The royal household of the Netherlands has confirmed the authenticity of a Nazi membership

The royal household of the Netherlands has confirmed the authenticity of a Nazi membership card belonging to the Dutch king’s grandfather, bringing an end to the decades-long suspicions that had swirled around Prince Bernhard.

◾️Claims of ties between Bernhard, a German aristocrat who married into the Dutch royal family in the 1930s, and the Nazi party surfaced in the late 1990s after a Dutch historian said he had found a copy of the card in a US archive.

◾️Bernhard, who was prince consort until 1980, adamantly denied being a Nazi. “I can swear with my hand on the Bible: I have never been a Nazi,” Bernhard, then 93, told the national daily newspaper De Volkskrant in an interview shortly before his death in 2004. “I never paid for party membership. I never had a membership card.”

◾️He did, however, acknowledge that he had been a member of several Nazi military units, describing it as a necessity for men of his age at the time.