Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld
Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was Prince consort of the Netherlands from 6 September 1948 to 30 April 1980 as the husband of Queen Juliana. They had four daughters together, including Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
Bernhard belonged to the German princely house of Lippe-Biesterfeld and was a nephew of the last sovereign prince of Lippe, Leopold IV. From birth he held the title Count of Biesterfeld; his uncle raised him to princely rank with the style of Serene Highness in 1916. He studied law and worked as an executive secretary at the Paris office of IG Farben. In 1937 he married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, and was immediately given the title Prince of the Netherlands with the style of Royal Highness. Upon his wife's accession to the throne in 1948, he became prince consort.
Bernhard was an early member of the Nazi Party as well as the brown shirts or Sturmabteilung, and served as an officer in the Schutzstaffel. He switched his political allegiance to the Allies after the invasion of the Netherlands. Until his death, Bernhard denied being a NSDAP member or holding a NSDAP membership card. He was respected for his performance as a combat pilot and his activities as a liaison officer and personal aide to his mother-in-law, Queen Wilhelmina, during the conflict, and for his work during post-war reconstruction. During the war, he was part of the London-based Allied war planning council, and saw limited active combat service as honorary wing commander in Royal Air Force, flying both fighter and bomber planes. He was also an honorary general officer in the Dutch army and was an observer in negotiating the terms of surrender of Nazi forces in the Netherlands. Officially for proven bravery, leadership and loyalty during his wartime efforts, he was appointed a Commander of the Military William Order, the Netherlands' oldest and highest honour. After the war he was made honorary air marshal of the RAF by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1969, Bernhard was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He became entangled in the so-called Lockheed bribery scandal in 1976 for having secretly promoted the sale of their airplanes and of Northrop's for money, and was degraded from all his military functions with a lifelong ban on wearing any military uniform.
Bernhard helped found the World Wildlife Fund, becoming its first president in 1961. In 1970, along with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and other associates, he established the WWF's financial endowment "The 1001: A Nature Trust". In 1954, he was a co-founder of the international Bilderberg Group, which has met annually since then to discuss corporate globalisation and other issues concerning Europe and North America. He was forced to step down from both groups after being involved in the Lockheed Bribery Scandal in 1976.
Early life
Bernhard was born Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter, Count of Biesterfeld in Jena, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Empire on 29 June 1911, the elder son of Prince Bernhard of Lippe and his wife, Baroness Armgard von Sierstorpff-Cramm, member of one of the oldest Lower Saxon noble families, House of Cramm. He was a grandson of Ernest, Count of Lippe-Biesterfeld, who was regent of the Principality of Lippe until 1904, and was also a nephew of the principality's last sovereign, Leopold IV, Prince of Lippe.Because his parents' marriage did not conform with the marriage laws of the House of Lippe, it was initially deemed morganatic, as Armgard didn't belong by birth to any ruling or the former ruling families of Europe, Bernhard was granted only the title of Count of Biesterfeld at birth. He and his brother could succeed to the Lippian throne only if the entire reigning House became extinct. In 1916, his uncle Leopold IV as reigning Prince raised him and his mother to the rank of Prince and Princess of Lippe-Biesterfeld, thereby retroactively according his parents' marriage dynastic status. The suffix Biesterfeld revived the beginning of a new cadet line of the House of Lippe.
After World War I, Bernhard's family lost their German Principality and the revenue that had accompanied it, but the family was still reasonably well-off. Bernhard spent his early years at Reckenwalde palace, the family's new estate in East Brandenburg, thirty kilometres east of the River Oder. He was taught privately and received his early education at home. When he was twelve, he was sent to board at the Gymnasium in Züllichau. Several years later he was sent to board at a Gymnasium in Berlin, from which he graduated in 1929.
Bernhard suffered from poor health as a boy. Doctors predicted that he would not live very long. This prediction might have inspired Bernhard's reckless driving and the risks that he took in the Second World War and thereafter. The prince wrecked several cars and planes in his lifetime.
Bernhard studied law at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in fall 1929 until the spring of 1930, then in Berlin, then in Munich the following year in the fall of 1931, and then again in Berlin. In Munich Bernhard enrolled himself on 24 October 1930. Van der Zijl also stresses the notoriety of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität as extreme-right including sending away Albert Einstein as a lecturer in the twenties and the early ban of all Jewish societies. She characterizes of the city of Munich as the birthplace of the NSDAP.
Back in Berlin at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in October 1931 after a serious illness, he could also indulge in his taste for fast cars, horse riding, and big-game hunting safaris. He was nearly killed in a boating accident and in an aeroplane crash.. Bernhard was an active member of the Motor-SA and of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, where he inscribed himself on 27 April 1933.
While at university in Berlin for the year 1933, Bernhard joined the Nazi Party, exactly dated on his membership card as 1 May 1933. He also enrolled in the Sturmabteilung, stating to his biographer Sefton Delmer that such a membership was necessary to register for exams – but Van der Zijl points out, that there were no official exams at this university until 1935.
