Frederica of Hanover

Born April 1917, granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, she came of age amid the wreckage of the German Empire. As a teenager she joined the Hitler Youth in 1933, then studied in Britain and Italy, where she met Crown Prince Paul of Greece in Florence and married him in 1938. She gave birth to Sophia in 1938, Constantine in 1940, and Irene in 1942. During the Second World War the family fled occupied Greece, spending years in South Africa and Egypt before returning in 1946 after a referendum restored the monarchy. In the civil war that followed, she built a network of "children's towns" for refugees displaced by the fighting - an effort praised by supporters and fiercely criticized by opponents of the Crown. When Paul died in 1964, she stepped back from public view but remained her son Constantine II's éminence grise, widely blamed by the opposition for inflaming tensions between the palace and the Papandreou government until the monarchy was abolished in 1974.