Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany [Hardcover]

Jonathan Petropoulos (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195161335 | ISBN-13: 978-0195161335 | Publication Date: February 1, 2006

The link between Hitler's Third Reich and European royalty has gone largely unexplored due to the secrecy surrounding royal families. Now, in Royals and the Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos uses unprecedented access to royal archives to tell the fascinating story of the Princes of Hesse and the important role they played in the Nazi regime.
Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassel, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria of England, had been humiliated by defeat in WWI and, like much of the German aristocracy, feared the social unrest wrought by the ineffectual Weimar Republic. Petropoulos shows how the princes, lured by prominent positions in the Nazi regime and highly susceptible to nationalist appeals, became enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. Prince Philipp, son-in-law to the King of Italy, became the highest-ranking prince in the Nazi state and developed a close personal relationship with Hitler and Hermann G�ring. Prince Christoph was a prominent SS officer and head of one of the most important intelligence agencies in the Third Reich. In return, the princes made the Nazis socially acceptable to wealthy, high-society patrons. Prince Philipp even introduced G�ring to Mussolini at a critical stage in the Nazi Party's development and later served as a liaison between Hitler and the Italian dictator.
Permitted access to Hessen family private papers and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, Petropoulos follows the story of the House of Hesse through to its tragic denouement--the princes' betrayal and persecution by an increasingly paranoid Hitler and prosecution and denazification by the Allies. Royals and the Reich is a startling and unique portrait of the vanished world of prewar aristocrats and a royal family caught in one of the most tumultuous periods in history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A devastating portrait of how the highest social stratum in Germany enthusiastically embraced a movement that might truly be said to have come out of the gutter.... Although this book is full of facts and statistics...it is no mere dry historical text. Mr. Petropoulos knows just how to find telling pieces of evidence and to frame them with excellent commentard."--Washington Times

"The very interesting and quite readable book sheds a great deal of light on what members of European royalty may or may not have know about Nazi criminality during World War Two, and what they certainly may not have shared with members of Western governments." --The Jewish Press

"An enthralling book, well researched in archives and through interviews, including one with the Duke of Edinburgh himself.... Royals and the Reich gets the big picture right--and a disturbing, even sickening, one it is."--Martin Rubin, Los Angeles Times

"This lucid and thoroughly researched book throws much light on the fateful--and sometimes fatal--relationship between the highest reaches of Germany's aristocracy and the basest quarters of that nation's politics during the first half of the 20th century. Along the way, Jonathan Petropoulos illuminates the familial bonds among many European dynasties and their impact on a tumultuous era. All in all, a revealing, penetrating, fair-minded, and sometimes touching work."--Peter Hayes, Theodore Z. Weiss Professor of Holocaust Studies, Northwestern University, and author of From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich and Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era

"In spite of a silken curtain obscuring the roles of royal supporters of the Third Reich, there is here a first truly balanced, thoughtful, and engagingly written account of royal princes and others of noble rank based on unprecedented access to some of the hitherto secreted records. A major and most welcome achievement in opening to readers a world too often closed except for pictures and gossip."--Gerhard L. Weinberg, Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II and Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders

"There is a cornucopia of literature analyzing the relationship between German social strata and the Nazis. What has been missing is an examination of the aristocracy. Using the example of the princely Hessen family, Jonathan Petropoulos now has begun to fill that void. The Hessens--and many of their relatives from other royal houses--sought accommodation with a movement which, from the outset, opposed monarchy. Petropoulos resolves this seeming contradiction with the help of interviews and rare private sources. His book is a pioneering contribution to the social history of the Third Reich." --Michael H. Kater, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of History at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, and author of Hitler Youth and Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany

About the Author

Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The Faustian Bargain (OUP), which was named one of the 25 Books to Remember in 2000 by the New York Public Library. He was a Research Director on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets and has served as an expert witness in cases involving Holocaust victims' assets. He lives in Claremont, California.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195161335
• ISBN-13: 978-0195161335
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #973,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. Previously, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1990), where he also had an appointment as a Lecturer in History. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983, when he commenced my graduate work in history and art history. He is the author of _Art as Politics in the Third Reich_ (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); _The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany_ (Oxford University Press, 2000); and _Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany_ (Oxford University Press, 2006); as well as co-editor of a number of volumes, including _A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies_ (University of Michigan Press, 1997), and _Gray Zones: Amibuity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath_ (Berghahn Books, 2005). He has also helped organize art exhibitions, including _Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991_ and appeared in a number of films, including _Rape of Europa_ (2006).

