Princess Birgitta of Sweden did things her own way, preferring golf to royal duties, sunny Spain to Scandinavian winters and informality to scripted state occasions. She set an unusual royal precedent by joining a trade union, while on one occasion the cadets at a Swedish military academy stood smartly to attention as their commander greeted her as “your royal highness” only for Birgitta to reply: “Hiya guys.”
Despite being the only one of five royal siblings to marry a partner of princely status, she kept her distance from life at court. “I have grown to know myself and formed my own opinions. I don’t listen much to what people say. As you age, you become more confident and happier. You dare to express what you think and show your true self. I do not regret anything I have done,” she told a Swedish radio station after missing a royal baptism in Stockholm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she called her memoir Min egen väg (My Own Path, with Fred König, 1997).
Yet at first Birgitta had found life outside a royal palace to be something of a shock. Speaking in a 2022 Swedish television documentary about her life, she said that moving to Germany in 1959 had been an education. “Picking up a telephone and ringing the dentist, having money in your hand and going out shopping, I had never done any of this. Everything was completely new,” she explained.
Princess Birgitta, right, with a schoolmate in Stockholm
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Princess Birgitta Ingeborg Alice was born in 1937, the second of five children of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, a soldier, skier and fencer, and his wife, Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; both were great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. She is survived by her siblings: Princess Margaretha, Princess Désirée, Princess Christina and King Carl XVI Gustaf, who acceded to the throne on the death of their grandfather in 1973 and later changed the order of succession for future Swedish royals.
The children were raised at the Haga Palace, north of Stockholm, which gave rise to the princesses’ nickname, the “Hagasessorna” (Haga princesses), though Birgitta later expressed amusement at the interest shown in their childhood. “I don’t understand why it meant so much to Sweden. We were like little idols to the Swedish people, many of whose names were inspired by us,” she said.
During the war the family experienced many of the same privations as the rest of the population, with butter rationing and darkened windows. Birgitta recalled her father telling them that he did not want “for our family to have special privileges … while other people are forced to give up so much”. Nevertheless, she recalled growing up around ducks, goats, and the family pony, Eva, a gift from her great-grandfather, King Gustaf V. “That’s when we were a family,” she said.
The childhood idyll ended abruptly in January 1947 when her father was a passenger in a KLM aircraft that crashed shortly after taking off in Denmark. All 22 people on board were killed, including Grace Moore, the American opera singer known as the Tennessee Nightingale, and Gerda Neumann, the Danish actress. “We weren’t allowed to talk about it, because my mother absolutely didn’t want any talk about Pappa. It probably wasn’t quite right,” she said.
Princess Birgitta in 1963
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Thereafter Birgitta, known to friends as Cessa (short for Princessa), and her siblings were raised at their grandfather’s Royal Palace in Stockholm in an atmosphere of severe strictness. “Children’s questions were met with silence; children’s anxiety and fear with the same silence,” she said.
Her earliest education was in a private class of six girls, comprising the daughters of family acquaintances. At 14 she transferred to Franska Skolan, the French school in Stockholm and then to a girls’ school in Chateau-d’Oex in southwest Switzerland. Meanwhile, she had been following her father’s sporting prowess in tennis, fencing and golf, and in 1954 she was among the spectators at a rain-soaked Wimbledon.
Back in her homeland she was apprenticed to Märthaskolan, a Stockholm fashion house, but was soon training as a gymnastics instructor at the Stockholm Royal Gymnastics Institute (now the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences). There she met Sven “Tumba” Johansson, a hero of the all-conquering Swedish ice hockey team. In 1957 the British press carried excitable reports of their “engagement”, evidenced by her enthusiastic cheers for his performances on the ice rink. Suggestions of a romance were fiercely denied by all concerned, including Tumba’s true fiancée, though it seemed that there had been a spark. “Birgitta was every man’s dream,” Tumba wrote in his memoirs, while she described him as her “symbol of freedom outside the castle walls”.
With her brother, the future King Carl XVI Gustaf, in April 1956
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King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden with Queen Louise Mountbatten, Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Princess Margaretha of Sweden and Princess Birgitta of Sweden at the opening of the Swedish parliament in the Royal Palace in Stockholm in January 1956
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A tall, blonde and willowy figure, Birgitta went on to teach daily gym glasses at Broms School in Stockholm, where her brother had been a pupil and where she joined the teachers’ trade union. In 1959 she moved to Munich to study German. At a cocktail party there she met Johann Georg von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a German prince and art historian known as Hansi who was distantly related to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. She told Aftonbladet that it was “love at first sight”.
They married in 1961 in a civil ceremony on May 25 at the Royal Palace in Sweden and a Catholic ceremony on May 30 in Germany — a compromise after the Vatican had rejected her application to convert from her Lutheran faith to Catholicism. Their wedding breakfast, including paté de foie gras and vanilla ice cream “a la Birgitta”, was prepared by Rudolf Boij, a former cook to the German Kaiser.
The couple had three children, Carl, Désirée and Hubertus, who survive her. They lived outside Munich in a bungalow that stood in marked contrast to the palaces she had known as a child, though insisted that it was “just the right size for us”. Her husband, who at the time of their nuptials was completing his PhD in art and archaeology, became director of the state collections of Bavarian art.
Princess Birgitta with her husband and her son Hubertus at their home in Munich in 1967
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Birgitta maintained her sporting interests. She was the Swedish team fencing champion, considered for the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, and in 1967 released a recording, Flex With Birgitta, a series of gymnastic exercises with accompanying book. In 1971 she appeared in Ladies Home Journal in an article entitled “Princess Birgitta’s Royal Swedish Shake-Up”, featuring in several leotard-clad pictures describing how to “shake up your hips … shake up your stomach … shake up your posture”.
In 1980 she opened her own fashion boutique in Munich and co-founded the Help Foundation, aiming to support vulnerable children around the world. However, by the early 1990s she and her husband had gone their separate ways. She settled on the Spanish island of Mallorca, perfecting her golfing handicap and setting up the Princess Birgitta Trophy at her home golf course.
In 2023 at her local golf course in Mallorca, where she lived in later life
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However, they remained married until his death in 2016. Shortly afterwards Birgitta told a Swedish newspaper that she was alive and well after false reports that she had taken her own life appeared in the Spanish media, apparently mistaking her for Princess Birgitta of Prussia who had recently died. “God, how stupid they are,” she said, her typically no-nonsense manner undiminished by age.
Princess Birgitta of Sweden was born on January 19, 1937. She died after a fall on December 4, 2024, aged 87