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, waited nearby.

Philip was the fifth child, the only boy after four older sisters, Margarita, Theodora, Cecilia, and Sophie. For exactly 18 months, he had a family. Then it all fell apart. In 1922, a military coup swept through Greece. Philip’s uncle, King Constantine I, was forced to abdicate. His father was arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to exile for life.

The entire family fled in the middle of the night aboard a British warship. Philillip, not even 2 years old, was carried to safety in an orange crate. They settled in Paris, living off the charity of wealthy relatives. But the cracks in the family were already showing. Philip’s father, humiliated by exile, grew bitter and distant.

His mother began hearing voices. She claimed she was receiving divine messages from Jesus and Buddha. She believed she had healing powers. In 1930, when Philip was 9 years old, his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a Swiss asylum. The treatment was barbaric. Doctors X-rayed her ovaries to cure her delusions.

She would spend years institutionalized, drifting between sanatoriums across Europe. Philip’s father didn’t stay to pick up the pieces. He moved to Monte Carlo with his mistress, spending his days gambling and sailing on her yacht. He essentially abandoned his only son and Philip’s sisters. One by one they married German princes and moved to Germany.

Margarita in 1931, Theodora in 1931, Sophie in 1930 at just 16 years old, Cecilia in 1931. Within two years, all four were gone. Philillip was alone. He was 9 years old and everyone had left. His mother was locked away. His father was living with another woman. His sisters were scattered across Germany. He had no home, no parents, no family around him.

He was sent to live with relatives in England. His grandmother at Kensington Palace, his uncle George Mountbatton at Lynden Manor. shuffled between boarding schools, passed around like an inconvenience. He didn’t see or hear from his mother for 5 years. Years later, when asked about this period, Philillip refused to dwell on it.

It’s simply what happened, he said. The family broke up. My mother was ill. My sisters were married. My father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does. But getting on with it didn’t mean he forgot. His sisters, particularly Theodora and Cecilia, tried to stay connected. They wrote letters.

They visited when they could. In 1933, when Philip was 12, Theodora brought him to Germany to live with her so he could attend school nearby. She hadn’t abandoned him. None of them had, not really. But Germany in 1933 was not the same country it had been when they married. Something had changed. Someone had risen to power.

And Philip’s sisters were about to find themselves caught in the middle of history’s darkest chapter. To understand what happened to Philip’s sisters, you have to understand the world they married into. When Margarita, Theodora, Cecilia, and Sophie wed their German princes between 1930 and 1931, Adolf Hitler was a fringe politician.

Germany was the VHimar Republic. Chaotic, struggling, but democratic. These were arranged marriages between European royals, the kind that had been happening for centuries. No one could have predicted what was coming. By 1933, everything had changed. Hitler was chancellor. The Nazi party controlled Germany, and Philip’s four sisters were trapped inside it.

Princess Margarita was the eldest, born in 1905, 16 years before Philillip. She was the first great great grandchild of Queen Victoria. A connection that once meant everything, but now meant nothing in a world where monarchies were falling like dominoes. In 1931, she married Prince Gotfrieded of Hoen Loa Langenburgg.

They were second cousins, both descendants of Queen Victoria. By all accounts, it was a happy match. They had six children together. But as the Nazi regime consolidated power, Gotfrieded found himself pulled into its orbit. On May 1st, 1937, Margarita and Gotfrieded officially joined the Nazi party. This wasn’t passive membership.

They used their royal connections to promote the regime abroad, particularly in Britain, where their family ties gave them access to the highest levels of aristocratic society. Gotfrieded served in the Vermacht fighting on the Eastern Front where he was severely wounded. But here’s where the story gets complicated.

By 1944, Gotfrieded had turned against Hitler. He was implicated in the July 20th assassination plot, the famous attempt by German officers to kill the Furer with a bomb. Whether he was directly involved or simply sympathetic remains unclear, but the Nazis dismissed him from the army shortly after.

He survived the war, but his Nazi membership would follow his family for decades. Margarita outlived her husband by 20 years. She died in 1981. Philillip attended her funeral. Princess Theodora was different. Born in 1906, she was the sister who stepped up when everything collapsed. When Philillip’s mother was committed and his father vanished, Theodora didn’t turn away.

In 1933, she brought her 12-year-old brother to Germany to live with her. She enrolled him at Schul Salem, a progressive school in Bon founded by a Jewish educator named Curt Horn. The move saved Philip money. The school was owned by Theodora’s husband’s family, but it also placed him directly in the shadow of the rising Reich.

