If you think the royal family has drama, wait to hear about Prince Philip’s side of the clan.
The late royal consort, who died Friday at the age of 99, came from a family of Greek aristocrats who lived dramatic and colorful lives in the 20th century – including three sisters married to Nazis and a mother honored for saving of Jews during the Holocaust.
Philip was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and his wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg. His older sisters were Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cécilie and Sophie.
The prince would stay close to his mother, who came to live in Buckingham Palace in her final years, while having a complicated relationship with his sisters – who weren’t even invited to his wedding.
Here’s a look at Philip’s family tree:
Philip’s father: Prince Andrew (1903-1944)
Andrew was a birth princess of both Denmark and Greece and related to the Romanov dynasty. He served in both the Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish War and was expelled from Greece in 1922 along with his family.
In 1930 Andrew’s marriage to Alice was effectively over, 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 a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, so Philip and the Queen were distantly related. She was born congenitally deaf but could speak clearly.
When Philip was only 18 months old, the family was expelled from Greece and settled in Paris, where they depended on relatives for distributions. There, Alice became more and more religious, began to hear voices, and claimed to be receiving divine messages.
She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and, on the advice of Sigmund Freud, her uterus was irradiated with X-rays in an attempt to thwart her alleged sexual desires.
When Philip was nine, his mother was admitted to a Swiss sanitarium where she was held against her will for more than two years.
After Alice was released, she essentially became homeless and stayed in various German inns. She did not see Philip again until the funeral of her daughter Cécilie, who died in a plane crash in 1937 at the age of 26.
Alice eventually settled in Athens, Greece, and during World War II 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 memorial center awarded Alice the title of Righteous Among the Nations 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 – the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary – before building a monastery and orphanage in a poor neighborhood of Athens.
After a military coup in Greece in 1967, the increasingly frail Alice was convinced to live in Buckingham Palace with her son and family. She died two years later, leaving no belongings after giving away all of her personal belongings.
Before she died, she wrote a touching note for her youngest child: “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 mama. “
Philip’s Sisters: Princess Margarita (1905-1981)
Philip’s eldest sister married Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a German aristocrat who later became a Nazi – although he eventually turned against Hitler.
Gottfried was one of the officers involved in the “Operation Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, which was depicted in the 2008 war movie “Valkyrie”, starring Tom Cruise.
He managed to avoid being executed like many others linked to the plan and lived until 1960.
Margarita had six children – five of whom survived into adulthood – and kept in touch with her brother even when visiting after Princess Anne was born.
Theodora (1906 – 1963)
Theodora was the only one of Philip’s siblings who did not think Nazis were spouse material, and chose to marry her great-nephew Berthold, Margrave of Baden.
She had three children and died in 1969, weeks before her mother died.
Cecilia (1911-1937)
Philip is said to have had a close relationship with Cecilie, who married her cousin Georg Donatus, hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine.
The couple joined the Nazi Party in May 1937.
Months later, the family met a violent end when Cécilie, eight months pregnant with her third child, was killed in a plane crash alongside her two sons and husband. Firefighters also found the remains of a baby.
At the funeral, family members were photographed in Nazi uniforms.
Sophie (1914-2001)
Sophie married her great-nephew, Prince Christoph of Hesse, when she was only 16.
Christoph was director of the Ministry of Air Force of the Third Reich and held the rank of Oberführer in the SS. He also served in the Luftwaffe Research Office.
Sophie was a guest at Herman Goering’s wedding in 1936 and, after having dinner 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 kept in touch with her brother and was Prince Edward’s godmother.