How an Italian princess incurred the wrath of Hitler

Eighty years ago, Mafalda of Hesse’s life came to a slow and painful end – all because she aroused the suspicions of the Nazi authorities

The announcement was stark and strikingly brief. On May 2 1945, British newspapers confirmed a royal death had happened nine months earlier. Princess Mafalda of Savoy, also known as Mafalda of Hesse, had been “killed in an air raid somewhere in Germany”. 
In fact, the princess, one of four daughters of Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, had died in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald as a result of injuries caused by an Allied bombing raid that buried her neck deep in rubble. A subsequent amputation of one of her arms, carried out in the camp brothel, led to fatal haemorrhaging. 
Mafalda died 80 years ago, on August 28 1944, a slow and painful end in squalid surroundings, her naked body thrown carelessly onto a heap of other corpses. A political prisoner, the mother of four was just 41 years of age. She was one of Buchenwald’s estimated 56,000 deaths – from causes including execution, medical experiments and exposure to the cold – where prisoners from more than 50 countries were terrorised by a staff of 9,000 SS guards and female wardens. For almost a year, the news that she had died was concealed. It emerged only in the wake of Hitler’s suicide and the Allies’ liberation of the camp. 
Like the several millions of men, women and children imprisoned in concentration camps across German-occupied Europe, Mafalda was not convicted of any crime. Her mistake was to have aroused the suspicion of the Nazi authorities. She owed her internment at Buchenwald to Hitler himself and his conviction that she was working against the Nazi war effort. Furiously, the Führer condemned her as “the blackest carrion in the Italian royal house”.
The paths of the Führer and the princess should never have crossed. Born in Rome in 1902, the second of five children, Mafalda Maria Elisabetta Anna Romana of Savoy appeared to be destined for a predictable existence of good works and a suitable marriage – as would be the norm for a person of her standing.
Her childhood was happy but it was also shaped by a no-nonsense quality possessed by her mother Queen Elena, who did not believe in her children leading a life of luxurious idleness, despite being of Royal blood.  An extremely tall woman at six foot four, with hair “as black as midnight forest depths [and] eyes as luminous as live coals”, Elena was a doting mother, who formed a particularly close bond with her second daughter. From her, Mafalda absorbed an interest in art and music; as a teenager during the First World War, she saw at first hand Elena’s spirited fundraising on behalf of the Italian Red Cross, which included turning Rome’s Quirinal Palace into a hospital and selling signed photographs of herself. As a child, she had often been seen in public with her parents, one reason newspapers acclaimed her as “the darling of her father’s people”. 
Darling of the Italian people or not, Victor Emmanuel’s subjects knew what they expected of Mafalda: a splendid marriage to the son of a reigning house. In the early 1920s, gossip focused on two candidates: Prince Nicholas of Roumania and the heir to the Belgian throne, Leopold, Duke of Brabant (the future King Leopold III). The rumours were groundless and, in the summer of 1925, Mafalda chose instead a throneless German prince whom she met at a garden party in Rome. 
Philipp of Hesse was six years her senior, an architecture student and interior designer of modest prospects, and one of twin sons of Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse. In October 1918, his father had been elected King of Finland (a position Frederick Charles renounced two months later, without ever visiting Finland); his mother was the ex-Kaiser’s sister Margaret (and, through her own mother, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria). Less than a decade after the end of the First World War, in which Italy had fought alongside Britain, France and Russia against the Central Powers of Germany, Philipp proved an unpopular choice among Mafalda’s countrymen on grounds of both nationality and rank. 
Among Italians, reported the Rome correspondent of the London Daily Chronicle, “there is no great popular enthusiasm” for the engagement. “It is not so much that the intended bridegroom’s family is nearly related to the Hohenzollerns, and therefore he is an ex-enemy alien, but the Italian people are keen on one of their princesses marrying a son of some reigning family.” Philipp was also a protestant.
