Hitler's "Prince's Decree"...


On May 29, 1940, Prince Wilhelm Friedrich of Prussia from Hohenzollern was buried in Potsdam...:



The son of the former German crown prince (and grandson of the last German emperor) had served as an officer in the German Wehrmacht, was seriously wounded in a skirmish near the northern French town of Valenciennes on May 23 and died three days later in a hospital in Nivelles. ..:



The burial ceremony will take place in the park of Sanssouci Palace, built under Frederick II....





As the coffin is transferred in a procession on the road from Berlin to Potsdam, well over 50,000 people - without this having been publicly announced in any way - gather along the way to express their condolences and sympathy.





It is the largest unannounced demonstration not organized by the state or the NSdAP during the Nazi era!

The dead Prussian prince (in the following picture at the right) was reserved, open, friendly, without airs and graces and a "family man" and therefore very different from his boastful grandfather Wilhelm II (centre) and his father the ex-crown prince (left)...



...and he had not, like his father, openly curry favor with the Nazis...:





That is why the dead man was very popular with the population.

After the prince's death, Hitler had thrown a fit of rage when he heard the words of the commanding general of an army group in France (probably Gerd von Rundstedt)...



...had been delivered:

"If he were 20 years older, our country would look different."

When the "Fuhrer" is told about the expressions of sympathy and sadness from such a large crowd, he is really shocked!

Because what does it mean for his own popularity among the population if even a single dead Hohenzollern prince can trigger such a rally...?

Hitler spontaneously decides that something like this must not happen again!

On the same day he wrote the so-called "Prince Decree" with his own hand, which prohibited all Wehrmacht princes of the royal houses that ruled until 1918 from taking part in combat operations in the Second World War. In the future they may only serve in the etape, so that they cannot die as "heroes".

Hitler justified this with the "international kinship" of the princely houses, which he is right about in a certain way, since Queen Victoria was once considered the "grandmother of Europe"...

On May 19, 1943, Hitler went even further and expelled all members of formerly ruling dynasties from the Wehrmacht by "Führer order".

There was one exception:

Friedrich Josias Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha...



...who served as first lieutenant and aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel on the French Channel coast, managed to continue serving in the Wehrmacht thanks to Rommel's intercession - until Germany's surrender in May 1945.

The fact that members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha also ruled in Bulgaria, which was allied with the Germans, probably also played a role.

Simeon Borissow Sakskoburggotski, (Simeon of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) was Tsar Simeon II from 1943 to 1946, the last "ruler" of the Tsardom of Bulgaria.

When the communists overthrew him he was only six years old!



But the man later succeeded in what no one else in the history of the world has managed to do: he is the only deposed monarch in history to regain political power in a democratic election.

As a "commoner" under the name of Simeon Sakskoburggotski he was Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 2001-2005.