Family tragedies
Margaret's elder sons, Friedrich Wilhelm and Maximilian, were killed in action during World War I. Prince Maximilian, Princess Margaret's second and favorite son, was serving near Aisne when he was seriously wounded by machine gun fire in October 1914. He died soon afterward and his body was secretly buried in the village of Caestre by the local people, who learned he was the Kaiser's nephew. The priest refused to identify the grave until the Germans had left Belgium and a compensation was paid. Max's younger brother Wolfgang appealed for help to the British authorities, and eventually, after an enquiry was made, Maximilian's body was returned to his family. Princess Margaret's oldest son, Friedrich Wilhelm, died on 12 September 1916 at Kara Orman in Romania. He was killed in close fighting; his throat was slit by an enemy bayonet.
Her two other sons, Philipp and Christoph, embraced Nazism, and Margaret, who was the sister of the last Kaiser Wilhelm II, invited Adolf Hitler to tea and flew the swastika from her home at Schloss Kronberg. Philipp married Princess Mafalda, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.
Due to his close relations with the King of Italy, Philipp was appointed in 1939 to Hitler's personal staff, since he could be a useful channel of communications between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Publicly, he continued with his duties and occasionally he made private missions in Italy for Hitler. When Italy capitulated, he personally informed Hitler. Hitler's revenge recoiled on Philipp, who was imprisoned in a concentration camp for political prisoners. His wife Mafalda was taken to Buchenwald, where she died of a haemorrhage caused by the amputation of her arm, which had been mangled in a bombing raid on the camp.
Margaret's fifth son, Christoph, was a staunch supporter of the German war effort, but after the Battle of Stalingrad, he became frustrated by the limitations placed on his own role in the conflict, and increasingly critical of the German leadership. Christoph's reaction to the assassination of Heydrich, whom he called a "dangerous and cruel man", in 1942 was that it was "the best news I had in a long time". The Nazi regime had turned against his family by the time he died in a plane crash near Forli on 7 October 1943. He was married to Princess Sophie of Greece, sister of Philip, Prince of Greece and Denmark who, in 1947, married the heir to the throne of the United Kingdom and, in 1952, became Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II.
Margaret also lost another one of her daughters-in-law during the war. Wolfgang's wife, Princess Marie Alexandra, when she and seven other women war aid workers, were killed in a bomb attack on Frankfurt on 29–30 January 1944.
The cellar in which they had taken refuge collapsed under the weight of the building, rendering Marie Alexandra's body barely recognisable.
Margaret, very much the matriarch, was at the centre of her large and dynamic family. During and after World War II, she took care of her grandchildren and tried to preserve a centre at Friedrichshof as their parents faced various tribulations.
