From the archive, 16 April 1985: Princess Michael's father was SS officer

Princess Michael of Kent acknowledged last night that her father had been an officer in Hitler's SS. A brief statement was issued by the Queen's press secretary, Mr Michael Shea, saying that the princess was "shocked" by the revelation in today's Daily Mirror.

The princess was born in the final months of the war to Gunther von Reibnitz, and his wife, Marianna, who had skied for Austria in the 1936 winter Olympics. The couple fled with their baby and her brother, Frederick, into American-occupied Bavaria when the Soviet army approached their estates in Silesia in 1945.

Accounts of this period have been sketchy since the princess, who was born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, came into British public life with her marriage to Prince Michael in 1978.

Mr Philip Hall, the historian who uncovered his link with the SS, said last night that he was alerted by an interview in which Princess Michael's parents were said to be Austrian. "I noticed that, looking at the German aristocracy's Who's Who, Princess Michael's father was German."

"It struck me that someone was covering something up," he said. He went to the Berlin Document Centre and there he discovered evidence that Baron von Reibnitz was a major in the SS.

He had joined in 1933 and had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1930, three years before Hitler came to power. "He was somebody who went in early and ahead of the mainstream," Mr Hall said.

The documents found by Mr Hall referred to the baron fighting on the Polish front and being recommended for his next appointment by Herman Goering.

The Mirror's investigations place the baron as an SS officer, one of the elite Nazi force which was responsible, among other things, for the running of the concentration camps. He and his family parted after the war, with the children and their mother settling in Sydney, Australia, while he went to Mozambique to run a citrus farm.

It was not clear last night whether the princess was entirely ignorant of the baron's wartime service.

Princess Michael described in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph in January this year how she had spent nine months with her father in 1960 when he was 66.

Her civil marriage to Prince Michael followed controversy when the Pope refused to sanction a church wedding because of the princess's previous marriage to a merchant banker, Mr Tom Troubridge, which was annulled in 1978.