LETTER FROM BENELUX

Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, husband to the late Queen Juliana and Prince Consort of the Netherlands from 1948 to 1980, led a flamboyant lifestyle and was known for having relationships with many women, resulting in two illegitimate daughters. He was also involved in the Lockheed bribery scandal and started the Bilderberg Group – a secret yearly meeting of influential people in business, government, and diplomacy. All of this has culminated in an uncomfortable legacy for his descendants.

His somber-faced grandson King Willem-Alexander faced the public in November, to give an account of "the less nice parts" of his family's history. The country had just learned that Prince Bernhard, scion of a noble German family, had been a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) from 1933 to the end of 1936. Willem-Alexander's message was addressed in particular to the Jewish community, still deeply affected by the deportation of three-quarters of its members during the Second World War.

Historians and journalists had always suspected that Prince Bernhard had been a member of Hitler's party, but they still had to prove it. It came to light when Flip Maarschalkerweerd, the former director of the Royal Archives, published a book with a copy of the prince's membership card after King Willem-Alexander had permitted him access to all the royal documents relating to the Second World War.

The party card was found in Germany by an American administrative official, who addressed it to the prince in 1949 when he wrote: "Dear Prince Bernhard, I kept this document in my safe for some years. On the verge of destroying it, I thought you had the right to destroy it yourself." Nevertheless, either unworried or certain of his impunity, the prince kept the document.

In 2010, Dutch historian Annejet van der Zijl had already shown that the prince's membership in a student association close to Hitler's regime also mentioned his affiliation with the Nazi party, which he left at the end of 1936, a few months before his marriage to Queen Juliana. A little later, in an archive document, we see him smiling and posing next to his brother Aschwin wearing a Wehrmacht uniform.

When confronted with other evidence, Bernhard formally denied it, admitting only to a distant association with the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary organization of the "brown shirts." He claimed this was to avoid trouble and suspicion.

He continued to swear "hand on bible" that he had never joined the NSDAP. A week before his death, he once again summoned a journalist, who had already written about his dubious past, to protest his innocence. He also emphasized that he had been a fighter pilot in the British Royal Air Force before taking command of the Dutch army. He had not convinced Field Marshal Montgomery, the British army mastermind behind the D-Day landings, who at the time described the prince as "an amateur and an adventurer."

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