If you think the royal family has drama, wait until you hear about the part of Prince Philip’s clan.
The royal consort, who died Friday at the age of 99, comes from a family of Greek aristocrats who led dramatic and colorful lives in the 20th century – including three sisters who were married to Nazis and a mother who was honored for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust.
Philip was the fifth child and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and his wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg. His older sisters were Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cecile and Sophie.
The prince would stay close to his mother, who had come to live at Buckingham Palace in recent years, while having a complicated relationship with his sisters – who were not even invited to his wedding.
Here’s a look at Philip’s family tree:
Philip’s father: Prince Andrew (1903-1944)
Andrew was a native of both Demark and Greece and related to the Romanov dynasty. He served in both the Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish War and was exiled from Greece with his family in 1922.
By 1930, Andrew’s marriage to Alice had effectively ended, and although the couple never divorced, he left for the French Riviera with a mistress and died in 1944. Philip had not seen his father since 1939.
Philip’s mother: Princess Alice (1885-1969)
Alice was Queen Victoria’s great-granddaughter, making Philip and the queen related. He was born deaf congenitally, but he could speak clearly.
When Philip was only 18 months old, the family was exiled from Greece and settled in Paris, where they relied on relatives for payments. Here Alice became more and more religious, began to hear voices and claimed to receive divine messages.
She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and, on the advice of Sigmund Freud, her belly was irradiated with X-rays in an attempt to counteract her alleged sexual desires.
When Philip was nine years old, his mother was hospitalized in a Swiss sanatorium where she was held against her will for over two years.
After Alice was released, she was essentially homeless, remaining in various German inns. He did not see Philip again until the funeral of his daughter Cecilia, who died in a plane crash at the age of 26 in 1937.
Alice eventually settled in Athens, Greece, and during World War II, she hid a Jewish family on the top floor of her home, around the corner from a Gestapo headquarters.
Her heroic actions were recognized by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center in Israel. In 1993, the Remembrance Center awarded the title of Righteous Among Nations to Alice, and a year later, Philip traveled to Yad Vashem and planted a tree in her honor.
Alice sold her jewelry and founded her own religious order – Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary – before building a monastery and an orphanage in a poor area of Athens.
After a military coup in Greece in 1967, Alice, increasingly frail, was persuaded to live at Buckingham Palace with her son and family. He passed away two years later, leaving no property after giving up all his personal property.
Before she died, she wrote an emotional note for her youngest child, reading, “Dear Philip, be brave and remember that I will never leave you and you will always find me when you need me the most. . All my devoted love, your old mother. ”
Philip’s sisters: Princess Margarita (1905-1981)
Philip’s older sister married Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a German aristocrat who became a Nazi – although he eventually turned to Hitler.
Gottfried was among the officers involved in the “Operation Valkyrie” plot for the 1944 assassination of Hitler, which was portrayed in the 2008 war film “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise.
He managed to avoid execution like many others related to the plan and lived until 1960.
Margarita had six children – five of whom survived to adulthood – and remained in touch with her brother, even visiting after the birth of Princess Anne.
Theodoros (1906 – 1963)
Theodora was the only one of Philip’s brothers who did not believe that the Nazis were material to her husband, choosing instead to marry her second cousin Berthold, the Margrave of Baden.
She had three children and died in 1969, a few weeks before her mother died.
Cecil (1911-1937)
Philip is said to have had a close relationship with Cecilia, who married her cousin Georg Donatus, the hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and Rhine.
The couple joined the Nazi party in May 1937.
A few months later, the family met a violent end when Cécilie, eight months pregnant with her third child, died in a plane crash with her two sons and her husband. Firefighters also found the remains of a baby.
At the funeral, family members were photographed wearing Nazi uniforms.
Sophos (1914-2001)
Sophie married her second cousin, Prince Christoph of Hesse, when she was just 16 years old.
Christoph was director of the Ministry of Air Force in the Third Reich and held the rank of Oberführer in the SS. He also served in the Luftwaffe Research Bureau.
Sophie was invited to Herman Goering’s wedding in 1936 and, after dining with Hitler, wrote that he was a “charming and seemingly modest man.”
The couple named one of their five children, Karl Adolf, in honor of Hitler.
Christoph died in a plane crash in 1943 and Sophie married Prince George William of Hanover three years later and had three more children.
Sophie also remained in touch with her brother and was the godmother of Prince Edward.