From 1998 to 2000, he served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report, Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims' Assets (2001). In this capacity as Research Director, he supervised a staff of researchers who combed archives in the United States and Europe in order to understand better how representatives of the U.S. government (including the Armed Forces) handled the assets of Holocaust victims both during and after the war. As Research Director, he provided expert testimony to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport in the U.K. House of Commons and to the Banking and Finance Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

He has served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks. This includes Altmann v. Austria, which involved five paintings by Gustav Klimt claimed by Maria Altmann and other family members. Mrs. Altmann was born and raised in Vienna and her family had its art collections seized after the Anschluss.

He lives with his family in Claremont, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Seduction of Nazism, March 17, 2006

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John D. Cofield - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassell were great-grandsons of Queen Victoria and nephews of Kaiser Wilhelm II. They were born into the highest circles of wealth and privilege in pre-World War I Germany, living in a variety of palaces and castles and secure within a wide family circle which extended into nearly every royal dynasty in Europe. Petropoulos' central story examines how such men could have been seduced into participating in the highest levels of one of the most thuggish regimes in modern times.

The Hessen family, like other royal/noble clans, was severely shaken by World War I. Although they did not lose all their property (or their lives) as so many of their relations did, Philipp and Christoph's family saw their status slip and some of their wealth vanish. This, along with the terrible suffering more ordinary Germans underwent in the post-World War I period, made the Hessen princes prime targets for the appeal of Nazism: militarism, aggressive nationalism, revenge for past defeats.

After Hitler's coming to power in 1933 and the establishment of the Third Reich, the Nazi Party made a concerted effort to win the support of highly placed individuals and families. Much of the German aristocracy and many members of former royal houses joined the Party, and while they may have privately sneered at the lumpenproletariat side of the Nazis and contrasted it with their own urbane sophistication, they were not above working for and doing the bidding of those they considered so uncouth. Philipp and Christoph were two prime examples. Philipp assisted Hitler in cultural affairs and, since he was married to a daughter of the Italian king, often served as an envoy to Mussolini. Christoph ran one of the Nazi intelligence agencies and served as a fighter pilot in World War II. Both were members of the SS, and both were used by Hitler to try to win influence with their cousins, the British royal family.

Having so much access to Hitler meant making a lot of moral compromises for the Hessens. Neither was particularly anti-Semitic (at least by the standards of the time) and had Jewish friends, but both were silent participants in the early stages of the Final Solution and similar atrocities. Both were artistic and fairly well educated by the standards of their caste, but neither protested the Nazi book-burnings or the destruction of art deemed insufficiently Aryan. Petropoulos does a good job contrasting this lack of action by the Hessens with the opposition of such aristocrats as Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who with his family suffered enormously because he refused to collaborate.

As so often happens to those who cooperate with evil, Philipp and Christoph became victims themselves. Philipp and his wife (the beautiful Princess Mafalda of Savoy) ended up in concentration camps where Mafalda died after terrible sufferings. Christoph was killed in a suspicious plane crash after he too lost the Nazis' favor. After the war Philipp spent time in POW camps and went through a long drawn out denazification process before being allowed to retire, poorer and hopefully wiser, to what was left of his estates.

Petropoulos had the cooperation of many members of the Hessen family and other German nobles as well as that of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who was Christoph's brother-in-law. He does a good job depicting the two men as the cultivated, charming cosmopolitans they were, and the reader is left with a disturbing question: If men such as these could be corrupted by the Nazis, is anyone really safe from similar extremism?

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stiff prose, sterling information, July 7, 2006

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Jan L. Thompson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

