
The scene was one of devastation and squalor.
At a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, in the weeks following the death of Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich, a 60-year-old man, crippled by arthritis, stumbled painfully round a rubbish dump.
He scrabbled in the rotting refuse until he discovered an old tin can. Starving, he pulled up grass to add to the thin soup his American captors allowed him for sustenance.
No one looking at him would have believed that this forlorn figure had once been one of the richest and highest-ranking men in Britain, a royal duke, the grandson of Queen Victoria, a Knight of the Garter, and the first cousin of kings and emperors.
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