SourceHitler Youth and Universal Fascism
Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold's father, Max von Baden, working through his longtime personal secretary, Kurt Hahn.
During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry's intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis' "strength-through-joy'' system.
At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger's friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a "universal fascist,'' in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with.
Although Hahn's powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip's arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun.
It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn's school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi "race science.''
Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the "centrist'' Nazis.
Philip's Relatives Work for the SS
The husband of Philip's sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler's personal staff.
The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labor organizations. When rumors of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt's eavesdroppers, and ordered the "Night of the Long Knives'' as a result.
The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie's children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler.
Later, Prince Philip would promote his education.
Prince Christoph's brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes.
Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring's Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg's brother's wedding.
According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938.
In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip's uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of "Dickie'' Mountbatten.
Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip's aunt.
Although Buckingham Palace's rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip's secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII).
On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side.
Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat:
"The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.''
Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph's Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned "Surveyor of the King's Pictures,'' Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence.
Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle.
Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time.
Clearly, Prince Philip's patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten's sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip's brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings.
