Royals and the Reich
Latest from Jonathan Petropoulos

Jonathan Petropoulos, the John V. Croul Professor of European History, director of the Gould Center, and associate director of The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, has written Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2006).
"This lucid and thoroughly researched book throws much light on the fateful, and sometimes fatal, relationship between the highest reaches of Germany's aristocracy and the basest quarters of that nation's politics during the first half of the 20th century," says author Peter Hayes (From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich).
Published simultaneously in the United States and Britain, the UK's The Mail on Sunday Review page featured Petropoulos' book in its March 5 cover story, Prince Philip, His Family and the Nazis. Over several pages, sprinkled with "remarkable" photographs reprinted from the book, staff writer Michael Jones draws on Petropoulos' extensive research into the Duke of Edinburgh's family links to the Nazis.
"For the first time in 60 years," Jones writes, "Prince Philip has broken his silence on the subject to an American academic in an astonishing new book."
Permitted unprecedented access to Hessen family private papers and Britain's Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, Petropoulos follows the rise and fall in the Nazi regime of Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassel, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria of England. Petropoulos illustrates how the princes, lured by prominent positions in the Nazi regime and highly susceptible to nationalist appeals, became enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. Prince Philipp, the King of Italy's son-in-law, became the highest ranking prince in the Nazi state and developed a close, personal relationship with Hitler and Hermann Goring, the creator of the Gestapoeven introducing Goring to Mussolini at a critical stage in the Nazi Party's development. He later served as a liaison between Hitler and the Italian director.
Michael H. Kater, author of Hitler Youth and Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany, calls Royals and the Reich a "pioneering contribution to the social history of the Third Reich."
Other books by Petropoulos include The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (1999), and Art as Politics in the Third Reich (1996). With John Roth, the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Petropoulos also just edited Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Berghahn Books), containing essays from the Center's inaugural academic conference in February 2004.
Petropoulos is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard, and also has served as research director for art and cultural property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.
In January, Petropoulosfollowing a seven-year legal strugglehelped with the return of five, multi-million-dollar paintings by Gustav Klimt to Maria Altmann, whose family fled Austria in 1939. (Complete story: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/news/pressreleases/article.asp?article_id=648).