Prince Bernhard

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30058, 16 February 1963, Page 3

Prince Bernhard

HAH. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. By Alden Hatch. Hamp. 269 pp. and Index.

One of the most dynamic personalities of our time has found a worthy biographer in Alden Hatch Sycophancy, the most common failing in books of this sort, is absent, and the author relies for most of his material on the frank, and often self-disparaging statements of Prince Bernhard himself. The proverbial cat has nothing on Prince Bernhard in its multiplicity of lives. He has had brushes with death from a number of causes—car and air crashes; dangerous illnesses, drowning, and bombs, not to mention the notoriously chancy fortunes of the combatants’ war in which he was engaged as commander-in-chief of the Dutch forces during the last year of World War 11. He confesses to being over-confi-dent, but has given some sober thought to mortality, and has a greater zest for life on this account.'

Prince Bernhard was born in 1911, the elder of the two sons of Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Detmold, a small principality in Western Germany, and his wife, Princess Armgard. A man of independent character, the senior Prince Bernhard fell foul of the

Kaiser, and the family lived happily in virtual exile on their estate at Reckenwalde. The young Bernhard’s education took much the same form as that of other Germans of high birth, and he was at the University of Berlin when Hitler came to power. From the first he detested the Nazis and went into voluntary exile in Paris where he worked in the office of I. G. Farben, the German chemical combine. In 1937 he cut all ties with his native land when, amid the acclamations of the Dutch people he married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, and was given Dutch nationality. In speaking some years afterwards to Prince Philip before his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, Prince Bernhard succinctly summed up the difficult role assigned to the husband of an heiressaoparent to a throne. “You probably do not realise what you are up against. Practically everything you do will be subject to criticism. You A can’t ignore it because some

of it may be justified .

don’t let tt get you down. In this job you need * skin like an elephant.” Yet both men have proved in practice how well this role can be played.

The first year of the war was probably the most frustrating period of Prince Bernhard’s life. After escorting his mother-in-law and his family to safe refuge in England as the Nazis overran their country, his prime wish was to return to the Netherlands and help to form a resistance movement Queen Wilhelmina —a stem, matriarchal though level-headed and kindly sovereign—firmly vetoed the suggestion. In Britain, the Prince’s German origins could not be discounted by officialdom, and he was debarred from public service on security grounds. Cruelly unjust as this judgment was, he accepted it The departure of his wife and daughters for Canada was a further blow to his spirits. However, by late 1940 he had qualified as a pilot after training with the R.A.F. and the Dutch Queen appointed him liaison officer to the Dutch forces with the British. Thus ended that period of purgatorial inactivity, and his flying qualifications enabled him to visit Dutch possessions and the United States, as well as allowing him brief reunions with his own family in Canada.

In 1944, he was given command of the Dutch army and his handling of them in those final days of bitter starvation and misery, and his concern for the sufferings of the people during the grim winter of 1945 enhanced his already high prestige with the nation. On Queen Wilhelmina's abdication in 1948, and his wife’s accession to the throne. Prince Bernhard found himself besieged on all hands to take on new responsibilities. He is among the most enthusiastic believers in the establishment of a United States of Europe as conceived by the Bilderberg Group; he is an indefatigible traveller in the interests of his country, and fulfils all the functions they entail without apparent strain. ' He is also a good family man and can be counted upon to take a decisive part in arranging suitable marriages for his lively and intelligent daughters one of whom, aged five, on seeing her mother arrayed for the first time in her regalia as Queen, exclaimed ecstatically. “Oh. Mommie. are you going to reign a bit?”), though he is too constitutional to try to run counter to the StatesGeneral.

As Prince Bernhard so rightly told his Royal counterpart, their roles are far from easy. Yet, withal, this is the biography of a happy man, whose sense of mission does’ not conflict with his love of "having fun” which he manages to do without being a frivolous hedonist. ■Diere are some good photographs and much lighthearted anecdote in this book which makes it a more than usually interesting biography. One glaring misprint should, however, be corrected.- On page 72 occurs a reference to “Alcibiades the Just.” which would scandalise the pedants.