In 1937, Bernhard resigned from the SS. It was arranged that he would marry the Netherlands' future Queen Juliana. His reluctant resignation letter is said to have been signed, "Heil Hitler!"
In his book, Queen Juliana, William Hoffman writes, "Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when ... Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that 'it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.'''