Cousin Simeon

The new Bulgarian prime minister and the former emperor, Simeon II, and Aleksandar Karađorđević, the new tenant of Dedinja, are close relatives on the Montenegrin line. Simeon's grandmother Jelena and Alexander's great-grandmother Zorka are daughters of the Montenegrin king Nikola Petrović.

Simeon, a paternal descendant of the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line, which the average Bulgarian pronounces as Saxe-Burgotsky, is somewhat older than Alexander, and in Switzerland he was more successful as a business man than his cousin in England. Simeon will take the oath to the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria and renounce his title of "Majesty". He personally became the emperor as a small child, when his father Boris died on August 28, 1943, as it is written in encyclopedias, "under unexplained circumstances." Boris returned from a visit to Hitler on a German military plane. A month before that, on July 24, Mussolini was overthrown and arrested in Rome. Now Bulgaria also wanted to withdraw from the alliance with Germany. For safety reasons, the plane flew very high, the passengers used oxygen from masks. Arriving in Sofia, Boris fell ill and died. It was said that the Germans poisoned him with what he inhaled during the flight.

Little Simeon was expelled as a six-year-old, as the Red Army entered Bulgaria. He did not give up the imperial title until he was elected prime minister.

Otto of Habsburg, who in Austria is not even allowed to use his noble predicate "fon", had to give up his pretensions to title and power and swear to the law of his republic. His father Karl, the last emperor of Austria-Hungary, was exiled after the First World War, and Otto took German citizenship after the Second World War and became a member of the European Parliament as a member of the Bavarian CSU party, but until that formal act he was not allowed to set foot on the soil of his native country. . Otto sued the Republic of Austria and demanded that the property confiscated in 1919 be returned to him, he claimed that it was known exactly what was "era" (state) and what was private. He didn't want big castles, like the Hofburg or Schönbrunn, but some forests, estates and summer houses, but he also lost the case before the international court.

No one has yet announced whether Aleksandar Karađorđević will recognize the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, from which he will live and support himself, his family and at least the thirty-strong staff needed to maintain the palaces on Dedinja and the park where they are located. In the "old court" - in Tito's time the protocol called it "the court on Dedinje" - the kitchen is about thirty meters away from the dining room so that the smells would not disturb the living area. Who will bring, for example, breakfast to Karađorđević at that distance? The Saxe-Coburg cousin in Sofia will not have such worries, he will receive the salary of the Prime Minister and enjoy the other privileges of that position.

WITHOUT MEMORIES: It is unlikely that Simeon can remember the funeral of his father and aunt Mafalda, who came to Sofia for that occasion. He was only three years old then. But he probably knows that Aunt Mafalda is the only woman who died and was burned in the crematorium of the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was actually an all-male camp. And the cause of the truly terrible fate of Mafalda is closely connected with the death of Tsar Boris.

Mafalda was married to a German nobleman, Philip von Hesse-Kassel, who served in the German army. After Boris's funeral, she flew to Rome and said that the Bulgarian emperor was killed on German orders. Perhaps that is why her parents, the Italian King Victor Emmanuel III and Jelena, née Petrović, fled to Sicily to the Western allies, while Marshal Badoglio signed Italy's capitulation on September 3. Mafalda took refuge in the Vatican. Her husband in Germany was immediately arrested. They told her that she could call him from the German embassy, ​​but it was a trap. As soon as she entered, an SS officer approached and announced: "I have a personal order from the Führer to arrest you!"

Under the administration of the Buchenwald camp there was a "barrack for prominent prisoners". There, among others, were the former prime ministers of France, Leon Blum, and Austria, Kurt Schuschnig, as well as some German generals and politicians. Mafalda was brought in as Mrs. Von Weber, given a two-room apartment with a bathroom and a kitchen and a maid, Maria Runau, who was brought from the Ravensbury women's camp especially for this reason. She received officer food.

On August 24, 1944, the Americans bombed a military industry nearby, but several bombs missed the target and hit the camp. Mafalda and some other prominent prisoners took shelter in a ditch and that saved some of them, because their barrack was directly hit. Due to the air pressure, the trench and Mafalda were partially buried in it, so that only the head, left shoulder and arm remained free. A piece of burning wood fell on his hand. The princess could not move and her hand was burned to the bone. Even the SS executioners never thought of such torture. Some time later she was dug up still alive. In Buchenwald, the only rooms for women were in the so-called special barracks, which served as a brothel for the SS. They took the princess there. The SS doctor Dr. Šidlauski, with the assistance of the prisoner, the Czech surgeon Professor Viceslav Horn, tried to save her by amputation up to the shoulder, the prostitutes cared for her, but she expired the next day. Her naked body was taken to the camp crematorium and thrown among the naked male corpses. In the crematorium worked a prisoner, otherwise a Catholic priest, Joseph Thiel, who made sure that the remains of the granddaughter of King Nicholas were cremated separately and before that he cut off a lock of her hair, which he managed to send to her German relatives. In the crematorium of Buchenwald today, a memorial plaque reminds her.