She smoked, she gambled, was never ordained as a nun in the Greek-Orthodox Church, but was a real-life princess…
Princess Alice of Battenburg was a Germanic princess and great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was born in Windsor Castle, actually in the presence of the Queen, she being the daughter of Princess Victoria of Hesse and granddaughter of Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s third child.
She was born deaf, which will figure in later with how she handled the Nazis in WWII. Alice went on to marry Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and took his first name as hers, becoming Princess Andrew. In 1917, the Greek royal family fled Greece, due to the turmoil cause by the First World War and Greece’s internal political infighting between the Royal family and the government. The government, led by Prime Minister Venizelos, sided with the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy) whereas the Royals, led by King Constantine I, were convinced that Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire would win the War so wished to be prudent and remain neutral. This made sense, given British and French naval power in the Mediterranean, which would be unleashed on Greece should she enter the War on the side of the Central Powers. In fact, the French Navy shelled Athens itself on December 1st,1916, forcing Alice and her family to seek underground refuge in the palace cellars.
Things came to a head in June of 1917 with the King of Greece abdicating. Prince and Princess Andrew fled the country, removing themselves to exile in Switzerland.
WWI came to a close in November of 1918. Germany, Austria, and Turkey lost the War, and the Greek royal family felt emboldened to return home…despite the terrible loss of their Russian cousins (bullets and bayonets do wonders in removing Kings and Queens, princes and princesses). Yet all was not well, Greece was now in a ferocious and ugly war with Turkey. Prince Andrew himself led the charge against the Turks…and lost. Greece blamed him for the defeat, a sacrificial lamb so to speak. Andrew was put on trial, found guilty of a trumped up charge that supposably led to the loss of a critical final battle, and was sentenced to banishment. Both he and the Princess, along with their five children, Margarita, Theodora, Cecilia, Sophie, and Philip, fled Greece once again in late 1922, this time under the protection of the British Royal Navy and aboard HMS Calypso. Their son Philip would be impacted and remember this event, effectively scarring his psyche for the rest of his life.
In July of 1917, after the Greek King and royal family had fled Greece the first time, a funny thing happened on the way to War…
Given the anti-German sentiment in Britain for all things “Jerry”, King George V and the Royal family had a very big name problem. They were all German, related to royal Germans, and they needed to get right with Brittania…real quick. The King and Queen change the name to “Windsor”…what could be more British than that? However, other influential members of the royal retinue needed the change as well. Like washing away the ailments with the water at Lourdes, Prince and Princess Andrew, along with Andrew’s father, Prince Louis of Battenburg, had their last names changed via British Royal decree…they were now “Mountbatten”.
Princess Alice eventually went back to Greece. Notwithstanding a bit of time in a sanitarium, where she was forced to stay because of some supposed mental ailments. In fact, she was “treated” by Dr. Sigmund Freud himself…he personally recommended applying x-ray radiation to her overies, because every woman’s issues derive from a sexual origin…
That’s not to say Princess Andrew was crazy, she was probably nominally sane before being subjected to involuntary “mental” treatment, but she was a bit odd as the years went by. Then came the Second World War…
Throughout the War, Princess Alice stayed in Athens. Her and Princess Nicholas (Princess Elena), Alice’s Sister-in-Law, were the only two members of the Greek Royal family to stay in Greece, and their Father-in-Law, King Constantine I, owed a favor…
Greece was split into until 1943. Italy and Germany occupied the county jointly. Athens was under Fascist Italian diktat…so the genocidal machinations of Nazi Germany were not in force. Consequently, 70,000 Jews lived in and around the Athens region, relatively safe from being exterminated. Mussolini was deposed and executed in 1943, and Italy switched sides. This did not bode well for the Italian occupied sections for Greece…the Nazis moved in, and the deportations began. Out of 70,000 Jews, 65,000 were deported to various concentration camps, and of that 65,000, only 2,000 lived to see the end of the War. 7,000, out of 70,000 Jewish men, women and children.
Haimaki Cohen was a member of the Greek Parliament, and was well known to the Royal family. King Constantine I had told Cohen that a time he needed help, no matter the circumstance, assistance would be provided. As the Nazis were hunting and rounding up Jews in Greece after September of 1943, The Cohen family needed that help. Haimaki himself had passed away, but his wife Rachel and the children were in desperate straits. Princess Andrew heard of their plight, and came to their assistance. Out of the Cohen’s five children, four (the sons) were able to flee to Egypt, while the journey was deemed too dangerous for Mrs. Cohen and her daughter.
Princess Alice hid the two in her home, and protected them from the Nazis. Both survived the War, and the Germans, despite vigorous efforts to find out if the princess was hiding Jews. On one occasion, the Gestapo “invited” Alice in for questioning, and being the astute and sly person that she was, used her deafness to act like she couldn’t understand a word of the questioning. Perhaps the Germans were simply to wary to push the issue, seeing that all of Princess Andrew’s daughters had married German princes, who in turn became high-ranking Nazis. And what of Alice’s son, Philip? He went on to serve in the Royal Navy during the War. Prince Philip Mountbatten, who would go on to marry Elizabeth…who would go on to become Queen Elizabeth II. Alice had children on both sides of the conflict, one of her Son-in-Laws even being an officer in the dreaded Waffen-SS.
In 1949 she started a Greek-Orthodox Order of Nursing, The Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary. Despite not being ordained in any way, she nonetheless donned the grey habit and made it so…leading her own mother, Princess Victoria, to lament, “what can you say of a nun who smokes and plays canasta”.
She left Greece for good in 1967, moving into Buckingham Palace with her son and daughter-in-law, passing away in 1969 at the age of 84. Princess Alice, great granddaughter of a Queen, mother-in-law to another, her son becoming Britain’s most famous Prince, and her brother, being another famous British Royal, Louis Mountbatten, killed by the IRA in 1979.
Despite all that surrounded her, wealth, status, influence, and recognition, perhaps her greatest achievement in life was saving two Jewish lives. According to her son, she probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, claiming it was simply a human duty, expected, not extraordinary:
"I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress."
Princess Alice/Andrew was named Righteous Among Nations in 1993 by the Yad Vashem in Israel.
