somehow tame and mollify the Nazis. It is
clear that he wanted some kind of Faustian
pact with the Devil. But how far did he go?
According to Lothar Machtan, emeritus
professor of modern history at Bremen
University and the author of a recent book
on Wilhelm, funded by the Hohenzollern
family, Wilhelm was not a Nazi himself.
“In terms of political ideology we are
dealing in Crown Prince Wilhelm’s case
with a radical right-wing antidemocrat
rather than an impassioned Nazi,” Machtan
says. “He hated the Weimar Republic and
wanted to replace it with an authoritarian
military regime.
“Up to 1933 he believed in all seriousness
that his family could only win back this
crown with Hitler’s support. This is why
he tried continually to bring the Nazi
party into the unified right-wing front he
was trying to create. That is why he worked
so hard to transfer the power to shape
politics to Hitler.”
In early 1932 Wilhelm made Hitler an
offer: Wilhelm would run for the presidency,
the most powerful post in the republic, with
Nazi support, and if he won he would make
Hitler his chancellor. Together they would
strangle the last vestiges of democracy.
The plan got far enough that Wilhelm’s
supporters gathered the necessary 20,000
signatures for his candidacy. He gave up
only when his father, the old kaiser, ordered
him to stand down at the last minute.
Thwarted, Wilhelm publicly threw his
weight behind Hitler’s campaign for the
presidency instead. Hitler was thrilled.
Peter Brandt, a retired professor of
contemporary history at the Open
University in Hagen, and the son of the
great postwar chancellor Willy Brandt,
was one of the experts brought in by the
German authorities to build the case
against the Hohenzollerns. He argues that
Wilhelm’s actions did in fact give the Nazis
a meaningful boost on their path to power.
“Hitler apparently valued the prestige of
a crown prince very highly,” Brandt says.
“Uniting the [German] right in general was
the crown prince’s only consistent guiding
principle and his most important goal, and
he would gladly have done it under the
leadership of the Nazi Party.”
Yet this was about as close as the two
leaders got. Wilhelm’s vision of a far-right
grand alliance unravelled in the final
months of the German republic, leaving
Wilhelm and Hitler at loggerheads. By
the time Hitler finally claimed the
chancellorship in January 1933, Wilhelm
had already largely outlived his usefulness
to the Nazis.
From then on he and his family
performed a basically decorative function
for the regime, appearing at public events
to lend it some of the dying authority of
the old Hohenzollern dynasty. They also
defended the Nazis’ conduct in newspaper
articles and correspondence and
conversations with members of the
British ruling classes, such as Neville
Chamberlain and Chips Channon.
The Hohenzollerns’ long drift into
humiliation and irrelevance had begun.
Wilhelm continued to mingle with the
Nazi elite but the section of his memoir
that covers these years is tinged with
bitterness. “It was not unattractive for me
to observe how the leading men of the
Third Reich behaved around one another,”
he writes. “Each of them tried to keep
himself in Adolf Hitler’s favour. Goebbels
hated Goering, and vice versa. Himmler
stuck by Goering, then went back to
Goebbels. By the way, he was spying on
them all. Without doubt, unfortunately
the little Goebbels had the greatest and
most lasting influence on the Führer.”
Wilhelm also snobbishly skewers the new
ruling class of nouveaux riches and tasteless
parvenus who preached frugality while
secretly indulging in decadence. “[These
were] people from poor backgrounds who
all at once had the finest villas, the biggest
cars, who hosted hunts and lived in great
luxury,” he writes. “They lived like great
lords; they very quickly forgot that they had
previously been postmen, nightwatchmen
or teachers in village schools.”
He had a particular axe to grind where
the “little Goebbels” was concerned,
recalling one gathering where a “young
lady who was a friend of my family was
invited to a big dinner at Goebbels’s house.
The champagne flowed in torrents, there
was a superabundance of caviar and every
kind of delicacy.
“Suddenly a servant ran in to announce
that the Führer would turn up at any
moment. Now there was a transformation:
in a trice the table was cleared, and beer
and buttered bread appeared where the
delicacies had been before. The good
Adolf rejoiced in the simplicity that
reigned in the Goebbels household.”
In Wilhelm’s telling, he began to see the
light on the infamous Night of the Long
Knives in the summer of 1934. In one fell
swoop Hitler wiped out hundreds of
opponents including old conservative
cronies of Wilhelm’s such as Kurt von
Schleicher, the former chancellor.
Wilhelm’s younger brother, August
Wilhelm, a devout member of the Nazi
Party and its Sturmabteilung paramilitary
wing, was placed under house arrest.
Wilhelm’s chief of staff, Louis Müldner,
was tortured in prison for several weeks and
reduced to a ghost of his former self, with a
shaven head and a permanent nervous tic.
Wilhelm began to fear for his family’s safety
and its wealth. “Goebbels and Goering
exploited the opportunity to take personal
revenge,” he writes. “It was the first time
Nazism dropped its mask and revealed its
boundless brutality and lawlessness.”
Looking back on the Third Reich from its
immediate aftermath, in an account thatTHE ANGLO-GERMAN LINK
Queen Victoria
(1819-1901)Queen Victoria’s eldest
child, Victoria, Princess
Royal (1840-1901)
married Frederick III
of Prussia (1831-88),
who was emperor for
only 99 days before
his death from cancermFrederick’s eldest son was
Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-
1941), king of Prussia from
1888 until 1918. He was
the last German emperorKaiser Wilhelm’s eldest son
was Wilhelm, Crown
Prince of Prussia (1882-
1951), whose ties to Hitler
are now under scrutinyWilhelm’s second son was
Louis Ferdinand, Prince
of Prussia (1907-94). His
elder brother renounced
his own succession rightsHis son was Prince Louis
Ferdinand of Prussia
(1944-77), who died during
military manoeuvresLouis Ferdinand’s eldest
son is Georg Friedrich,
Prince of Prussia (born
1976), who is seeking
compensation for
lost family treasuresWilhelm was wary of Nazis such as Hermann
Goering, left, and Heinrich Himmler30 • The Sunday Times Magazine