S

itting in a freezing castle

turret perched amid the

Jura Mountains in southern

Germany are 29 ageing,

slightly yellowed pages of

typescript. Their title:

35 Years of German History

— 1910-1945. Few have laid

eyes on this document and

the sheets crackle a little as I

leaf tentatively through them.

“Standing there before

me,” it says on one page,

“was a man of middling

height in a worn blue suit.

His linen was not very

clean, and his hair hung

down over his brow. He was

the kind of man you very

often see among the little

people in Vienna and Austria.”

The man in the tatty blue suit and lightly

soiled cuffs was Adolf Hitler. The author of

these lines was Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia,

then head of what had once been Germany’s

royal family — and one of the most intriguing

actors involved in the rise of the Third Reich.

By 1946, when Wilhelm dictated this

memoir to his secretary, he was an alcoholic

five years from his death and Germany

was in ruins after its defeat in the Second

World War. Now, some 75 years on,

Wilhelm is once again a lightning rod for

national controversy. He is at the centre

of a furious historical debate that

exemplifies Germany’s continuing

struggle to come to terms with its past.

Wilhelm’s heirs are seeking compensation

from the state for the loss of their family’s

possessions in the east, which were seized

by the Russians and the socialist East

German regime after the Second World

War. In all they were deprived of about

€20 million (£17 million) worth of palaces

and land, as well as thousands of artworks

and heirlooms that are stuck in legal limbo.

The dispute over whether they should

receive compensation is monstrously

complicated, but much of it comes down

to a single question: did Wilhelm, the last

member of the dynasty with a legitimate

claim on the estates, “significantly advance”

the Nazis on their way to power or not? If

he did then the heart of the case is void.

But if he didn’t Wilhelm’s heirs stand to

recover millions and win a momentous

victory in Germany’s long-running “battle

of the historians”.

The search for an answer has opened

ancient wounds, sparked more than 100

lawsuits, divided German politics and pitted

some of the leading experts on the period

against one another. Nearly everyone I know

in Germany has a strong opinion on the

subject one way or the other. A poll conducted

two years ago found that 53 per cent thought

it would be wrong for the German state to

give the royal descendants a single euro;

33 per cent favoured granting some of their

stave off a socialist revolution as the First

World War ground to an end.

Hours later he boarded a train to the

Netherlands, never to return. He lived out

the final decades of his life at a country

house near Utrecht, feeding the ducks,

hatching half-hearted intrigues and

grumbling about Jews in letters to his old

acquaintances. He chiefly vented his ire

on the estate’s trees, supposedly chopping

down 13,000 in a single year.

This muttering deforestation was not the

last act of his dynasty, the Hohenzollerns,

however. A decade later the family entered

the darkest chapter in its history. The kaiser’s

eldest son, also called Wilhelm, waded into

the politics of the Weimar Republic (created

after the kaiser was ousted) and began

scheming to restore the imperial crown.

Over the three years from 1930 to 1933 he

plotted in palaces, hunting lodges and

high-society soirées with some of the most

dangerous men of his age, including Hitler.

demands, while 6 per cent felt they should

get the lot. Only 8 per cent were undecided.

Amid all the wrangling, Georg Friedrich,

Prince of Prussia, the current head of the

dynasty, agreed to speak to me at the last of

the family’s castles, a neogothic pile in the

Swabian Jura. And it’s he who shows me

Wilhelm’s memoir, confident that it speaks

for itself as the self-portrait of a man who

always maintained a certain distance from

Hitler and the Nazis.

But first, to understand the family, the

saga and the significance of the document,

a little history on German royals is helpful.

On the morning of November 9, 1918,

Kaiser Wilhelm II — whose mother was the

eldest daughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria

— woke up as the king of Prussia and

German emperor. His domains stretched,

at least nominally, as far as Cameroon and

Samoa. By lunchtime, however, he was plain

old Wilhelm, ignominiously forced off his

throne by the government in an effort to

Georg Friedrich, head of the Hohenzollern clan, with his great-grandfather’s

archives. He believes they show his ancestor kept his distance from the Nazis

28 • The Sunday Times Magazine