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George Lascelles 1942.
George Henry Hubert Lascelles was
born in London on 7th February 1923.
The son of the 6th Earl of Harewood
and Princess Mary, daughter of King
George V, he was, at birth, sixth in line
to the throne. Educated at Ludgrove
School and Eton, he went up to King’s
College, Cambridge, but his studies
were interrupted by the outbreak
of war. Commissioned from 161
Infantry OCTU, Sandhurst, in 1942
into the Grenadier Guards, he served
with the 3rd Battalion in North Africa and in the Italian campaign. On 18th June 1944, he was wounded and subsequently captured during the assault on Monte Corno, the anniversary of his father being wounded in 1915 and his great-great- grandfather at Waterloo in 1815. Sent to the infamous POW camp Oflag IV-C at Colditz Castle, he was held alongside several other high-profile prisoners, segregated from the rest of the inmates.
The so-called ‘Prominente’ were kept as hostages and used as future bargaining chips by the Germans, although there is no doubt that their value was overestimated. Alongside Lascelles were others, such as Lord Elphinstone, nephew of the king; Lord Haig, son of the Great War field marshal, Douglas Haig; Giles Romilly, nephew- in-law of Winston Churchill, and John Winant Jr, the son of the US ambassador to the UK. British commando Michael Alexander avoided the firing squad when captured by claiming to be a nephew of the field marshal, Harold Alexander, when, in fact, he was only a distant cousin.
In March 1945, Hitler signed the death warrants for the Prominente but, by this time, the war was clearly lost, and SS General Gottlob Berger refused to carry out the order and instructed that the prisoners be taken into Austria, then into the care of the Swiss. At the Nuremberg war crime trials, Berger’s sentence was reduced from 25 to 10 years for this action. After serving as ADC to his uncle, the governor-general of Canada, Lascelles left the army and succeeded the title ‘Lord Harewood’ on the death of his father in 1947.
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