A German prince was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident on Sunday 17 May. According to German newspaper Bild, Prince Otto of Hesse crashed into the central guardrail on his Ducati Multistrada on the A96 motorway near the city of Lindau, on his way to Ticino in Switzerland.
The entrepreneur, who used to own a number of McDonalds restaurants in Ingolstadt, came from a long line of noblemen. As the second son of William of Hesse-Philippsthal-Barchfeld, the current head of the Hesse-Philippsthal family, he was a descendent of King Frederick William III of Prussia and King William I of the Netherlands.
Prince Otto owned McDonalds restaurants
His paternal grandmother was Princess Marianne of Prussia (1913 to 1983) who was a member of the House of Hohenzollern, a German royal dynasty which dates back to 1061. Otto's mother, Oda-Mathilde von Garmissen, died in June 2017.
The German prince married Clara Blickhauser in September 1998 and the couple divorced in 2017. He shared four children with his former wife, aged from 21 to 11.
According to Bild, Prince Otto helped to distribute food to the vulnerable and needy in Munich at the beginning of May, as part of a Caritas event organised by a German TV chef, Alfons Schuhbeck, during the coronavirus crisis.
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The tragic news comes after Maria Singh, neé Princess Maria Petrovna Galitzine, who was a descendant of Emperor Karl I and Zita de Borbon-Parma, passed away from a cardiac aneurysm just six days shy of her 32nd birthday on 4 May. Maria, who married Rishi Roop in 2017, later welcomed their first child Maxim, was laid to rest in Houston in the United States last Friday.