Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was more involved in Nazi politics than he admitted during his lifetime. That, at least, is the conclusion reached by historian and writer Annejet van der Zijl in her doctoral thesis. Ms van der Zijl defended her thesis on the late prince's life at the University of Amsterdam on Thursday.

While investigating the prince’s past Ms van der Zijl stumbled upon a membership card for the Deutsche Studentenschaft, a National Socialist student fraternity, in the archives of Berlin's Humboldt Universität. The prince attended this university in the early 1930s.

According to the membership card, Bernhard - then totally unconnected with the Dutch royal house - became a member of the Deutsche Studentenschaft in 1932. The card also shows that he decided to join several other National Socialist organisations in 1934. Among these organisations was the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary arm of the Nazi party, and the political Nazi party itself (the NSDAP).

The card shows that he terminated his membership of all these organisations when he left the university in December 1934. All the information on the document is written in Bernhard’s own hand.

Prince Bernhard, who married Dutch Princess - later Queen - Juliana in 1937, always denied being a member of the NSDAP, though he admitted that he briefly sympathised with the Hitler regime. In one of the last interviews he gave before his death in 2004, he said “I can swear this with my hand on the Bible: I was never a Nazi.”

He did, however, admit to being a member of the SS for a short time. He claimed that he joined the elite Nazi military force to avoid having to take a political exam he needed to pass to continue his studies. According to Ms van Zijl, such an exam didn’t exist at that time.

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