Word: biesterfelds
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Born heir to the pocket principality of Lippe-Biesterfeld in 1911, Prince Bernhard Leopold Frederik Everhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter spent a carefree childhood riding horses, hunting and fishing on a family estate in eastern Germany. After what he calls "a fairly perfunctory" university education in Switzerland and Germany, the prince studied law at the University of Berlin where, like all German students, he was forced to become a member of the Hitler Youth Movement. Severing all connection with the Nazi Party, Bernhard, after his graduation in 1935, took a job in the Paris office of I.G. Farben...
Many titled heads came from principalities and powers that no longer exist, such as Lippe-Biesterfeld. the stamp-sized German principality once ruled by the family of Prince Bernhard, Juliana's live-wire husband. Some of the noblest names were borne by hard-working royals such as Britain's globe-trotting Princess Alexandra and Dr. Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, a grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II who once worked as a mechanic in a Detroit auto plant. Going Dutch with their Queen, Amsterdam's city fathers contributed $28,000 to the royal revels, while...
...Dutch House of Orange-Nassau. For an aggregate of 66 years, its last two Queens have reigned with the placidity of huisvrouwen. The marriage of the present Queen Juliana,who succeeded to the throne at the retirement of her mother Wilhelmina in 1948, to German Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld (a former I.G. Farben representative) was long acclaimed as one of the happiest in Europe. Sentimental Dutch editors were known to refer to their conjugal life at the royal residence as "the idyl at Soestdijk," and even the fact of still another generation without male heirs failed to blight...
...Flavor of Greenwich. When Juliana was 26, she met Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, a charming young man-about-Europe who worked for I. G. Farben in Paris. Declared Wilhelmina: "This is not the marriage of The Netherlands to Germany [but] the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves, whom I have found worthy of her love." The story goes that when a German diplomat suggested how sensible it would be if The Netherlands indeed joined Germany, Juliana remarked: "Oh, I think Mama is too old to rule such a large country as Germany...
Juliana had better marital luck than her mother. Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld was another German princeling, and vaguely suspected of Nazi sympathies to boot. But his record of intense loyalty to his Queen and adopted country during the war has made Prince Bernhard the most popular man in Holland today. In the last year of the war, he served as head of the Dutch resistance movement, later organized relief of stricken areas...