During their exile, Sophie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Louis Mountbatten (who supported them financially).

Adolf Hitler's growing distrust of the German aristocracy (from 1942) and the betrayal of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (in 1943) led the Nazi regime to turn against the House of Hesse-Kassel.

Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian monarch and sister-in-law of Sophie, was imprisoned in Buchenwald, where she was seriously wounded and died shortly after, while her husband, Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, was confined in Flossenbürg until the victory of the Allies.

The defeat of Germany and its occupation by the Allies brought new difficulties in the life of Sophie, who found herself in a precarious financial situation due to the theft of her jewelry by American soldiers in 1946 and the sequestration of the property of her first husband until 1953.

The fourth daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Sophie was born on 26 June 1914 at Mon Repos,[1][2][3] a palace in Corfu that her parents inherited after the assassination of King George I in 1913.

[16][17] Fifteen days later, Sophie's family was in turn forced into exile and had to leave Mon Repos in order to remove the possibility of the new monarch being influenced by those close to him.

Sophie and her family also regularly met Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and his wife Elena Vladimirovna of Russia, who had also chosen France to spend their time in exile with their daughters.

[73][74] The happiness of the princess was however clouded by the situation of her mother, whose mental health deteriorated sharply after the celebration of her silver wedding anniversary with Prince Andrew, in 1928.

[77] He took advantage of his family's stay in Darmstadt, on the occasion of the celebration for Cecilie's official engagement in April 1930, to send Alice to a psychiatric hospital located in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.

They were married in two religious ceremonies, with the Orthodox one held at Friedrichshof Castle, owned by her mother-in-law Princess Margaret of Prussia, and the Lutheran one at a church in the city.

Confronted with permanent instability, the population gradually lost confidence in the institutions of the Hellenic Republic and King George II (Sophie's cousin) was finally reinstalled on the throne in November 1935.

[122] According to historian Jonathan Petropoulos, their travels were an opportunity for the couple to carry out, for the benefit of the Nazi Germany, a parallel diplomacy with their European cousins, such as Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark.

[129][130] Shortly after Sophie moved to Kronberg im Taunus on 28 May 1940, her father-in-law died in Wilhelmshöhe, making his eldest surviving son Philipp the new head of the House of Hesse-Kassel.

[132] For her part, Princess Alice chose to stay in Athens despite the occupation of Greece and the departure into exile of other members of the Greek royal family in April 1941.

[140] After two weeks of interrogation, Mafalda, who was the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, was imprisoned in Buchenwald,[141] where she died on 27 August 1944, after being seriously wounded following an aerial bombardment.

[128][148] Widowed and pregnant with her fifth child (Princess Clarissa, who was born on 6 February 1944), Sophie therefore found herself in a precarious situation, with her mother-in-law, Landgravine Margaret as her main support.

[167][168] Widowed since October 1943 and mother to five children, Sophie got close to Prince George William of Hanover, son of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, and brother of Frederica, Queen of the Hellenes.

[171] It was then established that on 5 November 1945, Captain Kathleen Nash, Major David Watson and Colonel Jack Durant had discovered the jewels,[173] whose value was estimated at £2 million at the time,[159] and that they eventually stole them in February 1946.

Organized at Salem Castle, property of Berthold, Margrave of Baden (husband of Sophie's sister Theodora), the event was the occasion for the bride to reunite with her brother Prince Philip, whom she had not seen since 1937 and who came to Germany with his arms laden with food and gifts.

They felt particularly dismayed and snubbed when they realized that their cousins, the Queen Mother of the Romanians and the Duchess of Aosta, had been invited despite their countries having been allies of the Nazi regime during the conflict.

[202] With George William having completed his law studies at the University of Göttingen in 1948,[166][203] he was approached by his brother-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, to take over the management of the Salem Castle School, which had since been closed due to the Second World War.

[204] A former student of the institution, the prince then went to Scotland with his wife to meet with Kurt Hahn, the founder of the school, and to visit Gordonstoun, the establishment that the latter founded when he had to flee Nazi Germany because of his Jewish origins.

[205] For Sophie, who was very affected by the way she was treated at the time of her brother's wedding, this trip to the United Kingdom was an opportunity to discreetly reconnect with Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth.

[168][210] The conclusion in 1951 of the case of jewelry theft from the residence of Hesse-Kassels,[211] and the end of the investigation into the role of Sophie's first husband Christoph in the Nazi regime in 1953[N 4][166] then helped to normalize her financial situation and that of her five elder children.

[203] In the meantime, the couple welcomed their nieces to their home, Princesses Sophia and Irene of Greece and Denmark, sent to Salem by their father, King Paul, to complete their studies.

[222] In 1978, she attended the wedding of Prince Michael of Kent (son of her cousin Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark) and Baroness Marie Christine von Reibnitz.

[228] After the establishment of the Regime of the Colonels in 1967,[229] however, Sophie went to the Hellenic capital to persuade her mother to leave Greece and settle in the United Kingdom, which she finally agreed to do.

[232] Struck by these successive losses, Sophie accompanied, in the weeks that followed, her sister-in-law, Queen Frederica and her niece Princess Irene on a spiritual journey to India.

In 1975, her son Welf Ernst left Germany with his wife and their five-year-old daughter to settle in an ashram in Pune, with the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

[224][243] Her funeral was held at Wolfsgarten Castle in the presence of many members of the aristocracy,[222] and her remains were buried at the cemetery of St Martin's Church in Schliersee, where she was eventually joined by her second husband, in 2006.