Albrecht, Duke of Bavaria

Albrecht, Duke of Bavaria (Albrecht Luitpold Ferdinand Michael; 3 May 1905 – 8 July 1996 ) was the son of the last crown prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, and his first wife, Duchess Marie Gabrielle in Bavaria.

He was the only child from that marriage that reached adulthood.

His paternal grandfather was Ludwig III of Bavaria, the last king of Bavaria, who was deposed in 1918.

Following the First World War, Albrecht's grandfather King Ludwig was deposed.

Albrecht and the family temporarily moved from Bavaria to the Austrian Tyrol.

His family, the House of Wittelsbach, were opposed to the regime of Nazi Germany and refused to join the Nazi Party.

His father, the former Crown Prince Rupprecht, earned Hitler's enmity by opposing the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, he sent his son Albrecht to President Paul von Hindenburg with a protest letter strongly objecting to the appointment of governors at the head of the federal states and thus the de facto abolition of German federalism.

This public opposition meant that Prince Albrecht, who had studied forestry, was prevented from completing his studies.

In July 1934, Albrecht emigrated to Hungary with his family.

From 1935 to 1939 the family returned to Bavaria and lived in seclusion in Kreuth, but his father emigrated to Italy in 1939 and Albrecht and his family moved back to Budapest, where they stayed in a rented apartment in the Castle Quarter.

They often visited his wife's Hungarian and Croatian relatives in the countryside, as well as Albrecht's uncle Prince Franz of Bavaria at his Nádasdy Castle in Sárvár.

The children received private lessons.

Albrecht took over the management of court hunting for the Prince Regent Paul of Yugoslavia until 1941.

In September 1943, the German Army occupied Italy and the former crown prince went into hiding in Florence.

In October 1944, after Germany had occupied Hungary in March, Albrecht and his family were arrested by the Gestapo in the Erdődy mansion in Doba, Hungary, and deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Together with his wife, his four children and three of his half-sisters, they were held captive as “special prisoners” and then transported to the Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps.

Albrecht almost died of dysentery.

Badly hit by hunger and disease, the family barely survived.

His son Franz writes in his memoirs that they only received one slice of bread, often moldy, per person per day as food.

Despite the dramatic situation, according to him, his parents behaved “completely confidently from the start”.

“My father used his aggressiveness as his only weapon and attacked anyone who came too close to him.”

Towards the end of the war, they were interned with other special prisoners, including the family of General Paulus, in a former hotel on Lake Plansee (Tyrol), but had to remain there under military guard even after they were liberated by the United States Third Army.

After a while, Albrecht and his family fled to Linderhof and hid there with a forest ranger.

Finally, together with numerous refugees from Hungary, they moved into an outbuilding of Leutstetten Castle near Starnberg, which was occupied by an Allied commission, where after some time the former crown prince also returned from Rome.

Since 1949 Albrecht lived at Berg Palace (Bavaria), 20 km southwest of Munich on Lake Starnberg, in relative seclusion until the end of his life.

His son Franz remembers: “He came back after being away for many years, having previously experienced a decade of severe disappointments - including on a human level.

He came back to a country where almost all of his real friends had been murdered or fallen.

And he had mostly bad memories of some of the people who had survived and whom he met back then... For him, many places were contaminated by the Nazi era.

He came back to a Bavaria that was no longer his Bavaria.

The resulting isolation accompanied him throughout his life.”

On Christmas Eve 1952, Albrecht of Bavaria was invested in the Knights' Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; he was president of its Bavarian Order Province.

The Duke appeared in public on important occasions.

In order to remain present, he established the annual receptions by the head of the House of Wittelsbach at Nymphenburg Palace, which are still held today, to which around 1,500 guests from state politics, municipalities, churches and sciences, art and medicine as well as friends and relatives are invited.

Together with his son Franz and a daughter, he had taken part in the ship tours organized by King Paul of Greece and Queen Frederica in 1954 and 1956, which became known as the “Cruises of the Kings” and were attended by over 100 royals from all over Europe.

Albrecht became head of the deposed royal family of Bavaria with the death of his father on 2 August 1955.

As head of the House of Wittelsbach, Albrecht was also Grand Master of the Wittelsbach House Orders, the Order of Saint George, the Order of St. Hubert and the Order of Theresa.

In 1959 Albrecht, in an official ceremony, returned the Greek crown jewels (originally made for a Bavarian prince who reigned as Greece's first modern monarch, King Otto) to the Greek nation, accepted by King Paul of Greece.

In 1980 Albrecht presided over sumptuous ceremonies in Bavaria celebrating the 800th anniversary of the ascension of the House of Wittelsbach to the Bavarian throne.

Albrecht was a prolific hunter and deer researcher, collecting 3,425 sets of antlers, now partially shown in a permanent exhibition on his research activities in the former royal castle at Berchtesgaden.