If you think the royal family has drama, wait until you hear from Prince Philip’s side of the family.
The late royal couple, who died on Friday at 99, came from a family of Greek aristocrats who led dramatic and colorful lives in the 20th century – including three sisters who were married to Nazis and a mother who was honored for her Jews saved during the Holocaust.
Philip was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and his wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg. His older sisters were Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cécilie and Sophie.
The prince would stay close to his mother, who came to live at Buckingham Palace in her final years, while having 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 of both Demark and Greece and related to the Romanov dynasty. He served in the Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish War and was banished from Greece with his family in 1922.
By 1930, Andrew’s marriage to Alice had indeed ended, and although the couple never divorced, he moved to the French Riviera with a mistress and died in 1944. Philip has not seen his father since 1939.
Philip is: Princess Alice (1885-1969)
Alice was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who made Philip and the Queen far removed. She was born deaf, but could speak clearly.
When Philip was only 18 months old, the family was banished from Greece and settled in Paris, where they relied on family members for distribution. It was there that Alice became more and more religious, began to hear voices and claimed to receive divine messages.
She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and on the advice of Sigmund Freud, her uterus was irradiated with x-rays in an attempt to curb her alleged sexual desires.
When Philip was nine, his mother was admitted to a Swiss sanatorium, where she was detained against her will for more than two years.
After Alice was released, she actually became homeless and stayed in various German inns. She did not see Philip again before the funeral of her daughter Cécilie, who died in a plane crash in 1937 at the age of 26.
Alice eventually settles in Athens, Greece, and hides a Jewish family on the top floor of her home, around the corner from a Gestapo headquarters, during World War II.
Her heroic actions were acknowledged by the Holocaust Center Yad Vashem in Israel. In 1993, the Alice Memorial Center was named Righteous Among the Nations, and a year later, Philip traveled to Yad Vashem and planted a tree in her honor.
Alice sold her jewelery and established her own religious order – the Christian sisterhood 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 debilitated Alice was persuaded to live with her son and family in Buckingham Palace. She died two years later and left no possessions after giving away all her personal property.
Before she died, she wrote a moving note to her youngest child, with the caption: ‘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 dedicated love, you old Mom. ‘
Philip’s sisters: Princess Margarita (1905-1981)
Philip’s eldest sister is married to Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a German aristocrat who went on to become a Nazi – although he eventually turned to Hitler.
Gottfried was one of the officers involved in the “Operation Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, starring 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 into adulthood and remained in touch with her brother, even visiting after Princess Anne was born.
Theodora (1906 – 1963)
Theodora was the only one of Philip’s siblings who did not think the Nazis were a man, but preferred to marry her second cousin Berthold, Margrave of Baden.
She had three children and died in 1969, a few weeks before her mother died.
Cécilie (1911-1937)
Philip is said to have had a close relationship with Cecilie, who married her cousin Georg Donatus, the hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and through Rhine.
The couple joined the Nazi party in May 1937.
Months later, the family reached a violent end when Cécilie, eight months pregnant with her third child, died in a plane crash next to her two sons and husband. Firefighters also found the remains of a baby.
During the funeral, family members were photographed wearing Nazi uniforms.
Sophie (1914-2001)
Sophie married her second cousin, Prince Christoph of Hesse, when she was just 16 years old.
Christoph was a director of the Third Reich’s Ministry of Air Force and held the rank of Oberführer in the SS. He also served in the Luftwaffe research office.
Sophie was a guest at Herman Goering’s wedding in 1936 and, after eating 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 thereafter.
Sophie also kept in touch with her brother and was the godmother of Prince Edward.