Theodora had married Berthold, Margrave of Bon in 1931. And here’s the crucial detail. Berthold was the only one of Philip’s brothersin-law who was not affiliated with the Nazi party. In fact, Berthold worked closely with Curt Han, helping him when the Nazis began targeting Jews. When Han was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, Berthold used his aristocratic connections to help secure his release.

Han fled to Scotland where he founded Gordon St, the school Philip would later attend and the school that would shape the man he became. During the war, Theodora joined the German Red Cross. Her husband served in the German Army and was wounded, but they kept their distance from the party, walking a careful line between survival and collaboration.

Theodora became what the royal family later called the Queen’s favorite sister-in-law. She attended Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, the first time Philip’s sisters were allowed back into the fold. She visited England regularly in her later years. She died on October 16th, 1969. Prince Charles attended her funeral.

Philip couldn’t. He was on an official trip to Canada. 5 weeks later, their mother, Princess Alice, died, too. Two family members gone within a month. But the darkest chapters of this story don’t belong to Margarita or Theodora. They belong to the two youngest sisters, Cecilia and Sophie.

One died in a nightmare. The other dined with Adolf Hitler personally. Of all his sisters, Philillip was closest to Cecilia. Born in 1911, she was only 10 years older than him, close enough to feel like a friend rather than a distant sibling. Biographers described her as the most beautiful of the four. Her father called her his favorite child.

In 1931, Cecilia married her cousin Gayorg Donatus, the hereditary grand juke of Hessa. They had three children, Ludvig, Alexander, and Johanna. For a brief moment, it seemed like at least one branch of this scattered family might thrive. Then came May 1st, 1937. Cecilia and Gayorg officially joined the Nazi party.

6 months later they were dead. November 16th, 1937. Cecilia was 8 months pregnant with her fourth child. The family was flying to London for a wedding. Gayorg’s brother was getting married. 11 people boarded the plane in Frankfurt. Cecilia Gayorg, their two young sons, Gayorg’s mother, and several others.

Only little Johanna was left behind. Cecilia hated flying. She always dressed in black when she boarded a plane, as if preparing for the worst. Somewhere over Belgium, thick fog rolled in. And then Cecilia went into labor. The pilot diverted toward Ostend, desperate to land. He never made it. The plane clipped a factory chimney, tore apart, and burst into flames.

When rescuers reached the wreckage, they found a newborn baby among the bodies. Cecilia had given birth in the final moments, either in the air or during the crash. The Belgian inquiry concluded the pilot had attempted the emergency landing because she was delivering her child. Neither survived.

The funeral held November 23rd in Dharmstat became one of the largest royal gatherings before the war. But it was also a Nazi propaganda event. Swastikas lined the streets. Crowds gave the Hitler salute. Soldiers in full Nazi regalia formed the honor guard. And there, in the middle of it, was 16-year-old Philillip.

Walking behind his sister’s coffin, surrounded by men in Nazi uniforms. Those photographs would haunt him for decades. There was one small mercy. Philip’s parents, separated for 6 years, both attended. They stood together at their daughter’s grave. It was the first time they’d seen each other since Alice was committed.

After the burial, they went their separate ways. They never reconciled. Little Johanna, the toddler left behind, was adopted by her uncle. 2 years later, she died of menitis. She was 2 years old, Philip’s favorite sister. Her husband, her three sons, her newborn, her surviving daughter, all gone within 2 years. If Cecilia’s story is a tragedy, Sophie’s is a cautionary tale.

The youngest sister, born in 1914, Sophie was only 7 years older than Philillip. She was married off at 16 to Prince Kristoff of Hessa, a great grandson of Queen Victoria. But Kristoff had other allegiances. One month before their wedding, he joined the Nazi party in Herman Guring’s Berlin apartment.

A year later, he joined the SS. By the mid 1930s, he was an SS Oberfura, a senior colonel, and head of the Forong Zamp Guring Secret Intelligence Service. His job was wiretapping political opponents and intercepting diplomatic cables. Sophie was right beside him. In her unpublished memoir, Sophie described how Guring kept insisting she and Kristoff meet Hitler personally, so they invited him to lunch at their apartment.

She wrote, “I have to say here that although Cree and I changed our political view fundamentally some years later, we were impressed by this charming and seemingly modest man and by his plans to change and improve the situation in Germany.” Charming, modest. These are the words Philip’s sister used to describe Adolf Hitler.