Kaiser’s wife’s letters found hidden in Prussian palace

THE last empress of Germany’s private letters have been found in a hidden compartment at a palace in Prussia.

The trove of more than 1,000 letters belonging to Augusta Victoria has been described by Samuel Wittwer, the director of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, as “treasure more precious than gems and jewellery”.

The empress was the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who led Germany into the disaster of the First World War and was forced to abdicate.

Custodians at the Neues Palais in Potsdam found the compartment as they tried to unlock a vault that had also lain undetected for decades.

Soviet troops ransacked the palace in 1945 but appear not to have broken into the vault or found the hidden compartment.

Mr Wittwer said despite having been with the foundation for 19 years, he was unaware of the vault until the end of last year. Four security companies failed to open it before an endoscopic camera revealed it was empty.

The wooden door of the compartment was found during the operation.

“That was an insane sensation,” said Mr Wittwer. They came right in and found the trove: two wooden boxes full of envelopes, and a bundle of letters in each envelope.”

The letters include some from Queen Victoria, who was the Kaiser’s grandmother and also related to the empress.

They have yet to be read and are on display in an exhibition on the twilight of the Kaisers. They will be opened in November on the 100th anniversary of Wilhelm’s abdication.

“It feels a little sacrilegious to open such an envelope just like that, when it was sealed 130 years ago and no one even knew where it was, for 100 years,” said Mr Wittwer.

It is hoped that the letters from Queen Victoria could shed light on the relations between the royal relatives in the turbulent period leading up to the First World War.