Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (; 26 June 1914 – 24 November 2001) was by birth a Greek and Danish princess, as well as Princess of Hesse-Kassel and Princess of Hanover through her successive marriages to Prince Christoph of Hesse and Prince George William of Hanover. An elder sister of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (husband of Queen Elizabeth II), she was, for a time, linked to the Nazi regime. The fourth of five children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie spent a happy childhood. Her early years, however, were affected by the First World War (1914–1918) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). For the young princess and her relatives, these conflicts had dramatic consequences and led to their exile in Switzerland (between 1917 and 1920), and then in France (from 1922 to 1936). During their exile, Sophie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Louis Mountbatten (who supported them financially). At the end of the 1920s, Sophie fell in love with one of her distant cousins, Prince Christoph of Hesse. Around the same time, her mother was struck by a mental health crisis which led to her confinement in a Swiss psychiatric hospital between 1930 and 1933. Married in December 1930, Sophie moved to Berlin with her husband. She then gave birth to five children: Christina (1933–2011), Dorothea (1934–2002), Karl (1937–2022), Rainer (born 1939) and Clarissa of Hesse (born 1944). Close to the Nazi circles, in which her husband and several of her in-laws were involved from 1930, Sophie joined the National Socialist Women's League in 1938. Deceived by Adolf Hitler, whom she saw as a modest and charming man, the princess became close to Emmy Sonnemann – who later married Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Göring in April 1935 – and became her friend. Attached to Nazism, Sophie and her in-laws therefore served as unofficial intermediaries between Nazi Germany and the European dynasties to which they were related. Under these conditions, the social status of Christoph and Sophie continued to improve and they moved into a large house located in Dahlem, in 1936. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, forced the couple to separate. An SS officer since 1932, Christoph joined the Luftwaffe, which led him to various European theaters of operation.