Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia (1895–1959)

Franz Joseph Oskar Patrick Friedrich Leopold von Hohenzollern, Prince of Prussia, was the third son of Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia (1865–1931) and Louise Sophie von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (1866–1952). He outlived his two older brothers, Friedrich Sigismund (1891–1927) and Friedrich Karl (1893–1917). He owned the seventeenth-century Villa Favorita on Lake Lugano in Switzerland between 1919 and 1932. At the time of his father’s death in 1931, the family’s property, Schloss Glienicke in Potsdam-Berlin, passed to Friedrich Karl (1919–2006), the surviving son of the deceased eldest brother, for reasons of primogeniture. But according to Friedrich Leopold’s mother’s autobiography, Behind the Scenes at the Prussian Court (London: John Murray, 1939), 247, her husband “had made a will in which he left all the works of art which he had inherited from his grandfather and from his mother to Friedrich Leopold who, as the youngest son, would not be left so very well off . . . .” Prince Friedrich Leopold the Younger sold several of these artworks, including two sculptures to Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. During the Second World War, the Nazis interred Prince Friedrich Leopold and his private secretary and life-companion, the Baron Friedrich “Fritz” Cerrini de Montevardi (1895–1985), in the concentration camp at Dachau for reasons of their homosexuality. Cerrini inherited the prince’s estate in 1959.