Did anything at the couple’s wedding in 1925, at the castle of Racconigi near Turin, foreshadow the horrors in store for Mafalda, then aged just 22? At her request, and partly on account of the difference in religion between bride and groom, celebrations were modest by royal standards, although the castle was transformed into “a bower of flowers”, “gifts from every corner of Italy” including “orchids and chrysanthemums from the Genoese Riviera, roses and gardenias from Rome [and] cartloads of orange blossoms from Sicily”. 
The guestlist was capped at 150. “Not even representatives of other reigning houses or the diplomatic body were invited; for the royal castle… can only contain a few guests,” noted a British journalist.  Italy’s prime minister was one of the distinguished guests. He officiated the civil service that preceded the religious service as Crown Notary. His name was Benito Mussolini. Months earlier, in a speech to the Italian parliament, he had asserted his right to supreme power, turning the country at a stroke into a fascist dictatorship. 
It was Mafalda’s misfortune that Philipp would come to share Mussolini’s outlook. Having had a few years of family life (the couple’s first two children Moritz and Heinrich were born in 1926 and 1927 respectively), on October 1 1930, in the flat in Berlin belonging to leading Nazi Hermann Göring, Philipp joined the Nazi party. Within a year he had joined the party’s paramilitary wing, the Storm Troopers (SA). Hitler recognised the value of this high-ranking countryman with close links to Italy’s fascist leader through Victor Emmanuel. 
The couple had settled in Rome, at the Villa Polissena close to Mafalda’s parents, and the Führer engaged Philipp as his go-between with Mussolini. He entrusted him with his own accounts of the Anschluss of 1938, the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland. 
A transcript survives of Philipp’s telephone call to Hitler after communicating the Führer’s version of the Anschluss to his Italian counterpart. “The Duce accepted the whole thing in a very friendly manner, said that Austria would now be a finished concern for him,” Philipp stated. Hitler replied: “Then please tell Mussolini… I am ready to go through thick and thin with him.” 
For his loyalty, Philipp was awarded an honorary commission in the Luftwaffe, a generalship in the SA and the Golden Party Badge that acknowledged outstanding service to the Nazi state. For his part, he returned Hitler’s admiration. In 1937, Philipp and Mafalda baptised their third son Otto Adolf. (Their fourth and final child, Elisabeth, was born in October 1940.)
Mafalda, however, did not share her husband’s political views and her ambivalence may have contributed to gnawing uncertainty on his part. Philipp became governor of Hesse-Nassau in 1933, a region that included the Hadamar hospital in which around 200,000 physically and mentally disabled adults and children were murdered in gas chambers or through injections or starvation. By the middle of the war, Philipp had recognised the limits of Italy’s commitment to Hitler’s vision; he told the Führer the likelihood of Italian withdrawal from the conflict and Mussolini’s imminent fall from power. King Victor Emmanuel formally dismissed Mussolini in the summer of 1943. Afterwards, Hitler ordered Philipp’s arrest that same year. He was imprisoned in solitary confinement in the concentration camp of Flossenburg near the Czech border.
Mafalda’s arrest followed shortly in September, at the German embassy in Rome to which she had been lured in the false hope of a telephone call from Philipp. She was flown to Gestapo headquarters outside Berlin and, over the course of a fortnight, interrogated harshly before being sent to Buchenwald. In his diary, Joseph Goebbels called her “the worst bitch in the entire Italian royal house”.
Philipp of Hesse survived imprisonment. His postwar trials resulted in heavy fines, and he later returned to Rome, where he died in 1980. The couple’s four children, placed in safekeeping in the Vatican City in 1943, also survived. Only Mafalda was less fortunate. In a bombing raid on August 24 1944, three bombs intended for Buchenwald’s munitions factory instead hit the isolation barracks, critically wounding the princess. Her injuries included burns, which became infected. Following a bungled operation, she lost consciousness and died days later. Her final words were: “Remember me not as a princess but as your Italian sister.”