Who was Prince William's great-grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg?

But when the time came to flee Athens, Haimaki Cohen was dead and his wife Rachel and family needed sanctuary. Princess Alice did everything she could to keep her and two of her children hidden. At one point, she was even interviewed by the Gestapo but managed to turn them away.

After the war in 1949, she became a nun and founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns on the island of Tinos. She went to England in 1947 for the wedding of her son, Prince Philip, to the future queen Elizabeth. She returned to the country in 1967 to be close to him and his family and died in 1969 aged 84.

She was buried at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle but her final wish was to be buried at the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives to be close to her aunt Elizabeth who had also become a nun and founded a covenant.

Her remains were moved there in August 1988.

Diplomatic sensitivities around Israel and Palestine kept the Royal Family from making any official visit for decades but Prince Phillip visited the site for the first time in 1994.

A year earlier, Yad Vashem gave her the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

Planting a tree in his mother’s honour, Prince Phillip said: “She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human action to fellow beings in distress.”