Tea With Hitler - The Secret History of the Royal Family and the Third Reich

After the Second World War, war crime prosecutors charged two of King George VI’s closest German relatives, Duke Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Prince Philipp of Hesse, with ‘crimes against humanity’. American soldiers discovered top-secret documents at Marburg Castle that exposed treacherous family double-dealing inside The Royal Family. The King’s two brothers – the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Kent – had flirted dangerously with the Nazi regime in duplicitous games of secret diplomacy.To avert a potential public relations catastrophe, George VI hid incriminating papers and, with Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt’s help, whitewashed history to protect his family. When the British Royal Family gathered for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Philip Mountbatten in 1947, three of Philip’s sisters were banned from Westminster Abbey because their husbands were senior Nazi officers. After the Second World War, war crimes prosecutors charged two of King George VI's closest German relatives with 'crimes against humanity'. American soldiers discovered top-secret documents at Marburg Castle that exposed treacherous family double-dealing inside the Royal Family. Two of the King's brothers had flirted dangerously with the Nazi regime in duplicitous games of secret diplomacy. To avert a potential public relations catastrophe, George VI hid incriminating papers and, with Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt's help, whitewashed history to protect his family. Three of Philip Mountbatten's sisters were banned from Westminster Abbey and the wedding of their brother to Princess Elizabeth because their husbands were senior Nazi officers. This dilemma was Queen Victoria's fatal legacy: she had hoped to secure peace in Europe through a network of royal marriages, but her plan backfired with two world wars. Tea With Hitler is a family saga of duty, courage, wilful blindness and criminality, revealing the tragic fate of a Saxe-Coburg princess murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme and the story of Queen Victoria's Jewish great-grand-daughter, rescued by her British relatives. A revelatory look at how the British royal family became divided by two world wars