Princess Victoria of Schaumburg-Lippe (Moretta), 2nd daughter of Kaiser Friedrich III

[Michael_II]

Any pictures of her funeral/burial site?

[Sebran]

She thought she was happy with him and maybe in the first period with him she was. He gave her some new experiences. Before meeting him she just knew how to live the life of a princess. A life of strict rules. I think she was bored to death living that life. In fact in the photos I have got of her from younger days she looks very bored. Sascha brought her some excitement – E.g. he drove her around Germany on a motorcycle. In many of the photos from this period, a new light in Viktoria’s eyes can bee seen… Then everything ended of course. That is natural. But still I think she was a very fortunate person. I mean first experiencing the life of a princess and than the life of common people, that is something very exceptional.

[Sebran]

Here is a picture of Viktoria (quite happy) and her beloved mother in law Mary.
Mary was born (with the last name Frykberg) in Sweden but she and her sister married two Russian cousins in the end of the 19th century. The cousins belonged to the noble family Zoubkoff and were both very rich. During the Russian revolution they were killed and Mary and her youngest son Alexander (Sascha) fled to Sweden were they stayed for some years, before moving to Germany. The first time Sascha met Viktoria was in a tennis match – Viktoria at once fell in love with the young Russian man.

[Prince_Christopher]

I read somewhere that she was really scatterbrained....the atrocious writing seems to confirm that....

[Eddie_uk]

lol, yes it does doesn't it! Does anyone have any more information about the auction of her belongings not long before she died?How awful! I think i read their was a tea set that had belonged to Vicky that was sold?? I wonder if her family purchased much? Was Sophie or Mossy supportive? I would be suprised if they weren't. Shame really.

[Prince_Christopher]

Was Sophie or Mossy supportive? I would be suprised if they weren't. Shame really.

One wonders what role they may have played.  Did they try to talk Moretta out of her disastrous second marriage?

Also, anyone know what happened to Zoubkov after Moretta's death.  I read somewhere that he died in 1936, he would have only been about 35 years old then....

[grandduchessella]

From The Great Hohenzollern Scandal--the book about the marriage:

''Most of the more precious and historic objects went to a Swiss dealer, but the British buyers acquired the old English silver that had once been the property of Queen Victoria...The next day saw the sale of furniture, china and glass, most of it gifts from the Prince Consort...from Queen Victoria and from Empress Victoria...Among the pictures were...a Winterhalter. The furniture was from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the marble fireplaces originated from the Prussian and English castles and each object bore the official stamp of the various palaces from which it came....A few relations of the Princess attended. Prince Adolph's brother bid fro the Schuamburg family pieces, the Prince of Wied bougth things connected with the history of the family. And it was an open secret that the ex-Kaiser, through a middleman, had acquired a set of silver cups and saucers, once a wedding present to....[their] father, and paid 35,000 marks for it. Most of the deficit between the debts and the auction receipts was made up by Vicky's own relations and eventually everyone was paid in full."

[grandduchessella]

I will soon publish a very late letter written by Viktoria (from 21/6 – 1929) where she writes to her “darling Mamushka” – her mother in law – Mary.  The letter is written in Schloss Friedrichshof were she lived her last days (she died 13/11- 1929). She writes about how much she misses both Mary and Sascha, and that her relatives in Friedrichshof wont let her return to Boon. She also talks about her plans of visiting England.

But I thought that she died in Bonn? That's what was in the papers and her obituaries.  :-/ Also in the book it says that as well and reports that 'When Vicky's coffin was carried out of the hospital to a special train, hundreds of Bonn citizens lined the streets in silent last farewell...' Could there just be a translation problem or perhaps speaks of her hopes to go to Friedrichshof? She was embalmed and taken to Friedrichshof where she was buried.

The report on her funeral went that she 'was buried in the family grave in the castle chapel. Attending were her first husband's brother, and the Landgraf of Hesse with his wife...her favourite brother Prince Henry, and...Prince Adalbert of Prussia. From the ex-Kaiser came bunch of white roses.'

