To find out more, directly from the family,
I drive about an hour south from Stuttgart,
along a narrow road that winds for a couple
of miles up the thickly forested slopes of a
lonely mountain, then through half a dozen
increasingly imposing gates. There I enter
the Burg Hohenzollern, a proper fortress.
Georg Friedrich, 45, Wilhelm’s great-
grandson, greets me in the innermost
courtyard with a solid handshake. Since
Germany’s aristocratic titles were formally
abolished in 1919 the honorific is, strictly
speaking, a surname: he is Mr Prince of
Prussia. Dressed in a tweed suit and a heavy
overcoat against the cold, he is affable,
unassuming and a little bit hard to read.
He leads me into the entrance hall, whose
high walls are covered in an intricate family
tree springing from the Middle Ages,
dividing into blue and red branches for the
Prussian and Swabian lines of the dynasty,
twisting and turning through nearly a
thousand years of turbulent history until
they arrive in the present.
Settling down in a study, Georg Friedrich
apologises for the bitter chill — “It’s a
nightmare trying to keep this place heated
in the winter” — and turns to the darkest
days of his family’s past.
He was still a baby when his father, a
reservist in the German armed forces, was
crushed to death between two armoured
vehicles during a training exercise near
Bremen. He was raised instead by his
grandfather Louis Ferdinand, Crown
Prince Wilhelm’s estranged son.
Louis Ferdinand had begun negotiating
over the family’s lost property with the
socialist East German regime in the years
before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When he
died in 1994, Georg Friedrich became head
of the dynasty at the age of 18 and inherited
the campaign. He points out that there have
been 800,000 other applications, under
the same law he is using, for restitution of
property confiscated after the war. Why, he
asks, should his family be any different?
For more than 20 years the negotiations
were put on ice because of a legal
moratorium. Then they exploded into life.
The state of Brandenburg, where the family
live, first decided that the Hohenzollerns
were due €1.2 million in compensation
— then backtracked in the face of outrage
from two left-wing parties.
The state brought in a pair of distinguished
historians, who argued that Wilhelm had
in fact done a great deal to help the Nazis
into power. The Hohenzollerns hired their
own equally distinguished historians, who
argued the opposite. The historians rowed.
The politicians fumed. The German press
had a field day.
“The headwinds we ran into actually took
me by surprise,” Georg Friedrich says. All
the meetings he’d had with the authorities
about compensation had been amicable, he
adds. “One really couldn’t see a reason why
that would take a turn. But it did take a turn,when all of a sudden a selection of
documents from our discussions with the
government representatives were leaked to
the media. And later our unresolved property
matters became a central issue in the
2019 state election in Brandenburg. This
clearly hasn’t helped. During the election
campaign my wife, Sophie, and I even
faced attacks on quite a personal level.”
Above Georg Friedrich’s study, several
flights of stairs lead up to a chilly garret at
the top of a tower. On a table there is the
brief memoir that yields a remarkable
insight into what was going on in the years
when Hitler rose to power.
For decades the document has been
stashed away in the family’s private archive,
seen only by a handful of retainers and
historians. Aside from a few sentences that
leaked into the German press in the 1950s
and a few more that were published in a
recent book, its contents have remained
unpublished all this time.
This is how Wilhelm himself hoped
posterity would see his role in the moral
downfall of his country. “In my life I have
always been drawn to get to know men
who play a role in the public sphere: mensuch as King Edward VII, President
Roosevelt ... Churchill and Cecil Rhodes,”
he writes. “In the same way I wanted to get
to know Adolf Hitler, too.”
Their first meeting was in 1930,
engineered through the offices of Hermann
Goering, the future commander of the
Luftwaffe. It was a disappointment, and
Wilhelm remembers Hitler as a dishevelled
figure in his worn blue suit. “The only thing
that particularly struck one about him was
his very lively eyes, which made, I would
almost say, a hypnotic impression,” he writes.
He recalls Hitler being “unable to sit still on
his chair, always leaping up ... and walking
around the room in a state of agitation”.
He continues: “It was also very
difficult [to have] a reasonable discussion
with him because on every subject he
would immediately give a lecture as
though he were speaking in front of
some people’s assembly.”
The tête-à-tête cannot have gone all
that badly, though. Wilhelm began
consorting with high-ranking Nazis ever
more frequently. On the desk, next to
the memoir, is a letter in which his wife,
Cecilie, refers affectionately to Hitler as
“Don Adolfo”.
Then in October 1931 all the most
prominent far-right forces seeking to
destroy the Weimar Republic — the Nazis,
the arch-conservative German National
People’s Party (DNVP) and the Stahlhelm,
a large paramilitary group of war veterans —
came together in the town of Bad Harzburg,
near Hanover. Though this “Harzburg
Front” alliance was short-lived, it gave
Wilhelm a political template for the future.
His best path to power, he decided, was to
unite the radical right behind a dictator who
would restore the Hohenzollern monarchy.
He already had the DNVP and the
Stahlhelm on side; all he had to do wasIT IS CLEAR THAT HE
WANTED SOME KIND
OF FAUSTIAN PACT
WITH THE DEVIL. BUT
HOW FAR DID HE GO?
Hitler delivers a speech at the Reich Conference of the Stahlhelm in Hanover,
PREVIOUS PAGES AND THESE PAGES: FRANK BAUER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, ALAMY 1933. Wilhelm, circled, supported Hitler’s aim to end the Weimar Republic
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