The deaf princess who hid Jewish refugees from the Gestapo during World War II
In short: Born into royalty and deaf from birth, Princess Alice of Battenberg lived a life that defied every expectation of her station. She traded her tiaras for a nun’s habit, sold her jewels to feed the poor, and risked execution by sheltering Jewish refugees while her own sons-in-law fought for the Nazis.
Born in 1885 in the presence of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria, Alice was congenitally deaf and mastered lip-reading by age eight. Her life took a traumatic turn in 1930 when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized. During her confinement, she was subjected to experimental treatments by Sigmund Freud, including X-raying her ovaries to induce menopause, which caused lasting health issues. She eventually fled the sanatorium and spent years estranged from her husband, Prince Andrew of Greece, who died in 1944.
Despite her royal background, Alice lived in relative poverty, often giving away her possessions to those in need. Her commitment to service was lifelong; she served as a nurse during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the First World War, earning a Red Cross award. During the Second World War, she remained in Greece, where she hid a Jewish friend and her daughter. When interrogated by the Gestapo, she used her deafness as a shield, feigning an inability to understand their questions to protect those she was hiding.
In 1949, she founded the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, a Greek Orthodox nursing order on the island of Tinos. She remained devoted to this life until 1967, when political unrest in Greece forced her to move to Buckingham Palace to live with her son, Prince Philip, and Queen Elizabeth II. She died in 1969. Decades later, her legacy was formally honored: in 1993, Yad Vashem named her 'Righteous Among the Nations,' and in 2010, the British government recognized her as a 'Hero of the Holocaust.'
Alice’s life was marked by profound personal loss, including the death of her daughter, Princess Cecilie, in a 1937 plane crash. Yet, she remained a figure of immense humility. By selling her royal jewels to fund her religious order and feed the poor, she embodied a sense of duty that transcended her noble birth, earning her the title of a true 'People’s Princess' in the most literal sense.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: New Histories - Princess Alice of Battenberg: The other ‘People’s Princess’
- Also: Princess Alice of Battenberg
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