[grandduchessella]

Once more from the book re: Zubkoff's last years:

'Came the spring of 1930 and once mroe he took odd jobs as a waiter, including one at the holiday resort of Esch-on-the-alzette. At the end of the season he returned to Luxemburg...jobless and soon without any means. He had to leave his furnished room for lack of money and moved into a dirty shack in the garden of the house, which was used for storing furniture and garden tools. With what he could gather by any means at all, he bought only cocaine and liquor and his condition descended...He never bought food, relied entirely on what he could beg. Drunk, drugged, he could be seen shuffling through the streets, too weak to work, even if anyone had wished to employ him...Yet he still continued to act the 'nobleman'; anyone who tried to help him was treated with condescension, even contempt.... Occasionally a restauranteur for whom he had worked in the past, or where perhaps he had once been an esteemed patron, gave him a bowl of soup, and in this fashion he just stayed alive...He was taken to the hospital once in 1935, when he collapsed in the street, unable to move. Two weeks of regular meals and a clean, comfortable bed improved him--but only so much, for as the yearning for liquor grew strong again, he fled the hospital and returned to his shack. On January 28, 1936, the neighborsthought the silence from the shack was significant....They pushed open the flimsy door to find him dead on the floor, little more than a skeleton. He had clearly fallen out of his camp bed many hours previously and had been unable to get back...It was the unlovely end of an unlovely man.'

[grandduchessella]

Thank you for your comments and your interest!
Here is a picture of Viktoria (quite happy) and her beloved mother in law Mary.
Mary was born (with the last name Frykberg) in Sweden but she and her sister married two Russian cousins in the end of the 19th century. The cousins belonged to the noble family Zoubkoff and were both very rich. During the Russian revolution they were killed and Mary and her youngest son Alexander (Sascha) fled to Sweden were they stayed for some years, before moving to Germany. The first time Sascha met Viktoria was in a tennis match – Viktoria at once fell in love with the young Russian man.

I think this was part of the story he made up--and published in his autobiography.

Apparently he was from a small town, Icanovo, about 6 miles from Odessa, where his father owned a general store. Money was tight but they were well-off in comparison to the majority of those in the area who were very poor.

His mother was from Swedish stock but had been born in Russia and after a visit to cousins there, she came back full of tales about how wonderful life in Sweden was in comparison. Within a year she had persuaded her husband to move to Odessa where he bought a small hosue and open a new business selling clothes and shoes.

His father died in 1916 after an accident. He was repairing damage to his store when some heavy planks fell on him.

Zubkov elevated himself into the nobility after he fled into Germany during the Revolution, changing the name to Zoubkoff and adding the 'von'. He made his way to Sweden at one point since he needed identification papers and thought his mother's family could help. They soon came to dislike him and gave him some money and took him to the station where he went to Stockholm and got a job in a hotel doing translation work for the guests, although this was illegal since he had no work permit and was in the country illegally. He finally did receive a 'Nansen passport' which was newly created for stateless persons. From here he made his way back to Germany.

Regarding his meeting with Moretta, he had become acquaintances with a 'Count Ich'. This gentleman was also a faux nobleman. He had realized that becoming a Count was good for business and that there was a general belief that the Russian emigrees were displaced nobleman so they capitalized on it. It was while he was a guest at his house that the Count received an invitation to visit Moretta. Ich introuced Zoubkoff as his cousin, which she recorded in her diary.  While there they partook in a tennis match (according to his memoirs) and he regaled her with (made-up) stories of his background and life. She was interested in his stories of his escape and invited him back.

