Expedience to fore as ex-royals jostle to return

The post-Great War revolution in a shattered Germany abolished the monarchy and introduced the democratic but shaky Weimar Republic of 1919 to 1933, and both the former crown prince and the potential dictator Adolf Hitler began agitating against the government at about the same time, in the first half of the 1920s, both men enemies of democracy.

After Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, questions were asked about the links between the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns from 1871 to 1918, known as the Second Reich, and authoritarian National Socialism, the latter founded in 1920 and intended to be Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Third Reich” but lasting only 12 years until defeat in World War Two in 1945.

The central thrust of Stephan Malinowski’s book examines how the mileus of ex-crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler converged, and how various segments of the anti-democratic Right in Germany collaborated. The matter sparked intense public debate in 1991 when Louis Ferdinand – the eldest son of Wilhelm and at his birth in 1907 the third in line to the Kaiserreich – petitioned the freshly unified German government for compensation.

Although the Weimar Republic had allowed the Hohenzollerns to keep most of their many assets, the family fortunes changed in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army conquered the eastern half of Germany and seized their lands, castles and possessions. With the post-Cold War offer of compensation to individuals and families, the former royals claimed assets worth hundreds of millions of euros.

A decision was complicated by a 1994 law barring restitution for the descendants of those who “significantly abetted” the Nazi regime. The success or otherwise of the claim would hinge on the actions of ex-crown prince Wilhelm, the eldest of the six sons of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the question of whether he and others in the family directly or indirectly supported National Socialism and Hitler’s rise to power.

Did the House of Hohenzollern do so? Malinowshi was appointed by the Ministry of Finance in Potsdam in 2014 to write an expert evaluation, one of many historians commissioned by authorities to do so. Malinowski was born in Berlin in 1966 and has studied and taught history in Germany, France, Italy, the United States and Ireland. He is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh and the author of “Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance” in 2020.

His new book was published as “Die Hohenzollern und die Nazis” in Germany in 2021, becoming a bestseller there and winning the German Non-Fiction Prize in 2022. The jury deemed it excellently researched and brilliantly told, and with further importance in inspiring social debate. Now it has been translated to English by Jefferson Chase, as Chase has done with some 40 other German books.

Malinowski focuses on three generations of the German royal family – that of Kaiser Wilhelm II (born 1859-died 1941),  that of his eldest son, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (1882-1951) and that of the latter’s six children, among whom his second son,  Louis Ferdinand (1907-1994), also possessed great historical significance, in seeking the compensation.

As the author recounts, when the Kaiser scurried off into exile in the Netherlands, he would never return to his homeland. And yet, the assumption that this was the end of the situation, and he and his heirs were silent and without influence in the following years, or that the Hohenzollern voice was limited to silly spats between a forgotten emperor and an upstart Austrian in a battle of epic narcissism, is wrong.

Malinowski’s answer regarding collaboration is unequivocal, an emphatic “yes”. When the “Third Reich” was being built, he assesses, the family and the Nazi movement forged a symbolic political alliance. Kaiser Wilhelm II had six sons and a daughter, and Malinowski finds that of the brothers, Prince August Wilhelm was definitely worst.

The post-First World War years in Germany were anarchic, politically and economically, with rival political gangs brawling on the streets. August Wilhelm (1887-1949) was a convinced Nazi who joined the party in 1930, and was present when the Sturmabteilung – Storm Troopers, or Brownshirts, the SA – tortured their political opponents in an improvised facility in 1933, and he later inspected the Dachau concentration camp.

His older brother, the ex-crown prince, did not go that far but he did turn up at all the right moments in the pivotal 1933. Before Hitler had been Chancellor for a week, he got his first public chance. On February 5 that year, the joint funeral of a police sergeant and the leader of a particularly vicious SA squad was held. The two men had been killed in Charlottenburg on the night of January 30. In a show of strength, 4000 Storm Troopers, with police, machine-guns and floodlights in support, had marched through the district.

The funeral was held with great spectacle in Berlin Cathedral, the policeman’s coffin draped in the old flag of the German Empire, the Storm Trooper’s with the swastika. Former crown prince Wilhelm, dressed in Nazi uniform, laid a wreath on each coffin. Up to 500,000 people braved the rain to pay their respects as the funeral cortege moved slowly down the roads leading from the cathedral to the Invaliden cemetery, three kilometres distant.

Wilhelm did not join them but he was much photographed by reporters both inside the cathedral, where he sat in the front row next to Hitler, and outside in conversation with government Minister Hermann Göring at the top of the steps. The press coverage was not just a national and provincial affair. It was discussed at length in The New York Times, under the headline “Strange things happen in Germany”.

Six weeks later, the ex-crown prince joined Hitler, Field Marshal August von Mackensen and President Hindenburg at the Day of Potsdam, the re-opening of the Reichstag, in which the Nazis choreographed the merger of their upstart regime with the old monarchical elites. To complete the symbolic ambiguities, Hitler wore tails and Wilhelm wore his Nazi uniform.
An empty chair was placed for the deposed emperor, uninvited from his enforced retirement in Doorn in the Netherlands, where he died in 1941 after attacking the Jews, the western allies, the Weimar Republic and the surrounding trees.

His son had returned from exile in 1923, with the way paved for him by Chancellor Gustav Stresemann. Photographs in the book show the returned former royal in the company of leading Nazis, including Hitler, and with swastika armbands on his military uniform.

In text and photos, masterly researched, Malinowski presents what must be the definitive account of the Hohenzollerns during the Weimar and Nazi years, showing the family’s roles in anti-democratic right-wing circles, re-inventing themselves in a “de-aristocratized society”, the deals they struck with the National Socialist state and their attemps since 1945 to convince democratic, post-war Germany to buy into a self-serving revised telling of history.