Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

Charles Edward's parents (1882)

Prince Charles Edward was born at Claremont House near Esher, Surrey. His father was Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, the eighth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. His mother was Princess Helen of Waldeck and Pyrmont, the fourth daughter of George Victor of Waldeck and Pyrmont and of his first wife Princess Helena of Nassau.[2] Prince Leopold had suffered from hemophilia but a boy cannot inherit the condition from his father so Charles Edward was healthy.[3] As Leopold had died before Charles Edward's birth,[4] Prince Charles Edward succeeded to his titles at birth and was styled His Royal Highness the Duke of Albany.[1] After falling ill, the young royal duke was baptised privately at Claremont on 4 August 1884. He was publicly baptised in Esher Parish Church on 4 December 1884.[5]

Charles Edward (front centre) with his sister, mother and members of his maternal extended family (1895)

Charles Edward was brought up as a Prince of the United Kingdom for his first 15 years.[2] He was seen as a sickly, timid and spoilt child.[6] Charles Edward had one sister, Alice, who had been born a year before him.[7] Being an intensely anxious child he would often look to Alice for support, a habit that would continue throughout his adulthood.[8] Later on, Charles Edward's behaviour would often leave her conflicted between patriotism and loyalty to him.[9] Princess Helen and the children lived with members of the wider royal family in close proximity to Queen Victoria.[7] As a child, Charles Edward attended two prep schools. First Sandroyd School in Surrey[note 1] and later Park Hill School in Lyndhurst. In 1898 he enrolled at Eton College and his mother hoped he would eventually go onto Oxford University. He was happy at Eton and looked back nostalgically at his time at that school throughout his life.[3]

On the morning of 9 November 1918, during the German Revolution, the Workers' and Soldiers' Council of Gotha declared him deposed. On 11 November, his abdication was demanded in Coburg. Only on 14 November, later than most other ruling princes, did he formally announce that he had "ceased to rule" in both Gotha and Coburg. He did not explicitly renounce his throne.[2] The following year, he also lost his British titles, though some personal sympathy remained for him among the political establishment in the United Kingdom due to the way German nationality had been forced on him as a teenager.[3]

Charles Edward in 1930

In 1919, his properties and collections in Coburg were transferred to the Coburger Landesstiftung, a foundation that still exists today. A similar solution for Gotha took longer, and only after legal struggles with the Free State of Thuringia was it set up in 1928–34. The Gotha foundation was expropriated by the Soviet authorities after 1945.[2] After 1919, the family retained Schloss Callenberg, some other properties (including those in Austria), and a right to live at Veste Coburg. It also received substantial financial compensation for lost possessions. Some additional real estate in Thuringia was restored to the ducal family in 1925.[6]

Politically, in the post WW1 period, Charles Edward aimed for the restoration of the monarchy and supported the nationalistic-conservative, völkisch right. Now a private citizen,[note 2] Charles Edward became associated with various right-wing paramilitary and political organisations.[2] These organisations were associated with violent repression, anti-government activities and politically motivated murders. He supported Hermann Ehrhardt, both morally and financially, after the Freikorps' commander's participation in the failed Kapp Putsch. It was rumoured that Charles Edward wanted to return to political power as "King of Thuringia".[6] Charles Edward met Adolf Hitler for the first time on 14 October 1922, at the Nazis' second Deutscher Tag held at Coburg. In 1923, he joined the Bund Wiking as Oberbereichsleiter in Thuringia. When the Wiking joined Der Stahlhelm, Charles Edward became a member of the Stahlhelm's national board.[2][6] From 1929, he provided financial support to the Nazi Party.[18] He was attracted by the party's militarism and anti-communism.[3]

Charles Edward (furthest left) at his daughter's wedding (1932)

Charles Edward was a useful ally for the Nazis in the period before they gained power with extensive links in Franconia and across Germany. In 1932, Charles Edward took part in the creation of the Harzburg Front, through which the German National People's Party and other groups with similar views became associated with the Nazi Party. He also publicly called on voters to support Hitler in the presidential election of 1932. A few months later, Charles Edward's daughter Sibylla married Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Västerbotten, the eldest son of the Crown Prince of Sweden and second-in-line to the Swedish throne. The marriage meant that Sibylla would, in the normal course, become Queen of Sweden. He used the event as a public display of his ideology and to improve the damaged prestige of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.[8]

Charles Edward in 1933, as SA-Gruppenführer

Charles Edward speaking at a meeting of the German Red Cross (1936)

