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Early Childhood
Paul was born on 14 December 1901 at the palace of Tatoi, not far from Athens. Like all children of Crown Prince Constantine and his wife Princess Sophia of Prussia, he grew up in the Greek capital, between the house of his parents (on Kifissias Ave.), the Crown Prince's Palace, and Tatoi.

Fourth in a family of six children, Paul was particularly pampered by his parents and by his elders and was considered to be the favourite. This did not however prevent him from becoming the victim of the foolishness of his siblings. When he was three years old, he was almost injured when his brother Prince Alexander missed him when he violently launched the children's wagon at full speed in the gardens of the royal palace.

He was a member of a cosmopolitan family with roots in Germany, Denmark, and Russia. He spoke English as a native language and learned Greek as a second. His mother, Princess Sophie, was an Anglophile who inherited from her mother, Empress Victoria, a great love of British culture.

Education
As he was the third son of Crown Prince Constantine, Prince Paul was never expected to ascend the Greek throne and received a slightly more basic training than his two older brothers. His education was supervised by foreign tutors (notably Dr. Hoenig, the Pomeranian chaplain of his mother) and by Greek university professors chosen by his grandfather, King George I. At the request of his mother, Paul completed his education between 1911 and 1914, for summer courses at Saint Peter's Preparatory School for Young Gentlemen of Eastbourne, a fashionable boarding school which attracted children of British high society. He performed averagely with his academic subjects, but showed ability with manual disciplines such as woodworking.

The Crown Prince intended for his third son to join the navy and engaged in talks with the British government to allow Paul to join the Royal Navy as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth or that of Osborne. But despite the enthusiasm of the young boy, who soon became interested in the sea, the plan never materialized because of the outbreak of the First World War.

The Goudi coup and the Balkan wars
In 1909, Paul was seven when a group of Greek officers, gathered to form the "Military League" which led to organizing a coup against the government of his grandfather, King George I which became known as the "Goudi coup". While declaring themselves to be monarchists, members of the League, led by Nikolaos Zorbas, demanded the king that he dismiss his son Constantine from the army. Officially, this was to protect the royal family from jealousies which may arise from friendships with some soldiers. Unofficially, the reality was different: the insurgents blamed Crown Prince Constantine as responsible for the stinging defeat suffered by Greece in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. The insurgents also claimed that the royal family were unduly monopolizing the highest positions in the army.

In this context, the sons of the king were forced to resign from their military posts in order to spare him the shame of having to send them back. Targets of the most scathing criticism, Constantine and his wife also hurriedly left Greece with their children and the family found refuge with the Hohenzollerns in Germany. The young Paul spent several months in the castle of his aunt Princess Margaret of Prussia, in Kronberg.

The exile of the royal family did not end until 1911, when the new Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos returned to the Oldenburgs their ranks in the army. Shortly afterwards, from 1912-1913, the Balkan Wars broke out, after which the kingdom of Greece managed to double the size of its territory. During these conflicts, and despite his young age (he was then eleven years old), Paul served for the first time in the Hellenic Navy as a cadet.

The "National Schism" and the overthrow of Constantine I
Constantine became king after the assassination of George I in 1913, Paul's father sought to keep Greece in a position of neutrality during the First World War. The new monarch considered his country not ready to participate in a new conflict just one year after the end of the Second Balkan War. But as he was trained in Germany and linked to Kaiser William II, his brother-in-law, Constantine was quickly accused of supporting the central powers and of wishing the defeat of the Allies. Soon the king broke with his Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who was meanwhile convinced of the need to support the countries of the Triple Entente to link the Greek minorities of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans to the Hellenic kingdom. Protected by the countries of the Entente, and by the French Republic in particular, the Cretan politician formed, in October 1916, a parallel government in Thessaloniki. The central Greece was occupied by the allied forces and the country was fast sliding into civil war: the "National Schism". Despite these difficulties, aggravated by the king's health problems, Constantine refused to change his policy and was faced with an increasingly clear opposition from the Entente and the Venizelists.

Finally, on 10 June 1917, Charles Jonnart, the High Commissioner of the Entente in Greece, ordered the king to step down. Under the threat of an Allied landing at Piraeus, the king agreed to go into exile, but without formally abdicating. The Entente did not wish to establish a republic in Greece, and decided that one of the family members should succeed Constantine. Crown Prince George was also considered to be as equally a Germanophile as his father because he was also likewise trained in Germany. He was considered to be flexible as Constantine's enemies wanted a puppet king on the throne. After some hesitation, Paul's other brother, Prince Alexander, was chosen by Venizelos and the Entente as the new king of the Hellenes.

