We begin our exploration of the UK’s surprisingly controversial Princess Michael of Kent with a little back story. And given that Princess Michael of Kent started life in January 1945 as a German baroness named Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, you can bet the Nazis had a hand in it!
The daughter of Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, a Nazi Party member who spent time at the Russian front during the war, Princess Michael’s mother, Austro-Hungarian Countess Maria Anna, was stridently anti-Nazi, enough that it got her in trouble. Her father’s allegiance to the party was pretty loose by the time the war came around, and he was eventually kicked out of the Nazi party entirely. This was helpful when he was later investigated by the Appeals Tribunal for Upper Bavaria after the war ended.
Meanwhile, Gunther’s somewhat impromptu wartime marriage to Princess Michael’s mother turned out to be a bigamist marriage, since old Gunther had never had his first marriage annulled in the Catholic Church, which declared Princess Michael and her older brother legitimate, but essentially ended things between Gunther and Maria Anna. He skipped out on the whole “wreckage of Europe” thing and moved to Mozambique and a third marriage there.
This left Countess Maria Anna in the post-war wreckage of Europe with two very young children. She did what aristocrats always do: she packed up a bunch of gemstones – Europe was flooded with gemstones from out of luck rich folks at the time – boarded a boat for Australia, and set her family up in their next chapter by selling the stones into a much more favorable market.
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Sources
MC: The Adventures of a Maverick Princess – Life of Princess Michael of Kent, by Barry Everingham (Amazon)
Princess Michael of Kent, by Peter Lane (Amazon)
Who Is Queen Elizabeth’s Cousin, Prince Michael of Kent (townandcountrymag.com)