The book, for which information on his family was given by one of Zubkoff's living relatives, states that he only had a brother and his mother died in the early 1920s. He had used visiting his mother as a pretext to get money from Moretta and thus produced a woman at the wedding, who didn't speak German, whom he introduced as his mother. I wonder if the lady in the pictures was the same one? Perhaps someone Moretta was tricked into believing was her MIL? Or maybe it's not her 'mother-in-law' at all but rather a friend? Regardless, Zubkov was certainly good at maintaining his con of being an impoverished Russian nobleman. Sad to think she could've been happily writing these letters and cards to a woman who had died years before. 

[Prince_Christopher]

Thanks, Grandduchessella, for the interesting excerpts!

What a sordid mess poor Moretta got herself into....What an awful man Zubkov was!!  

I wonder if Moretta had a "history" of being duped, what with the "Count Ich" person and all....

And I also wonder HOW Zubkov ran up SO many debts in a relatively short period?  I guess drugging and drinking is expensive, but to cause her to have to part with historical heirlooms, everything she had ever owned?

Didn't QV, during or maybe after the Sandro situation, say something to the effect that Moretta was acting too desperate?  Perhaps that is a peek at how her personality was.

[Sebran]

Dear Grandduchessella!

I don’t know where you have gathered this information, but at lot of it incorrect…
For instance – Mary Zoubkoff, died in Stockholm 1969. If you like I can post her obituary notice. She was absolutely not born in Russia, but in Gräsmark, Värmland, Sweden. As I have to go to a meeting now, I haven’t time to write more, but I’ll try to do so this evening.

[Sebran]

I think it is important to bring forward correct statements about the story.  E.g. to say “What an awful man Zubkov was” is to use historical facts in an ignorant way. It has to be understood that what was written around the world in articles about the affair between Alexander and Viktoria is extremely biassed. As everyone knows it was not accepted for a royalty to marry a common people, and what was written about the marriage was seen from that perspective. The story got even more exiting when ascribing Mr. Zoubkoff bad characteristics – some maybe truth, but most fabricated. The truth was dealt with in the same way gossip papers deals with the truth today. It has to be remembered also, that many of the articles wrote about Alexander and Viktoria where published in magazines which talked about Hitler as a new Messiah.  
No doubt about Alexander being a drug and alcohol addict, but I think it is awful to judge him only after those facts. He was also very intelligent and spoke fluent Russian, Swedish, German and several other languages. So did his mother.
The pictures below show Sascha and his urn.

 


When talking about the the Russian noble family Zoubkoff, it indeed is a nobel family. I guess Sascha used “von” to make the name sound nobel even in Europe, other Russian nobles has done the same. Before the revolution the family was very prosperous. Alexander’s father Anatolij Zoubkoff did not sell shoes but was an anatomy university professor. He died in 1919, not in 1916.  The pictures below presents Anatolij and Mary Zoubkoff, Mary at home (indeed not the house of a shoe seller), and Mary’s obituary notice which tells she died in 1969, and not in the 1920s.

   


More about The Zoubkoff family, Mary’s Swedish family and Alexander and Viktoria can be read about in this article (in Swedish):
http://www.genealogi.se/shf9821.htm

[grandduchessella]

The information comes from The Great Hohenzollern Scandal by JJ Lynx. It seems to be fairly well-regarded.

The author talked to contemporaries and friends of Zubkoff's--the book mostly focuses on him more than Moretta--and got the information about his family and childhood from his cousin Natasha, living in Odessa, who remembered him well. (The book was done in the 1960s). He also relied on political and police archives from various countries--Germany, Sweden, France,Belgium and Luxemburg.

Whatever the situation with his mother, there seems to be no doubt that his background was a purely invented one--the stories of his wealthy ancestry coming from his own, highly disreputable, memoirs.

[Sebran]

I’m quite sure this Natasha was some woman in Odessa, who saw an opportunity in earning some money by fabricating a false story about a famous couple. It is strange that the author did not contact Mary if he wanted to write about the marriage. Without having read “The Great Hohenzollern Scandal”, but from what you have told me, it seems like the book presents a story with true parts as well as parts invented to make it even more scandalous.