A KAISER WITHOUT A KINGDOM
After defeat in the First World War, Wilhelm II ended his days in exile, watching as Germany was consumed by Nazism
“WILHELM WAS PART OF A ROYAL CARTEL WHOSE INCESTUOUS NETWORK OF NEPOTISM AND INTERMARRIAGE HAD CONTROLLED THE FATE OF MILLIONS FOR CENTURIES”
At 5am on Sunday 10 November 1918, a convoy of nine Daimler touring cars raced through the Belgian countryside towards the Dutch border. Inside were officers loyal to the Imperial German Army and with them – in full military attire, complete with a chest full of medals he’d awarded himself – was the German monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II. The landscape around them was barren and broken, shattered by four-and-a-half years of war, the scale and destructiveness of which had never been witnessed before. More than four million men had been killed fighting over bleak stretches of land like that on which the cars now sped. Although the fighting was all but over, many of those who’d survived it – Germans included – would happily have lynched the man whose arrogance, aggression and insecurities had caused the conflict in the first place: the man known in Europe as Kaiser Bill.
Wilhelm was part of a royal cartel whose incestuous network of nepotism and intermarriage had controlled the fate of millions for centuries. But the old order was now crumbling and the maps were being redrawn.
The Ottoman Empire, which had controlled Turkey and much of the Middle East for more than 600 years, was in its death throes. The Habsburg Empire, which had dominated central Europe for nearly 400 years, was already dead, while in Russia the kaiser’s cousin Tsar Nicholas II had been shot in a grubby basement by a new breed of revolutionaries who’d finally seen through the ancient scam of royal rule by ‘divine right’.
These were dangerous times to be a monarch and, fearing a similar fate might befall their king, Germany’s chiefs of staff persuaded Wilhelm that he must seek asylum in neutral Holland. With his throne already lost – a newly formed government in Berlin had declared the country a republic the day before – the kaiser had little choice but to flee for his life.
His heavily armed cavalcade reached the Netherlands at about 6am, throwing officials at the minor border crossing of Eijsden into a panic. Forms were filled out and phone calls made as the Dutch authorities decided what to do with the controversial figure who’d just turned up on their doorstep. The kaiser and his entourage parked at the train station and waited.
“HIS INSECURITIES AND PERSONAL AMBITION HAD PLUNGED THE WHOLE WORLD INTO WAR, AND YET HE REMAINED UNABLE TO RECOGNISE THAT HE WAS IN ANY WAY ACCOUNTABLE”
Not that the disgraced monarch would be doing much travelling: the Dutch government insisted on certain restrictions in exchange for allowing Wilhelm to stay in the Netherlands, one of which limited his freedom of movement to within a 15-mile radius of his property.
If he wanted to travel any further afield than that he needed to obtain permission
As the day wore on, news began to seep out of this sleepy settlement that Europe’s most wanted man was strutting about its streets. His presence attracted a growing crowd of Belgian refugees, furious with him for the prolonged occupation of their country by his army. The kaiser’s Imperial train was sent for, and when it arrived he sought refuge inside it away from the angry mob until word came from The Hague that Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina would indeed grant her beleaguered fellow royal the asylum he was after.
It was a huge risk on her part. Revolutionary tensions were high throughout Europe. So high, in fact, that Britain’s King George V had refused to allow Tsar Nicholas II – his own cousin – sanctuary in London for fear it might provoke a communist uprising in his own country. In Holland, though, the aristocratic order closed ranks. Wilhelm might be a war criminal, as many were now calling him, but he was still one of their own. Favours were quickly called in and by 11 November the kaiser found himself the guest of Count Godard Bentinck van Aldenburg at Amerongen Castle. At 11am that day – with its principle instigator officially in exile – the catastrophe that came to be known as The Great War came to an end. The bodies, which were still being buried, would eventually total 17 million. On 28 November, the kaiser issued a statement of abdication, bringing to an end the House of Hohenzollern’s 350-year-long rule over Prussia in the process.
Kaiser Bill’s stay with the count was amicable but short-lived. In 1919, he purchased a 24room manor house on an 86-acre estate in Doorn, in the Utrecht Hills. The property may have been modest compared to the palaces he’d known as one of Europe’s most privileged men but, despite his refugee status, the kaiser was not a poor man. He still owned property throughout Germany, and just before the outbreak of World War II his assets were yielding the modern equivalent of £12 million a year. A train was sent to collect his personal possessions from his previous residence, the New Palace at Potsdam. It returned with 23 wagons of furniture and 27 of other assorted items, including cars and a boat. beforehand from local officials. Wilhelm, however, never asked. He may have been a kaiser without a kingdom but he would not subject himself to the indignity of genuflecting to mere bureaucrats.
So instead, Wilhelm established at his new home, known as Huis Doorn, a phony, scaleddown court. Majestic oil paintings were hung and its rooms crammed with grand furniture, while statues of himself and his ancestors were placed around its grounds and echoing hallways. Sitting on an old riding saddle he’d had converted into an office chair, Wilhelm began writing his memoirs. Everywhere his gaze fell there were yellowing photographs and dusty keepsakes reminding him that he had once been a man of importance, and his memoirs, he hoped, would restore him to the German throne by resurrecting his reputation.
The profound loss of status Wilhelm’s calamitous decisions had resulted in was not just being felt by the dethroned king, however. In July 1920, his youngest son,
Prince Joachim, fell into a deep depression over the fate of the Hohenzollern dynasty and committed suicide.
