The Royal Family's Wartime Heroine

How Prince Philip's eccentric mother became a revered member of the royal family

Last week King Charles III made history as the first British monarch to visit Auschwitz in Poland. The occasion was the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of the infamous Nazi death camp where 1.1 million men, women, and children—one million of them Jews—were tortured and killed during the Second World War. The King became visibly emotional as he listened to the “powerful testimonies” of elderly survivors. He emphasized the importance of recalling “the depths to which humanity can sink when evil is allowed to flourish, ignored for too long by the world.”

The Prince and Princess of Wales at the Guildhall in London during a Holocaust Memorial Day service, January 27, 2025

Back in London, his son Prince William and daughter-in-law Catherine, the Princess of Wales, participated in a Holocaust Memorial Day service that had a more personal angle. William read from a book called Heroes of the Holocaust that singled out Princess Alice of Battenberg—Prince Philip’s mother and his great-grandmother—for courageously saving a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation of Greece in the Second World War.

“There were great risks”

From September 1943 to October 1944, Rachel Cohen and two of her children, Tilde and Michael, were protected by Alice in her Athens home. “There were great risks,” said William, “not least the position of the house. The front door faced the residence of the local Archbishop, which always had a German guard on duty outside. She was sometimes interviewed by the Gestapo and used her deafness to an advantage, pretending not to understand their questions or what they were talking about. It worked, and they soon gave up. Thanks to her, the entire Cohen family survived the war.”

Alice’s journey to heroism took her from palatial opulence to poverty and sacrifice, through multiple tragedies and a prolonged bout of madness. As a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alice was born in 1885 in Windsor Castle, where her mother, Princess Victoria, had been born twenty-two years earlier. Alice’s father was a German prince, Louis of Battenberg. When Alice was eighteen, she married twenty-one-year-old Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, an officer in the Greek army. As a descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the nineteenth century, Andrew, like Alice, had a strong Germanic heritage, but he had no Greek blood whatsoever. After their marriage, Alice was also called Princess Andrew of Greece.

Princess Alice and Prince Andrew in 1903 before their October wedding

Alice had been deaf since birth, and she learned to lip-read so expertly that she could communicate in several languages. She and Andrew had four daughters, and on June 10, 1921—at last—a son, Prince Philip. By then they had been through two wars in the Balkans. While Andrew fought with the Greek army, Alice set up field hospitals on the front lines and witnessed awful carnage. She had been inspired by her Aunt Ella, her mother’s younger sister known as Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia, who became a nun and ran a charitable convent hospital as well as an orphanage and home for consumptives. In 1918, after the Russian Revolution, Ella was murdered by Lenin’s secret police, recognized as a martyr, and eventually canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox church. Alice’s connection to Ella was so intense that many years later she ensured it would extend into eternity.