One of the most shocking events of the Second World War was the death of a princess inside
of the barbed wire fences of a concentration camp. Millions passed through the horrific
systems imposed upon the Nazis, and prisoners came from all walks of life, but there was
one royal who Hitler managed to get his hands on and kill in horrific fashion. The story
of Mafalda of Hesse, or Mafalda of Savoy is an incredibly sad one which saw a young Italian
princess dead inside of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, a horrific site of mass killing during
World War 2. 280,000 prisoners passed through the gates of Buchenwald, and over 56,000 were
killed including Princess Mafalda. The conditions there were horrific and particularly awful
with a distinct lack of food starving prisoners, and executions were also carried out. Mafalda
of Savoy’s death is incredibly sad and was one which was preventable, but the Nazis chose
to let her suffer. So join us today as we look at, ‘The BRUTAL Execution Of Mafalda
of Savoy, the Princess In A Concentration Camp.’ Remember as always to support, please
make sure to subscribe.
Mafalda Maria Elizabeth was born in 1902, the second of five children to the King of
Italy, Victor Emmanuel III and Elena of Montenegro. Her father came onto the throne in 1900 following
the assassination of his father, and it was during his reign that he would oversee Italian
involvement in two world wars, and he also reigned during the rise and fall of Italian
Facisicm. The King and Queen lived a rather unpretentious lifestyle, and the children
were brought up in a rather modest villa outside of Rome in the Countryside. They seemed rather
normal as royal families went, as Elena the Queen would do much of her own cooking and
cleaning rather than relying on servants, as she had been raised in a small village
and wished to instil a sense of work in her children. As Mafalda grew up, she was very
highly educated and was noted for being a good student. She mastered four foreign languages,
and was a capable musician being able to play four different instruments and well as taking
a keen interest in sports.
When she was around the age of 21, she caught typhoid fever along with her younger sister
Giovanna. Both of the girls were very ill, and came close to death, and throughout her
life she was rather frail. A number of bouts of flu throughout her life almost killed her,
but the expectation for her was to marry a rich prince, to secure an alliance with another
country. For royal families, marriage at this time was still a very big think, and as a
young woman Mafalda was linked romantically with the Prince of Wales and Crown Prince
Leopold of Belgium, Leopold III. However in a turn of events, in June 1925 she was engaged
to Prince Phillip of Hesse. She met him previously at a garden party on the ground of her roman
villa, and he came from high status beginnings but also was a rather practical man. He was
the nephew of the exiled following World War 1 Kaiser Wilhelm II. His father was Prince
Frederick Charles of Hesse and Princess Margaret Beatrice. He was an engineer and an architect,
and had studied both of these before he served within the German Army during the First World
War as a leftenant.
When they became engaged, Mafalda and Philip’s commitment was a major turning point in European
politics. It marked the first betrothal between two royal families who had previously been
at war with each other, and it was the first since the war. To marry the Catholic Mafalda,
Philip who was a protestant gave up all his rights to be future king, and agreed that
any of children produced between the two would be raised Catholic. They married on the 23rd
September 1925 in a royal castle, and the guests enjoyed the lavish ceremony, but the
couple later hosted a modest celebration for the local villagers, and even attended themselves
to celebrate with the everyday people. After their wedding they went on honeymoon and settled
into life in a villa in Rome. In 1933, Philip became the governer of the province of Hessen
Nassau, and was appointed to this position by none other that Adolf Hitler, and the couple
then moved to Germany before having children.
In Italy, Faciscm had risen to prominence through the government of Benito Mussolini,
and Mafalda had allegedly been sympathetic to this. It was the time too when Hitler was
beginning to manipulate his way up to the positions of power within Germany, and for
the birth of their children, Hitler gifted Mafalda with the mother’s cross to reward
her. She did not recognise any gifts within the Nazi Party, however Phillip was being
cast into positions of power by Hitler. Hitler through political manipulation eventually
became the dictator of Nazi Germany, and the Fuhrer would seek to expand his empire. But
he would build a dangerous and close alliance with Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini sided with
Germany when the Second World War broke out, along with the rest of the Axis powers.
This saw Italy in conflict with France and Britain, and at first this seemed like not
an issue for Mafalda. She had married a man who was acting as a German Prince, and he
himself was a member of the Nazi Party. Hitler had honoured him as a honorary member of his
brownshirts, the SA. This was the group of violent thugs that would disrupt communist
meetings, beat up Jews and other minorities and further the Nazi cause. The Night of the
Long Knives purged the SA to limit their power and destroy their leadership, demonstrating
Hitler’s power, but Phillip became a general of the Brownshirts.
He acted as a go between and a messenger in a sense between Hitler, Mussolini and Heinrich
Himmler the Head of the SS. Phillip would be included in certain meetings, would be
there as a integral part of meetings and he also built a personal relationship with Hitler.