Further tragedy struck the following year when Wilhelm’s second cousin and first wife Augusta Victoria collapsed from heart failure. Joachim’s death combined with the shock of abdication and the family’s exile had proved too much for her, and she died in April 1921.
Their marriage had lasted 40 years and produced seven children. Yet although Wilhelm was devastated, he was planning to remarry within months. At 34, the recently widowed Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz was nearly 30 years younger than the 63-year-old kaiser. Despite the grumblings of his monarchist supporters and the objection of his surviving children, however, the ever-stubborn Wilhelm would not be deterred, and on 5 November 1922 they were married in a muted private ceremony in Doorn.
Princess Hermine brought with her five young children from her previous marriage, and with their arrival Wilhelm’s manner mellowed. For years he’d played the part of the tough guy. A breech birth had left him with a withered left arm that wouldn’t grow or function properly. It was something he was incredibly selfconscious of throughout his childhood. As he’d grown into a man this physical weakness, alongside a deep belief in the macho values of Prussian militarism, had seen him cultivate a public image as a disciplined hard man.
The uniforms he wore, his spiked helmet and aggressive upturned wax moustache were all part of a carefully constructed costume. Wilhelm, his image yelled, was to be feared and so, too, was Germany. That costume now, though, was in the wardrobe. Wilhelm instead dressed in the attire of a country gent with a kindly white beard.
Despite his instant new family, however, life at Huis Doorn moved slowly for the old kaiser. He missed having a navy to play with or soldiers to move about a map. He missed the pomp and circumstance of the military parades, the gala dinners and the diplomatic parties.
Since boyhood he’d enjoyed outdoor pursuits, and he now filled his largely meaningless days either shooting or keeping fit by splitting logs into stacks of firewood – more than could ever reasonably be used. Thousands of the estate’s trees were chopped down as a result, leading one employee to quip, “It looks like the kaiser wants to re-create another devastated battlefield around Huis Doorn.” Others, meanwhile, began calling him the Woodchopper of Doorn behind his back.
In many ways, the estate was little more than a high-end prison. Barbed wire surrounded the property and Dutch soldiers guarded the gates. Although this was all intended for the kaiser’s protection, a sense of incarceration could not have been lost on him – nor on the thousands of visitors who came to the property over the years, hoping to catch a glimpse of him as if he were a rare animal in a zoo.
Not that Wilhelm felt he had done anything to deserve such a miserable fate. His insecurities and personal ambition had plunged the whole world into war, and yet he remained unable to recognise that he was in any way accountable. Although he was Queen Victoria’s grandson, Wilhelm had been brought up to regard
Britain with suspicion and had developed an adolescent obsession about rivalling the power of its royal house. It was an obsession he’d never grow out of, and at the start of the 20th century he had began to build a huge war machine, in particular a huge navy that could match Britain’s. It was a clear threat that Britain took seriously, and as Wilhelm continued this escalation of arms the three great powers of Europe – Britain, France and Russia
– bound themselves together with treaties that effectively allied themselves against Germany. Because of this, when war inevitably began Germany found itself surrounded. It was at this point that Wilhelm relinquished responsibility for the chaos he’d created. Taking a step back, he handed over the running of his unwinnable war to his generals while he watched the escalating slaughter from the safety of his palace walls.
Yet both his memoirs that appeared in 1922 and later interviews revealed he was utterly unrepentant about the past. “I absolutely believe in the future of my country,” he declared during a radio broadcast in 1931. “A nation that fights during four-and-a-half years against the whole world, and if America hadn’t come in, would have beaten the Allies, will always in the end come out top.”
At this point, of course, Wilhelm was still angling to be restored to the throne, and although he couldn’t have known it, the future of Germany was in reality heading towards a darker horizon than anyone could have dared to predict. Two years after he gave this interview, Adolf Hitler – an Austrian who’d served as a lowly corporal in the kaiser’s army – replaced him as absolute ruler of Germany, and he was planning a conflict that would overshadow even Wilhelm’s warped ambitions.
By the end of the decade, the German army was once again on the march, and in 1940 Hitler’s forces managed to do in a matter of weeks what the kaiser’s army had failed to do in four-and-a-half years: France was defeated and British troops chased out of Europe. Wilhelm immediately sent Hitler a telegram congratulating him, and later wrote to his pet historian Kurt Jagow telling him, “I was deeply moved by the incomparable achievements of the German Wehrmacht… I followed the development of operations in minute detail with the aid of maps. Under brilliant leadership all sections of the armed forces displayed the greatest courage to achieve deeds that were quite stunning. The ignominy of November
1918 has been wiped out and the Diktat of Versailles torn up!”
Wilhelm clearly felt vindicated, and even partly took credit for what Hitler had achieved. After all, these stunning victories had been won with what was to all intents and purposes the army he’d built, and in places still commanded by generals he’d appointed.
When Kaiser Bill died on 4 June the following year aged 82, World War II was very much still going Germany’s way. Britain was on the verge of defeat, the Americans looked like they had no interest in getting involved in a European conflict again, and Hitler’s ultimately disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union was still more than two weeks away. The old king doubtless went to his grave believing that his dream of toppling the British Empire and replacing it with a world-dominating German one was finally coming true. His place in history was assured. In the event, however, it was not to be in the way he’d envisaged.
Within four years Germany’s war machine had again been defeated – smashed, like the country’s cities, economy and infrastructure, in the most violent conflagration the world had ever seen. Yes, WWII had been Hitler’s war, but Wilhelm, who’d seemingly spent the last 21 years of his life sidelined by history, had been the man who’d lit its touch paper so many years before.