Early Life
Irmingard was born at her father's residence, Schloss Berchtesgaden. She spent her childhood between Berchtesgaden and her father's other residences, the Leuchtenberg Palais in Munich, Schloss Leutstetten, and Schloss Hohenschwangau. In 1936 she was sent to England to be educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton (later Woldingham School) where several of her cousins, princesses of Luxembourg, were also enrolled.
In early 1940 Irmingard and her siblings were allowed to go to Italy and join their father who had left Germany in order to avoid conflict with the Nazi authorities. She spent the rest of the war mostly in Rome, Florence, and Padua.
In September 1944 Irmingard was arrested by the Nazis who had been unsuccessful in trying to find and arrest her father. She fell ill from typhus and was sent to a prison hospital in Innsbruck. When she recovered, she was sent to the concentration camp at Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, where she was reunited with other members of her family who had also been arrested. Later they were transferred to the concentration camps at Flossenbürg and Dachau, before being freed by the Third American Army, April 30, 1945.
Irmingard and her sisters sought refuge in Luxembourg, where their mother's sister Charlotte reigned. After a brief return to Germany, she went to the United States for a year, where her uncle Prince Adolf of Schwarzenberg had a ranch in Montana.
Read more about this topic: Princess Irmingard Of Bavaria
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)