Charles Edward formally joined the Nazi Party in March 1933, he also became a Obergruppenführer in the SA.[6] Charles Edward was made president of the National Socialist Automobile Association, an organisation which provided vehicles for the German state including those used to carry out the Holocaust.[18] From 1936 to 1945, he served as a member of the Reichstag, representing the Nazi Party, and was president of the German Red Cross from December 1933 to 1945. By the time he took over the position, the German Red Cross had already been placed under the Nazis' control.[2][6] Under Charles Edward's leadership, the German Red Cross reduced its interest in improving the welfare of the civilian population in order to focus on military matters and introduced various displays of allegiance towards the regime. His deputy Ernst-Robert Grawitz was involved in human experimentation in the concentration camps.[6] American historian Jonathan Petropoulos wrote of the German Red Cross's role in the regime that:

The German Red Cross, which Heinrich Himmler's SS infiltrated, helped conceal the true horrors of the concentration camps and psychiatric institutions, the latter serving as the sites for the murderous T-4 program that targeted the mentally and physically disabled. The duke [Charles Edward] used his venerable name and excellent manners to assist the Nazis in their propaganda campaign. He helped deceive the International Red Cross and its president, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, and this included orchestrating Burckhardt's 1935 inspection tour, during which he visited Dachau.[18]

German historian Karina Urbach also said she found evidence of Charles Edward donating generously to the Nazi party for years, financing political murders and being aware of the death camps in Buchenwald.[19] According to a review of a documentary about his life in The Guardian, he was aware of the death camps' work, and the programme that killed more than 100,000 disabled people in Germany, Austria, and other German-occupied territories from 1940 onwards.[16]

Charles Edward (left) meeting the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Nevile Henderson, in 1939. He had been at Eton with Henderson and this photograph may have been taken at a meeting of the Anglo-German Fellowship that Henderson addressed in May 1937, shortly after his appointment as British Ambassador.[20]

The regime made significant use of Charles Edward as an informal diplomat.[8] In 1934, Charles Edward visited Japan, where he attended a conference on the protection of civilians during war, and delivered Hitler's birthday greeting to Emperor Hirohito.[6] In 1940, Charles Edward travelled via Moscow and Japan to the US, where he met President Roosevelt at the White House. In 1943, at Hitler's behest, Charles Edward asked the International Red Cross to investigate the Katyn massacre.[6] He was particularly significant to their attempts to cultivate pro-German sentiments among the British aristocracy.[8] By 1936, he had agreed to be a spy for Hitler while attending the funeral of his first cousin George V at Sandringham,[21] He attended George V's funeral as Hitler's representative, in an SA uniform, complete with a metal helmet.[22] He was president of the Anglo-German fellowship and lobbied figures believed to be pro-German.[3]

His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry argues that Charles Edward's advocacy had little success, and that he failed to understand the degree to which the people he had grown up around now saw him as a foreigner.[3] In contrast, Urbach argued in her 2015 book that the strains British society experienced in the post World War 1 period had a radicalising effect on sections of the British elite and that there was significant sympathy for Fascism albeit discomfort with Nazism in particular among the aristocracy. She wrote that Charles Edward reintegrated himself into aristocratic social life in Britain with the help of his sister and influenced prominent figures such as the Prince of Wales.[8]

Charles Edward visiting a hospital in German-occupied Prague (1942)

Although Charles Edward was too old for active service during World War II, his three sons served in the Wehrmacht.[23] His son and son-in-law were killed in action. His support for Nazism grew more intense during the war years and never relented.[3] Charles Edward probably ceased to act as an informal diplomat after 1940. He continued to wear uniforms and travel abroad to countries that were occupied by Germany, members of the Axis powers or neutral. Travelling abroad was a privilege afforded to few German civilians during the war years. It is unclear what Charles Edward was doing politically during this period but he was being paid 4,000 Reichsmarks a month by the German government from a fund Hitler had organised for associates that were useful to him. In 1945, Hitler ordered that Charles Edward not be allowed to be captured because of the great deal of inside information that he possessed.[8] In April 1945, Charles Edward agreed the surrender of Veste Coburg to US forces and gained their assistance in putting out a fire in the castle museum which had been started by the bombardment. Charles Edward was on the US army's list of suspected war criminals and was put under house arrest until being moved to a prisoner of war camp in November.[7]