Bernhard left Berlin in December 1934 when he graduated and went to work for IG Farben. The Prince later denied that he had belonged to SA, to the Reiter-SS, and to the paramilitary National-sozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps, but these are well-documented memberships. According to journalist Philip Dröge, Bernhard was also a member of Nazi youth movement Sturm. While he was not a fierce champion of democracy, the Prince was never known to hold any radical political views or express any racist sentiments, although he admitted that he briefly had sympathised with Adolf Hitler's regime. van der Zijl clearly demonstrates, that Bernhard again and again fabulates on his memberships and other activities, to enhance his postwar stance that he never willingly would have joined any Nazi-organization. In October 2023, Bernhard's original NSDAP membership card was discovered in his old residence in Germany.
The Prince eventually went to work for the German chemical giant IG Farben in the early-to-mid 1930s, then the world's fourth-largest company. In 1932, it had already sponsored Hitler's election campaigns.. He joined the statistics department of IG Farben's N.W.7 wing, the company's main information gathering and management centre headquartered in Berlin and with offices worldwide that evolved into the economic intelligence arm of the Wehrmacht. He was lodged with Count Paul von Kotzebue, an exiled Russian nobleman of German descent, and his wife Allene Tew, who was born in the United States. After training, Bernhard became a secretary in 1935 to the board of directors at IG Farben's Paris office.
Marriage and children
Bernhard met then-Princess Juliana at the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Juliana's mother, Queen Wilhelmina, had spent most of the 1930s looking for a suitable husband for Juliana. As a Protestant of royal rank, Bernhard was deemed acceptable for the devoutly religious Wilhelmina. They were distantly related, seventh cousins, both descending from Lebrecht, Prince of Anhalt-Zeitz-Hoym. Wilhelmina left nothing to chance, and had her lawyers draft a very detailed prenuptial agreement that specified exactly what Bernhard could and could not do. The couple's engagement was announced on 8 September 1936, and they were married at The Hague on 7 January 1937. Earlier, Bernhard had been granted Dutch citizenship and changed the spelling of his names from German to Dutch. Previously styled as Serene Highness, he became a Royal Highness by Dutch law. His appropriateness as consort of the future Queen would later become a matter of considerable public debate.Prince Bernhard fathered six children, four of them with Queen Juliana. The eldest daughter is Beatrix,, who later became Queen of the Netherlands. His other daughters with Juliana are Irene, Margriet and Christina.
File:Princess Juliana and family 1942.jpg|thumb|right|262px|Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard with their oldest daughters Princess Beatrix and Princess Irene in Ottawa on 4 May 1942.
He had two "natural", or illegitimate, daughters. The first is Alicia von Bielefeld. Von Bielefeld has become a landscape architect and lives in the United States. His sixth daughter, Alexia Grinda, is his child by Hélène Grinda, a French socialite and fashion model. Although rumours about these two children were already widespread, their status as his daughters was made official after his death. In December 2004, Dutch historian Cees Fasseur claimed that Jonathan Aitken, former British Conservative Cabinet Minister, is also a child of Prince Bernhard, the result of his wartime affair with Penelope Maffey.
1930s: Relationship with Nazi Party
Prince Bernhard was a member of the "Reiter-SS", a mounted unit of the SS, part of the National Socialist Motor Corps. Historian Flip Maarschalkerweerd discovered a NSDAP membership archive card that showed he had been a member of the NSDAP, also known as the Nazi Party from April 1933 to June 1934 and again from November 1934 until January 1937. His Nazi Party membership card was found in his belongings after his death. Bernhard denied being a paid or active member of the Nazi party throughout his life, although he did admit to being part of the movement as part of the Sturmabteilung; he falsely claimed it was needed for him to be member of this organization as a student at the university. This was not the case as when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, there was an run on party membership among opportunists. Between January and April 1933 the number of members of the party grew from around 850,000 to more than 2.5 million. Due to its inability to manage the influx, the party implemented a membership halt on May 1, 1933, which was only removed in 1937.Bernhard claimed to have severed all ties to the ruling Nazi regime in 1937 when he married princess Juliana of the Netherlands. In interviews he claimed his brother Aschwin was a real Nazi at the time, but that he was only Nazi on paper.
Various members of his family and friends were aligned with the Nazis prior to the Second World War, and a number of them attended the royal wedding. Protocol demanded that the prospective Prince-Consort be invited to an audience with his head of state, who was Adolf Hitler. Hitler gave an account of the conversation that he had with Bernhard in his Tischgespräche. The book was a collection of monologues, remarks and speeches that Hitler gave during lunch or dinner to those he had invited. In those notes, Hitler is recorded to have said that Bernhard approached him, shortly after the start of the Nazi regime, with an offer of support to increase German influence in the Netherlands.
When asked in an interview in 2004 why he changed sides and started fighting against his homeland Germany, Bernhard claimed that he did not believe that Hitler and his regime had no plans to invade the Netherlands. Once Germany attacked his new homeland of the Netherlands in 1940; Bernhard's feelings towards his birth country of Germany changed to antagonism, and he had no problems fighting against Germany for the rest of the war.
The Dutch government's information bureau Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst would later confirm in 2023, years after the death, that Bernhard was member of the NSDAP, and that the Koninklijk Huisarchief does still have Bernhard's original party membership card in his file.