Petrouplos'has a remarkable knack for gathering valuable hisotrical information, not to mention wangling an interview with the formidable Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He is a serious academic historian and his work includes a list of previous books he's written about the Nazi era and the holocaust. His fluency in German, and his academic background, put him in a league of his own among royalty writers. The book is written with the stiff prose of an academic research paper, but on its face, it may appeal as much to royalty buffs as to historians of World War II and the Nazi movement.Often the sensational facts underlying the story are dulled by the musty language. However, the reluctance to sensationalize gives the book more credibility. Petroupols downplays the sizzling hot genealogy of the principal players, Christoph and Philipp von Hessen. Even the family tree fails to branch out as far as it could, straight into the heart of the living royal family of England. A typical royalty writer such as Kitty Kelley would have put the facts in big bold font: the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the Queen of England, had three sisters and three brothers-in-law who became members of the Nazi party. The facts are interesting, if deplorable. Petroupolus seeks to lay out the facts objectively, looking at root causes. Maybe there is enough distance between us and the Nazi era to admit with some calmness the appeal of the movement. Royalty buffs may want to turn their idols into saints, but this book makes it evident that some royals backed Hitler long and enthusiastically. One vivid passage in the book quotes a conversation between Phillip von Hessen and Hitler, and the Prince sounds both subservient and fanatical: 'Jawohl, mein Fuherer!'he says, several times in one minute.

I admit to being a royalty buff, and I bought this book because my current obsession is the house of Hesse. I found mayself seeing Princess Margaret of Hesse-Kassel in a new light. A daughter of Victoria, the English Empress of Germany, who was herself the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Margaret and her husband became devout fans of Hitler and Nazism. The root cause seems to have been a hatred of Communism and an admiration for the German economic and social renaissance ushered in by the Nazis. True, many German nobles gradually or quickly became disillusioned by the regime as it showed its profoundly evil side...and suffered military defeat. One can't help wondering how one would have acted in the same circumstances. And how our own reaction to the policies of the current administration will be viewed.

We all get caught in our times. Petroupolos's book doesn't convey this vividly, and it is not a miracle of literature. But the facts he discloses resonate long after the last page is turned.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Royal Contribution?, February 22, 2006

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Dennis Richmond (Mill Valley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Hardcover)

In written prose, the masses and even the elusive "educated general public" prescribe a certain compromise between scholarship and entertainment. Something that is too scholarly creates boredom and confusion, while a product too colloquial smacks of capitalization of the faddish aspects of popular culture and contributes a negligible modicum of understanding of the past. Therefore, a published scholar in popular media inevitably walks an unquantifiable tightrope between scholarship and entertainment. In Jonathan Petropoulos' third novel, Royals and the Reich, the author interweaves scrupulously-researched facts with a compelling narrative that offers the reader an unprecedented view into the relationship between the Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen and Hitler during the Third Reich.

In the sixty years since the end of the Second World War, there has been much speculation but little scholarship on the interaction between the aristocracy and Adolf Hitler. Hitler courted the German aristocracy in attempt to make his regime socially acceptable, and later turned on them as he did many other entities with which he at one time enjoyed an alliance. Additionally, there exists speculation that he conspired to install a pro-Nazi monarch in the United Kingdom, a theory that has failed to be discredited due to affirmative circumstantial evidence and the continued secrecy exhibited in the closure of archives during this period. It is a testament to the author's perseverance and diplomatic skills that he succeeds in convincing the Hessen estate to grant him unprecedented access to their archives.

Philipp's biography allowed the author to saliently interweave facts intriguing to popular culture that are also relevant to an understanding of his personality. The author examines a homosexual relationship between Philipp and an Englishmen, something on the surface that appears to be nothing more than an attempt by the author to add tabloid sensationalism to his novel. However, Philipp's elusive bisexuality saliently illustrated his conflicted role in the war effort. Like many aristocrats, Hitler's promise of restoration of the monarchy and of a stronger Germany elicited the support of Philipp. However, if his testimony is to be believed during his denazification trial, he reluctantly followed some of Hitler's edicts and contemplated an assassination attempt.

Additionally, Christoph's interest in automobiles and aviation is sure to intrigue the American male audience, as both are essential elements to the machismo culture, as most young boys fantasize of flying the plane. The reader may also infer some timely differences between the European and American elite. In a tradition rooted in the Middle Ages, male aristocrats view it as their patriotic duty to enter the officer corps and lead their peasants into battle. The concept of shared sacrifice contrasts sharply with a large trend among the American elite, which is to use their money and influence to avoid military service. While outside of the purview of this book, it would have been helpful to judge Philipp's denazification trial against the verdicts of other perpetrators.

Royals and the Reich offers the reader an unprecedented view (although at sometimes hindered by the Hessens) into the complex relationship between Hitler and both German and British aristocratic families. Hopefully, it will serve as a catalyst for continued research on the interaction, and increase pressure for full disclosure on the aristocracy involved in the Third Reich.