Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark

Nicknamed "Tiny" by her family, the princess grew up within a united household, together with her elder sisters Margarita (1905–1981), Theodora (1906–1969), and Cecilie (1911–1937).

With their mother, Sophie and her sisters communicated in English, but they also used French, German, and Greek in the presence of their relatives and governesses.

Sophie's early childhood was marked by the instability that the Kingdom of Greece experienced due to the First World War.

The conflict divided her family into opposing branches, and Greece eventually set aside its neutrality due to the Triple Entente.

Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (Σοφία; 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).

The fourth daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie was born on 26 June 1914 at Mon Repos, a palace in Corfu that her parents inherited after the assassination of King George I in 1913.

Sophie and her sisters were in the royal palace of Athens when it was bombarded by the French Navy during the battle in the capital on 1 December 1916.

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).

In June 1917, King Constantine I, Sophie's uncle, was finally deposed and driven out of Greece by the Allies, who replaced him on the throne by his second son, the young Alexander.

Fifteen days later, Sophie's family was in turn forced into exile and had to leave Mon Repos in order to remove the possibility of the new monarch being influenced by those close to him.

Forced to reside in German-speaking Switzerland, the small group first stayed in a hotel in St. Moritz, before settling in Lucerne, where they lived with uncertainty about their future.

Homesickness caused by exile was not the only source of anguish for the family, however.

Following the Russian Revolution, Sophie's Romanov relatives were murdered in Russia.

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.

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.

An SS officer since 1932, Christoph joined the Luftwaffe, which led him to various European theaters of operation.

For her part, Sophie moved with her children to her mother-in-law at Friedrichshof Castle in Kronberg im Taunus.

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).

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.

Adolf Hitler's growing distrust of the German aristocracy (from 1942) and the betrayal of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (in 1943) led the Nazi regime to turn against the House of Hesse-Kassel.

Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian monarch and sister-in-law of Sophie, was thus imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she was seriously wounded and died shortly after, while her husband, Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, was confined in Flossenbürg until the victory of the Allies.

At the same time, Christoph was found dead in mysterious circumstances, leaving Sophie almost alone with her four children and a fifth one on the way, as well as the children of Philipp and Mafalda.

The tragic events made Sophie realize the true nature of Hitler's regime and turn against Nazism.

The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies brought new difficulties in the life of Sophie, who found herself in a precarious financial situation due to the theft of her jewelry by American soldiers in 1946 and the sequestration of the property of her first husband until 1953.

After living for several months in Wolfsgarten, she began a relationship with another cousin, Prince George William of Hanover, whom she married in 1946.

She had three more children by her second husband: Welf Ernst (1947–1981), Georg (born 1949) and Friederike of Hanover (born 1954).

Excluded from the 1947 wedding of her brother Prince Philip To Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom (later Queen Elizabeth II) because of her past links to the Nazi regime, Sophie was reintegrated into the royal circles in the early 1950s and attended major events of the aristocracy afterwards.

She nevertheless led a discreet and withdrawn life, spending her time reading, listening to music and gardening.

The couple moved to Salem, where George William worked as director of Schule Schloss Salem (1948–1959), before settling in Schliersee (from 1959).

The last surviving sibling of the Duke of Edinburgh, she died in a retirement home in Schliersee in 2001, after losing one of her sons in 1981 and a grandson in 1994.

She was the paternal aunt of King Charles III.