After decades of controversy, a new book finally puts paid to denials by the late prince Bernhard, prince consort of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1980, that he was a member of the Nazi Party – by discovering and reproducing his original membership documents.
During an extraordinary 93 years, Bernhard was born into an aristocratic German family, was a well-documented member of the Sturmabteilung, the original Nazi paramilitaries, and later of the Reiter-SS cavalry corps, before meeting Dutch princess Juliana, at the 1936 Winter Olympics.
Bernhard, it seems, was a man transformed. The couple married a year later and had six children. Juliana ruled as queen from 1948-1980 and their eldest child, Beatrix, then served as queen of the Netherlands from 1980 until 2013 when she abdicated in favour of her son, the current monarch, King Willem-Alexander.
During the war Bernhard became head of the Dutch military mission in London. He broadcast on the BBC’s overseas service, describing Hitler as “a tyrant” destined to be defeated.
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However, Britain’s security services remained suspicious and barred his access to the most sensitive intelligence – not least because his brother, prince Aschwin of Lippe-Biesterfeld, was an officer in the German army.
On orders from Winston Churchill he was vetted by promising young intelligence officer and soon-to-be novelist, Ian Fleming, and became involved in some war planning.
During the fighting, he clocked more than 1,000 hours flying with the RAF’s 322 Squadron, surviving two crashes.
He was present at the German surrender in the Netherlands on May 5th, 1945, where accounts noted that he “avoided speaking German”.
Was young Bernhard a Nazi by conviction or by circumstance, and was his later conversion a real change of heart or a matter of expediency? These questions dogged him before and since his death.
To some Dutch he remains a war hero who did the right thing. To others he remains a sophisticated dissembler.
In a deathbed interview, Bernhard said: “I swear on the Bible, I was never a Nazi. I never paid party dues. I never had a membership card.”
Despite that, Those Left Behind, the new book by Flip Maarschalkerweerd, former director of the Dutch royal archives, revealed on Wednesday how he discovered the prince’s original Nazi party membership card when he was making an inventory of Bernhard’s papers in 2019.
As historian Gerard Aalders observed: “In the end, he was trying to deny something that simply could no longer be denied.”
