page_title: Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna of Russia
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna of Russia / Later life
caption_attribution_description: Vladimir Cyrillovich, Grand Duke of Russia, Titular Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias from 1938 to his death.
context_page_description: Grand Duchess Kira Kirillovna of Russia was the second daughter of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia and Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She married the head of the German Imperial House, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia.
context_section_description: The family eventually left Finland and headed first to Coburg and then to Saint-Briac, France. Kira was born Princess Kira Kirillovna of Russia, but her father later gave her the title "Grand Duchess" when he declared himself Guardian of the Throne in 1924. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Kira, high-spirited and straightforward, also had an even temper. She was intelligent, curious, and interested in the arts like her mother, with whom she worked in the art studio at Saint-Briac. Kira also frequently visited her cousins at various royal courts or attended house parties in the United Kingdom.
  Grand Duchess Kira had some difficulty finding a suitable husband. She was interested in the hemophiliac  Alfonso of Spain, Prince of Asturias, son of Alfonso XIII of Spain, but was disappointed when the prince showed more interest in one of the daughters of Prince Nicholas of Greece. Later, she was fond of Prince Constantine "Teddy" Soutzo, a Romanian aristocrat. Her cousin Carol II of Romania refused to permit the match for political reasons. Finally, Kira married Louis Ferdinand of Prussia in 1938. Louis Ferdinand worked with the underground against the Nazis, and, in the later years of the war, the couple was arrested and imprisoned, and they were rescued by American troops in 1945.  They raised a family of four sons and three daughters in a village near Bremen, Germany. Her children were:
  Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia (9 February 1939 – 29 September 2015); married Waltraud Freydag on 22 August 1967 and they were divorced in 1975. They have one son and six grandchildren. He remarried Ehrengard von Reden on 23 April 1976 and they were divorced in 2004. They have three children and one grandson. He remarried, again, Sibylle Kretschmer on 23 March 2004.
  Prince Michael of Prussia (22 March 1940 – 3 April 2014); married Jutta Jörn on 23 September 1966 and they were divorced in 1982. They have two daughters and two grandchildren. He remarried Birgitte Dallwitz-Wegner on 23 June 1982.
  Princess Marie Cécile of Prussia (born 28 May 1942); married Duke Friedrich August of Oldenburg on 3 December 1965 and they were divorced on 23 November 1989. They have three children and eight grandchildren.
  Princess Kira of Prussia (27 June 1943 – 10 January 2004); married Thomas Liepsner on 10 September 1973 and they were divorced in 1984. They have one daughter and two granddaughters.
  Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia (25 August 1944 – 11 July 1977); married Donata Countess of Castell-Rüdenhausen on 23 May 1975. They have two children and four grandchildren.
  Prince Christian-Sigismund of Prussia (b. 14 March 1946); married Countess Nina of Reventlow on 29 September 1984. They have two children and also he has another daughter.
  Princess Xenia of Prussia (9 December 1949 – 18 January 1992). she married Per-Edvard Lithander on 27 January 1973 and they were divorced in 1978. They have two sons and six grandchildren.
   After World War II, Kira was called upon to testify in the case of Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia. Kira had met Anderson briefly in 1952 at the urging of her mother-in-law, Crown Princess Cecilie of Prussia, who believed Anderson's claim. Kira was not convinced. She found the woman "repellent" and "not a lady" and incapable of speaking the cultured English used by her family. Kira had last seen Anastasia when she was a child of seven. Kira's uncle, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich of Russia had been convinced Anderson was Anastasia, but her father and mother were unconvinced by Anderson's claim.
  In later years, Kira was disappointed when her eldest son, Friedrich Wilhelm, renounced his rights to the title and married a commoner. She also paid little heed to her health, putting on weight and suffering from high blood pressure in her fifties. She was in good spirits on a visit to her brother Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia at Saint-Briac in September 1967, where she ate well and dumped several spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee, commenting, "God forbid I should eat anything healthy!" That nigh
caption: Grand Duchess Kira with her parents and brother Vladimir.
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