One of the strangest figures of the first half of the 20th century was Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who began his life as an English prince, the grandson of Queen Victoria, but as an adolescent was plucked from his life at Eton and transported to Germany where he had unexpectedly inherited a dukedom. What happened then is described in his DNB entry:
The duke still felt close to his old home in England…. The outbreak of the First World War found the duke in England and faced him with a painful dilemma. He told his sister he would like to fight for England, but duty demanded his return to Coburg, where people were turning against the ducal house for its English connections. A show of patriotism was imperative. A lame leg from a bobsleigh accident made active service impossible at first, but Charles Edward supported his own Coburg troops on the eastern and western fronts throughout the war and his sympathies became more German as the years passed. In Britain he was denounced as a traitor. Forced to abdicate the ducal throne of Coburg in November 1918, he was stripped of his British titles in 1919, but there was still some sympathy for him in the British establishment, where it was remembered how German nationality had been forced upon him.
A disappointed man, in the early 1930s Charles Edward was drawn to the Nazi party by its confident militarism, which was strongly reminiscent of imperial Germany, and by fear of communism. He attended Nazi rallies and held several appointments, becoming president of the German Red Cross in 1933 and a party member in 1935. He longed for better relations with Britain: as president of the Anglo-German Fellowship he visited England and was active in canvassing the prince of Wales and other prominent men thought to be pro-German. In this way the Nazi regime sought to make use of his connections. His enthusiastic reports to Berlin reflected hope, but not reality: he idealized memories of Eton and never understood that by the 1930s his boyhood contemporaries saw him as a foreigner.
The Second World War shattered Charles Edward's hopes of closer friendship between England and Nazi Germany and brought personal grief. His second son and son-in-law were killed in action and his adherence to Nazism deepened. He never acknowledged the brutality of the movement and remained unrepentant even when placed in an internment camp in 1945.
From devoted Etonian to unrepentant Nazi. Quite a journey.