Barely had Alexander came to the throne on 10 June 1917, the royal family left the palace in Athens. The next day the Oldenburgs reached the small port of Oropos and began their exile. This was to be the last time Paul and his family were in contact with Alexander.

Exile in Switzerland and Germany
After crossing the Ionian Sea and Italy, Prince Paul and his family settled in German-speaking Switzerland, first at St. Moritz, then to Zurich. In exile, the royal family was soon joined by almost all of their Greek relations who had left Athens. However, the financial situation of the Oldenburg is not the most brilliant and Constantine I, already haunted by a deep sense of failure, soon falls ill. In 1918, he contracted the Spanish flu, which he failed to overcome.

Despite these difficulties, the Greek king and queen continued to be concerned about the education of their youngest son. After a new refusal by the British government to allow Paul into the Royal Navy, Constantine and Sophie accepted the proposal of Kaiser William II to allow Paul to join the Kaiserliche Marine. A few weeks after his arrival in Switzerland, the prince left for Germany, where he was to become a cadet.

After several weeks of refresher training in a German preparatory school, Paul joined German Imperial Naval Academy in Kiel, where his training was supervised by his uncle, Prince Henry of Prussia. However, the riots that broke out in the Kaiserliche Marine in November 1918 brought the closure of the naval school which was deserted by teachers and students. As the revolution spread and the Germanic thrones were overthrown one after the other, Paul had to make up his mind to return to Switzerland. The prince had contracted the Spanish flu, and it is with great difficulty that he succeeded in finding his family after several days of traveling through Germany,

Possible successor of Alexander I
With the end of the First World War and the signing of the Treaties of Neuilly and Sèvres, the Hellenic kingdom realized important territorial acquisitions in Thrace and Anatolia. However, Greece was far from having regained its stability after the departure of Constantine I and the tensions between Venizelos and the royal family continued. The unexpected death of the young Alexander I, the victim of a septicemia following a monkey bite, caused a serious institutional crisis in Greece.

The Hellenic Parliament refused to proclaim the forfeiture of the Oldenburgs while confirming the exclusion of Constantine I and his eldest son from the order of succession, Venizelos was forced to find another candidate to succeed Alexander. After some hesitation, on October 29, 1920, the Prime Minister sent the Greek ambassador to Switzerland to the Hôtel national in Lucerne to meet Prince Paul. There, the diplomat informed him that he was now the new king of the Hellenes and that his people were waiting for him in Athens. Somewhat disconcerted by the news, the prince asked the diplomat for a day to reflect before answering the Greek government's call.

On the following day, however, Paul forwarded to the ambassador a long letter in which he made known his refusal to disregard the laws of succession to the crown. In this document the young man insisted that neither his father nor the crown prince, George, had abdicated their rights and that, under his conditions, he could not accept the crown that did not legitimately belong to him. The Greek throne remaining resolutely vacant and the war waged against Turkey in 1919 dragging on, the legislative elections were transformed into an open conflict between the supporters of Venizelos and those of the ex-King Constantine. On November 14, 1920, the monarchists won and Dimitrios Rallis became Prime Minister. Defeated, the Cretan politician chose to go into exile. Before his departure, however, he asked the Queen Dowager Olga to accept the regency until the return of her son to the throne.

Return to Greece and the war against Turkey
The return of the royal family to Greece on December 19, 1920, was welcomed by demonstrations of popular jubilation. However, the restoration of Constantine I does not bring back the peace expected by the population. Moreover, it prevented the country from receiving the support of the great powers in the war with Turkey and Mustafa Kemal since 1919. Indeed, the former Allies did not forgive Constantine for his attitude during the First World War and were not ready to provide to him their support. As for the sovereign, though he went to Anatolia in 1921 to support the morale of the Hellenic troops, he was no longer the dynamic commander-in-chief who led his country to victory during the Balkan wars of 1912-13. Gravely diminished by the pleurisy which had affected him since the Great War, he returned to mainland Greece as early as September 1921.

For his part, Paul took advantage of his return to Greece to resume his training in the navy. He joined the Hellenic Naval Academy and took up his quarters in the boarding school of the school, located in the port of Piraeus. After two years of training, complemented by training courses at sea in the summer, the prince was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant in 1922. He embarked on board the cruiser Elli, on which he served several months under the orders of Admiral Perikles Ioannidis (husband of Princess Maria of Greece). During this period the prince had scarcely the opportunity to rub against enemy fire but his ship participated in the evacuation of the Ottoman Greek refugees who flocked to the Anatolian shores after the fire of Smyrna and the Greek defeat against the Turks.