Phillip acted as an art agent for Hitler seeking valuable Italian masterpieces to be stolen
and bought at obscenely low prices for Hitler’s collection. As the governor or Hesse-Nassau
he was complicit and knew about the Action T4 Euthanasia programme, and signed over a
sanatorium which resulted in the deaths of 10,000 mentally ill people who were killed
there. He would later be charged with murder, but the charges were dropped. It’s been
debated how trusted Phillip actually was because of his Italian connections through his wife
and the fact he was a royal. However it was Mafalda who attracted the attention of Hitler
in a negative way. He referred to her as ‘the blackest carrion in the Italian royal house,’
and Joseph Goebbels labelled here the ‘biggest bitch’ of the Italian royals.
Hitler believed that Phillip and is family including Mafalda were complicit in orchestrating
Mussolini’s downfall and arrest. Phillip was arrest in September 1943 and was stripped
of his membership of the Nazi Party and was later sacked from his position as the Oberpresident
of Hesse-Nassau. Following this he was then placed under guard and was transported to
Flossenburg concentration camp. He was held under solitary confinement and was refused
any contact with the outside world. He was given the same food as the guards and was
allowed to wear civilian clothes, but what happened to Mafalda his wife, the Princess
of Italy was far worse.
Along with the accusations about Mussolini’s downfall, Mafalda of Savoy was linked to the
death of Tsar Boris of Bulgaria. Following a visit from Mafalda he was struck by a mysterious
sudden illness of which he quickly succumbed to. There was a belief in the Nazi high command
that he was poisoned, and it was said his corpse turned black which occurred in a similar
way when the Greek prime minister was poisoned. Hitler also learned that Mafalda had received
ciphers from her husband over the phone, and he believe these showed the royal couple were
behind the death.
Mafalda was arrested and placed under military arrest in Rome at her villa. She was then
transported to Munich for questioning and then on to Berlin. It’s assumed that during
her interrogation, the Princess disclosed nothing and what occurred next was extremely
shocking. The Princess was then transported to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, a site in
which thousands of people were murdered and executed during the Holocaust and the Second
World War. Buchenwald was a camp mostly for men, and Princess Mafalda was housed in a
special compound for dignitaries and was imprisoned with 54 other prominent members of European
politics. The SS wanted to separate them from the other prisoners, and they were given special
guards and were kept in a building surrounded by a large fence. But things went wrong the
following year.
On the 24th August 1944, the Allies bombed an ammunition factory located inside of Buchenwald.
In the attack, 400 prisoners were killed and many were wounded, including Princess Mafalda.
However her injuries were incredibly serious. She was kept in a unit near to the factory
and when the attack happened she had been buried in the debris from the bombing. As
a result she had horrific burns on her arms. Because of the awful conditions of the concentration
camp, Mafalda’s arm then got severely infected. The medical officers at Buchenwald then decided
to amputate it, but during the operation things went very wrong. Firstly she was operated
on inside of a newly set up brothel inside of the camp, and the operation was very very
long. Whilst asleep Mafalda was left in the room, bleeding to death. She bled profusely
from the operation which was being performed by an inexperienced and botching surgeon,
and she never regained consciousness. However we could consider Mafalda to have been given
a death sentence.
The SS doctors inside of Buchenwald had a policy of delaying operations un-necessarily
in a sick way to in their eyes bring about the deaths of the prisoners. Mafalda lay inside
of the hospital at the camp for days with her burned arm, and it was during the wait
for the operation that her arm became infected. Another prisoner working in the infirmary
who had previously been a surgeon even begged the director of the hospital to operate, but
he waited two more days as allegedly ‘the headquarters hadn’t approved surgery on
the Italian princess.’ It was later that these finally arrived with permission happening,
and the hospital directors amputation of Mafalda’s arm was slow, drawn out, and a huge ordeal
for her. The amputation was performed in a horrific manner, and there was no post operation
care or support offered.
There was nothing in place for Mafalda after the operation, and the doctor just left her
inside the infirmary unconscious. It was that night that she bled out and died, and it’s
believed that the SS held off her treatment and operation for as long as possible intentionally.
It would have been an easy solution for the Nazis to say the Princess died from her injuries,
and passed away rather than executing her or killing her inside of the gas chambers.
It was convenient for the Nazis to let her succumb to her wounds, and for them seemed
like a sensible solution as she was an inconvenience, having a high up member of the Italian royal
family inside of the camp. After her death, her body was dumped naked in the crematoria
and a cremation took place. A lock off her hair was cut off by a priest who then smuggled
it out of the camp to be sent to her relatives.
So the death of Mafalda of Savoy was an incredibly sad one, and the neglect of the doctors to
care for her after her injury was a death sentence. Like so many she succumbed to the
conditions inside of the concentration camps, and she was one of millions killed by the
Nazis during the Second World War in this way. Mafalda was the princess who died inside
of the concentration camp, and her story is one that deserves to be told.
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