After the end of World War II, Charles Edward was interned by the American military authorities from 1945 to 1946.[24] His sister lobbied unsuccessfully for his release on health grounds.[7] In 1950 (or August 1949, according to his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry) Charles Edward was found by a denazification court to be a Mitläufer and Minderbelasteter (roughly translated as: follower and follower of lesser guilt).[6][3] Charles Edward also lost significant property as a result of his participation in World War II. Gotha was part of Thuringia, and therefore situated in the Soviet occupation zone. The Soviet Army confiscated much of the family's property in Gotha.[24] However, Coburg had become part of Bavaria in 1920[23] and was occupied by American forces. As such the family was able to retain property in what would become West Germany.[24]

In April 1946, his daughter Sibylla gave birth to a son,[25] the future Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, who became, upon birth, third in the line of succession to the Swedish throne. In January 1947, Sybilla's husband died in a plane crash,[26] and in October 1950, Gustaf V of Sweden died, at which point Charles Edward's grandson became the Crown Prince of Sweden, who later became King Carl Gustaf.[27]

Burial site near Schloss Callenberg

Charles Edward spent the last years of his life in seclusion, forced into poverty by the fines he had been required to pay by the denazification tribunal,[28] and the seizure of much of his property by the Soviets.[23][29] In 1953, he viewed the coronation of his cousin's granddaughter, Elizabeth II, in a local cinema.[30] According to a column published that year in The Scotsman Charles Edward had reestablished links with the Seaforth Highlanders a British Army regiment which he had once been Colonel-in-chief of.[31]

Charles Edward died of cancer in his flat in Elsässer Straße, Coburg, on 6 March 1954, at the age of 69,[29] his obituary in The Times commented that "...he was Hitler's man... Whether, and to what extent, he was admitted to the inner council of the Nazi gang is as yet an open question."[23] He was the penultimate ruling prince of the German Empire to die; only Ernst II of Saxe-Altenburg outlived him – see List of German monarchs in 1918. He is buried at the Waldfriedhof Cemetery (Waldfriedhof Beiersdorf) near Schloss Callenberg, in Beiersdorf near Coburg.[3]

The Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1905)

The Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and their four eldest children (1918)

Wilhelm II chose Princess Victoria Adelaide of Schleswig-Holstein, the niece of his wife, Empress Augusta Victoria, as the bride of Charles Edward. She was believed to be well adjusted and loyal to his royal house. Charles Edward was told to propose to her and obliged.[8] They married on 11 October 1905, at Glücksburg Castle, Schleswig-Holstein, and had five children.[2] Victoria Adelaide was described in her grandson's memoirs as the leading part in the marriage and Charles Edward would initially come to her for advice.[32]

The family mainly spoke English at home, though the children learnt to speak German fluently. Hubertus, Charles Edward's second son, was the favourite child.[33] A profile of the family published in a British newspaper The Sphere shortly before the outbreak of WWI described Charles Edward's sons and daughters as "bright, happy children who lead a natural life, spending a great deal of their time in the open air in the fine grounds of their castle" and mentioned they enjoyed various sports.[34] Later, according to German historian Karina Urbach, the children lived in fear of their father, who ran his family "like a military unit". Charles Edward's younger daughter, Princess Caroline Mathilde, claimed that her father had sexually abused her. The allegation was backed by one of her brothers. When they grew up, Charles Edward's children were often a disappointment to him in their choice of romantic relationships at a time when he was trying to use strategic marriages to improve the diminished reputation of his royal house.[8]

In December 2007, Britain's Channel 4 aired an hour-length documentary about Charles Edward called Hitler's Favourite Royal. A review in The Guardian described the film as "A solid documentary on a feeble man and a wretched family."[16] Another review in The Telegraph suggested the documentary had been overly sympathetic to Charles Edward stating that the "story emerged as a tale of pure tragedy. Which it undoubtedly was, in parts," but that he was depicted "As if the trauma of being elevated to a dukedom and losing it had somehow robbed him of his ability to tell right from wrong."[54]

Karina Urbach's 2015 book Go Betweens for Hitler discusses how various aristocrats including Charles Edward acted as informal diplomats for Nazi Germany.[55] A review in The Times commented on Charles Edward that "For many years thereafter [the German Revolution], Carl Eduard was regarded as a mere footnote in history; a harmless, potty old aristocrat, washed up by the seismic upheavals of the early 20th century. However, that benign interpretation has been recently revised. We now know that Carl Eduard was a member of the Nazi party, a sponsor of paramilitary terrorism and — as Karina Urbach’s excellent book demonstrates — an important “go-between” for Hitler."[56]

• Büschel, Hubertus (2016). Hitlers adliger Diplomat. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt. ISBN 978-3100022615.
• Sandner, Harald (2010). Hitlers Herzog: Carl Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha: die Biographie. Aachen.