Allegiance To The House of Orange
The Prince eventually went to work for the German chemical giant IG Farben, then the world’s fourth-largest company (which survives today as BASF, AGFA, and Bayer). After training, he became secretary to the board of directors at the Paris office in 1935. Because he was a Protestant of royal rank (the Lippe-Biesterfelds were a sovereign house in the German Empire), Bernhard was acceptable to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands as a suitable husband for her daughter Princess Juliana. Bernhard’s appropriateness as consort of the future Queen would later become a matter of some public debate.
Prince Bernhard’s political affiliations with the Nazi regime have received much attention. Various members of his family and acquaintances were aligned with the Nazis prior to and during the war, and a number of them joined the royal wedding party on 7 January 1937 in The Hague. Protocol demanded that the prospective prince-consort be invited to an audience with his head of state, who at the time was Adolf Hitler. Hitler himself gives a rendering of the conversation he had with Bernhard in his Tisch Gespräche (Table Conversations). Table Conversations was a collection of monologues, remarks, and speeches Hitler gave during lunch or dinner to those invited to the table by him. Bernhard himself called Hitler a tyrant in a public speech on the BBC on 25 June 1940 after France fell to Germany.
The Prince’s brother, Prince Aschwin of Lippe-Biesterfeld, was an officer in the German army. Although the secret services on both sides were interested in this peculiar pair of brothers, no improper contacts or leaks of information were discovered. The Prince showed himself to be a loyal Dutch citizen and officer. He cut off relations with the members of his family who were enthusiastic Nazis. As a sign of his "Dutchness" he spoke only Dutch when negotiating the surrender of German forces in the Netherlands. The Prince was known to be very fond of smart uniforms and medals. He made a point of wearing his medals in the English court style, even though members of the Dutch armed forces wear their medals in the Prussian style.
The Prince’s mother was no admirer of the Nazis and got into trouble for refusing to hoist the swastika flag on her country seat at Reckenwalde.
Read more about this topic: Prince Bernhard Of Lippe-Biesterfeld
Famous quotes containing the words allegiance to the, allegiance to, allegiance, house and/or orange:
“You didn’t feel there was anything you ever could enjoy again because you really were immersed in death. Other people seemed shallow. You felt a strong allegiance to the dead.”
—Joan Furey (b. 1946)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“You didn’t feel there was anything you ever could enjoy again because you really were immersed in death. Other people seemed shallow. You felt a strong allegiance to the dead.”
—Joan Furey (b. 1946)
“The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’d take the bus downtown with my mother, and the big thing was to sit at the counter and get an orange drink and a tuna sandwich on toast. I thought I was living large!... When I was at the Ritz with the publisher a few months ago, I did think, “Oh my God, I’m in the Ritz tearoom.” ... The person who was so happy to sit at the Woolworths counter is now sitting at the Ritz, listening to the harp, and wondering what tea to order.... [ellipsis in source] Am I awake?”
—Connie Porter (b. 1959)