page_title: George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood
section_title: Military service
hierarchical_section_title: George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood / Military service
caption_attribution_description: en:Oflag IV-C Prominente outside the Hungerberg Hotel on en:May 5, en:1945, shortly after their release. Left to Right: John Alexander Elphinstone, en:Max de Hamel, en:Michael Alexander, unknown, George Lascelles, and en:John Winant Jr.
context_page_description: George Henry Hubert Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, KBE, AM, styled The Hon. George Lascelles before 1929 and Viscount Lascelles between 1929 and 1947, was a British music director and author. He served as director of the Royal Opera House, chairman of the board of the English National Opera; managing director of the ENO, managing director of the English National Opera North, governor of the BBC, and president of the British Board of Film Classification.
  Harewood was the elder son of the 6th Earl of Harewood and Princess Mary, Princess Royal, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. At his birth, he was 6th in the line of succession; at his death, he was 46th. Lord Harewood was the eldest nephew of both King Edward VIII and King George VI and was a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. He succeeded to his father's earldom on 24 May 1947.
context_section_description: Lascelles joined the British Army where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Grenadier Guards (his father's regiment) in 1942, attaining the rank of captain. He fought with the 3rd Battalion of the regiment, part of the 1st Guards Brigade of the 78th Infantry Division (the brigade was later transferred to the 6th Armoured Division), serving in North Africa and Italy, but was wounded and captured at Monte Corno on 18 June 1944, the anniversary of both his father's injury in the First World War and the Battle of Waterloo, in which his great-great-grandfather was injured.
  He was held as a prisoner of war in Oflag IV-C (Colditz) till May 1945. As the nephew of King George VI, Lascelles was one of the Prominente at Colditz, considered a potential bargaining chip by the Nazis.
  We thought it was absolutely ridiculous. There were about half a dozen of us with well-known connections and we were of absolutely no importance ourselves.  We were all let's call it relatively junior officers from (age) 30-something downwards. Our fear was that someone would rumble that the bargaining power was a great deal less than they'd at first thought it was — they'd calculated one way and then it turned out another, and then we'd become expendable. That was our fear. And once the Wehrmacht, the army, lost interest in us, we were frightened of becoming prisoners of the Gestapo or something like this which would have become very disagreeable. We just avoided it. We spent the last night of our time not at Colditz but actually in Austria by then, where the guns of the guards were pointing outwards at the Gestapo who might come in rather than in at us who might try to get out.
  — Lord Harewood, Desert Island Discs, 1982
  In March 1945, Hitler signed his death warrant; the SS general in command of prisoner-of-war camps, Gottlob Berger, realizing the war was lost, refused to carry out the sentence and released the Viscount to the Swiss.
  In 1945–46, he served as aide-de-camp to his great uncle, Lord Athlone, who was then Governor General of Canada.  Lord Harewood served as a Counsellor of State in 1947, 1953–54, and 1956.
caption: Lascelles with fellow Prominente after his release: John Alexander Elphinstone, Churchill's cousin Max de Hamel, Michael Alexander and John Winant Jr. among them.
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