Saturday, October 29, 2011

King Carl XVI Gustaf's 'annus horribilis'

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: King Carl XVI Gustaf's 'annus horribilis' started last November with the publication of The Reluctant Monarch, a[n] exposé of his playboy past detailing the sex parties hosted for him and his friends by Mille Markovic, a Serbian gangster.

The book also brought into the open a steamy affair with Camilla Henemark, a Swedish-Nigerian pop singer, who the King was involved with for a year in the late 1990s, with the full knowledge of Queen Silvia, who was powerless to stop it.

"The King sometimes looked like a love-crazed schoolboy, and on one occasion they talked about running away together to an isolated exotic island," Thomas Sjöberg wrote in his book.

Then, on November 24, a documentary aired on Swedish television that claimed that Walter Sommerlath, the German father of Queen Silvia had grown rich on returning to Germany in 1939 by producing armaments in a factory stolen from the Jews, and that he had joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s when the family still lived in Brazil.

These claims conflicted with the account given by Queen Silvia in another documentary, aired at the start of the year. She had claimed that he had not been "politically active", that the factory he owned had produced mainly trains and hair dryers, and that he had joined the Nazi party to save his career. » | Richard Orange | Saturday, October 29, 2011

Related »