The extraordinary life of Victoria Alice Elizabeth of Battenberg, mother of Prince Philip and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.


 

Born in Windsor, England, on February 25, 1885, Alice of Battenberg, Princess of Greece, was one of Queen Victoria's many great-grandchildren. Her father was Prince Louis Alexander Battenberg and her mother was Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt.


Although Alice was congenitally deaf, she learned to read lips and speak English, German and, after her engagement, Greek.


On the occasion of the coronation of Edward VII, Alice meets and falls in love with Andrew of Greece, younger brother of King Constantine I and son of George I of Greece, and the two get married in 1903: they will have five children.


Alice's husband is commander of a Greek army corps in the ill-fated war against Turkey, which ends catastrophically in 1922. Held responsible


of the military defeat, Prince Andrew is arrested and tried. Foreign pressure saved his life, but he and his family were exiled when the Greek monarchy was overthrown in 1923.


It was in 1929 that the first signs of psychological imbalance began: Alice, in her delirium, was convinced that she was in direct contact with Jesus Christ and was receiving divine messages. In 1930 she was admitted to the clinic of Dr. Ernst Simmel, a close collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic.


When questioned, the father of psychoanalysis ruled that the princess' disorder arises from a sexual imbalance. Alice is therefore subjected, against her will, to sterilization which leads to an early menopause, without certainly providing her with any mental benefits.


While Alice is hospitalized in a mental hospital, her husband, in the south of France, turns to alcohol and gambling alongside a new lover.


But even from these dark years, Alice manages to recover. In 1942 she returned to Greece, where she hid Jews in the attic of her house, ending up in the sights of the Gestapo who included her among her suspects: by taking advantage of her deafness she managed to get away with it, saving the lives of her protégés.


She also works for the Red Cross, dedicating herself again to the least and needy. Her brother Louis of Mountbatten sends her money to live on, but she donates it all to charity.


Alice will not be able to attend her daughters' weddings with princes of various German families, but she would have seen her family again at a tragic moment. In 1937, in fact, her daughter Cecilia, married to her cousin Donato d' Assia, while traveling to London with her husband and two of her children, met her death in a plane crash that killed all the passengers.


Cecilia was eight months pregnant with her fourth child at the time of the disaster, and the remains of her baby were found in the wreckage, indicating that Cecilia had gone into labor. At her funeral Alice sees her husband again, but above all her Filippo, now a teenager and entrusted to the care of his uncle Louis Mountbatten, the famous last viceroy of India.


During the Second World War Alice experiences a controversial situation as her sons-in-law fight in the German army, while her son Philip is enlisted in the English army, in the navy commanded by Lord Mountbatten, the princess's brother.


Alice returned to Britain in 1947 for the wedding of her son Philip to the future Queen Elizabeth. To give the engagement ring as a gift, Philip, who has no means, receives some stones from his diadem from his mother.


In January 1949, Alice founded a Greek Orthodox order of nuns; she attended her daughter-in-law's coronation in 1953 dressed in the habit of the order.


When in 1967 the coup d'état in Greece made the situation hot again, Prince Philip had her mother taken to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen would assign her a room worthy of her rank.


Alice died on 5 December 1969 at the age of 84 in Buckingham Palace. Her remains, initially placed in the Royal Crypt of Windsor Castle, were transferred in 1988 to the convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (near her aunt Elizaveta Fedorovna, sister of Alexandra, last Tsarina of Russia), as requested by the princess before her death.


On 31 October 1994, at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial) in Jerusalem she was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for having hidden and saved Jews.

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