Wallace Freeman Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (baptized Leopold Charles Edward George Albert German: Leopold Carl Eduard Georg Albert; 19 July 1884 – 6 March 1954), was the fourth and last reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, two duchies in Germany (from 30 July 1900 to 14 November 1918), and the head of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 1900 until his death in 1954. A male-line grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he was also until 1919 a Prince of the United Kingdom and held the British title of Duke of Albany. Charles Edward formally joined the Nazi Party in 1935 and became a member of the SA (Brownshirts), rising to the rank of Obergruppenführer. He also served as a member of the Reichstag representing the Nazi Party from 1937 to 1945 and as president of the German Red Cross from 1933 to 1945. During his years the German Red Cross became a part of the Nazi organisation and was no longer affiliated to the neutral International Red Cross.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler sent Charles Edward to Britain as president of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. His mission was to improve Anglo-German relations and to explore the possibility of a pact between the two countries. He attended the funeral of his first cousin George V in a uniform of a general of the German army (his British ceremonial robes having been taken away from him), and sent Hitler encouraging reports about the strength of pro-German sentiment among the British aristocracy. After the Abdication Crisis, he played host to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the former King-Emperor and his wife, during their unauthorised private tour of Germany in 1937. When World War II ended, the American Military Government in Bavaria, under the command of General George S. Patton, placed Charles Edward under house arrest at his main royal residence, the vast Veste Coburg, because of his Nazi sympathies. He was later imprisoned with other Nazi officials. His sister, Princess Alice, learning of his incarceration, came to Germany with her husband, Major-General The Earl of Athlone (the former Governor General of Canada), to plead for his release with his American captors. They dined with the American generals holding her brother, who declined to release him.
In 1946 (August 1949, according to his ODNB entry), he was sentenced by a denazification court, heavily fined and almost bankrupted. Since Gotha was part of Thuringia and therefore in the Soviet occupation zone, the Soviet Army confiscated much of the family's property in Gotha. Coburg had become part of Bavaria in 1920, and the family kept property there and in other parts of Germany and abroad.
He spent the last years of his life in seclusion. In 1953, he travelled to a local cinema to watch the coronation of his cousin's granddaughter, Elizabeth II Having been evicted by the Allies from the Veste Coburg and his other palaces in 1946, he died in Coburg in his flat in Elsässer Straße on 6 March 1954, as the elder of only two surviving grandsons of Queen Victoria. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Charles_Edward,_Duke_of_Saxe...
Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha...
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