#princess alice
Princess Alice of Battenberg
Princess Alice of Battenberg, later Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II.
She was congenitally deaf, and grew up in Germany, England and the Mediterranean, and in 1930, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium. After her recovery, she devoted most of her remaining years to charity work in Greece.
She stayed in Athens during the Second World War, where she worked for the Red Cross, helped organize soup kitchens for the starving populace and flew to Sweden to bring back medical supplies on the pretext of visiting her sister, Louise, who was married to the Crown Prince. She organized two shelters for orphaned and stray children, and a nursing circuit for poor neighbourhoods.
The occupying forces apparently presumed Princess Andrew was pro-German, nonetheless, when visited by a German general who asked her, “Is there anything I can do for you?”, she replied, “You can take your troops out of my country.”
Princess Andrew hid Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and two of her five children, who sought to evade the Gestapo and deportation to the death camps.
During the fighting, to the dismay of the British, she insisted on walking the streets distributing rations to policemen and children in contravention of the curfew order. When told that she might have been shot by a stray bullet, she replied “they tell me that you don’t hear the shot that kills you and in any case I am deaf. So, why worry about that?”
In January 1949, the princess founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary.
She died at Buckingham Palace on 5 December 1969. She is recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations“ at Yad Vashem.
Prince Philip said of his mother’s sheltering of persecuted Jews, “I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress.”
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Painting of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, 1894.
Portrait of Princess Irene with Princess Charlotte, Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen, 1880s.
Portrait of Princess Louis of Battenberg holding her daughter Princess Alice of Battenberg, 1885.
Portraits of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia by Hayman Selig Mendelssohn, July 1887.
Candid photograph of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, 1900s.
Candid photograph of Princess Henry of Prussia and Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, 1900s.
Portrait of Princess Louis of Battenberg, 1890s.
Painting of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna based on a photograph by Carl Backofen, Darmstadt, 1890s.
Full length photograph of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia, 1899.
Photograph of Prince and Princess Henry of Prussia with their son Prince Waldermar by Robert Milne, Balmoral, September 1895.
Photograph of Princess Alix, Margareth von Fabrice and Princess Louis of Battenberg, late 1880s.
Portrait of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia by Sergey Levitsky, 1885.
Portraits of Princess Henry of Prussia, 1900s.
Photograph of Princess Alix performing in a Tableux-Vivant called “The Novice” by Charles Albert Wilson, Balmoral, 5 October 1888.
Photograph of Prince and Princess Louis of Battenberg along with Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Osborne, 1885.
Portrait of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, 1894.
Portrait of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia along with her maid of honor Princess Lobanova-Rostovskaya, 1897.
