was inevitably coloured by Nazi Germany’s
defeat, Wilhelm was a little torn. Hitler
had destroyed the Marxists, revived the
economy and “liberated” the Rhineland.
For such achievements Wilhelm compared
him to Caesar, Robespierre, Napoleon,
Cromwell and Lenin.
“It is very cheap and facile to just say
that everything the Nazis did was bad and
contemptible: things weren’t like that,”
he writes. “Hitler’s notion of founding a
united federal state of Europe was, per se,
right. Only the implementation was
wrong, of course.”
He is also ambivalent about the
persecution of the Jews. There’s no direct
mention in the memoir of the Holocaust.
Wilhelm insists he “was never an antisemite”
and his friendships with Jews in high
society had been held against him by the
regime. “I have no doubt that a certain
percentage of Jews are very useful for the
intellectual life of a nation,” he writes. “The
Jewish intellect is very precise and critical.”
Yet he is also scathing about Jews “jostling
their way into all the important posts of
public life” in Weimar Germany, filling up
theatres, spa towns and even his golf club
at Wannsee, which “looked as though one
was in Palestine”.
“Through their loud, often challenging
way of being, [through] their not always fair
business methods, they awakened in the
German people an embittered mood of
rejection,” Wilhelm writes. “With this ever
stronger rejection from the German people
of the dominant influence of Jewry, it was
later easy for Hitler to gather millions
behind his banner with the slogan ‘Struggle
against Jewry’. I am personally convinced
that even had Hitler not existed there would
nonetheless have arisen a very strong
reaction against Jewry in Germany.”
Mainly, though, Wilhelm expresses anger
and horror at what had become of his
country. “A systematic dumbing-down of
the German people was implemented inevery intellectual domain,” he writes.
“[There was] no book, no play, no film that
did not contain a Nazi tendency ... If it
could, the party would have forbidden
thought itself.”
It was, he goes on, “a dreadful state of
affairs. Through the Hitler Youth even the
children were poisoned and their parents’
influence was systematically blanked out.
The children were raised to spy on their
parents: probably the most immoral thing
that even a perverse imagination could
come up with ... One must be ashamed that
these people were Germans. The swastika
will forever remain a mark of shame and
brutality in the memory of every
respectable German.”
So did Wilhelm play a “significant” role
in bringing about this shame and brutality?
I’m not competent to judge. Historians agree
on most of the facts above, but disagree on
virtually every aspect of how to interpret
them, from Wilhelm’s political weight to
his true intentions. He has been variously
portrayed as a pointless and ineffectual
figure on the margins, a valuable PR gift
to the Nazi Party, a political bridge uniting
the far right, or even as a kind of resistance
figure, leaking information to Hitler’s
opponents and machinating to keep him
out of the Reich Chancellery.Georg Friedrich concedes that his
great-grandfather was “unsurprisingly, not
a republican” and was in regular contact
with the Nazi leadership, but says he never
held any influence or formal office in the
Third Reich. “I’m certainly not proud of
this chapter in my family history,” he says.
“But Hitler clearly never trusted my family.
So in 1940 he even banned all members of
the [Hohenzollern] family from serving in
the armed forces.
“And now the big question is of course:
did the actions of the former crown prince
change the course of history? Given the
millions of votes and the support of the
conservative and liberal parties in the
Reichstag for Hitler and the Nazi Party,
I have doubts that Hitler would not have
come to power had my great-grandfather
acted differently.”
One thing Wilhelm certainly was not is
an impressive or savoury character, even by
the standards of his time. “I have to admit:
what I’ve read about my great-grandfather
and what is known about some of his public
remarks does not necessarily make him my
favourite ancestor,” Georg Friedrich says.
“Some of my relatives, however, who did
know him personally say that they remember
him as a friendly gentleman with a very
bawdy sense of humour.”
What I struggle to understand is why the
Hohenzollerns are spending such time and
effort pursuing a seemingly interminable
battle on such ugly terrain. Why stake the
family’s name on the actions of one of its
least appetising members?
Over the years German commentators
have speculated that the motive may be
pride, or greed, or sheer bloody-minded
stubbornness. I’m sure Georg Friedrich
would deny it is any of these things, but
getting him to say what the motive actually
is proves unexpectedly difficult.
His grandfather started the process, he
says, choosing his words with the care of
a man who has spent too much time in
the company of lawyers. So it was “most
naturally my obligation” to finish it.
After the interview we step into the castle’s
surprisingly gaudy Protestant chapel. Georg
Friedrich recalls the numerous services he
attended here as a child, head bowed among
the memorials to his ancestors. Perhaps it
is only here, among all the relics of a chain
of familial duty stretching back almost a
millennium, through wars, genocide and
the rise and fall of empires, that this iron
sense of obligation really makes sense.
Whatever the family’s motivations, the
tussle over the Hohenzollern legacy
continues to echo down through the ages.
As the historian Machtan says: “Even
today the Germans are wrangling with
their fatal 20th-century history. They are
still bothered by the question of how and
why the majority of their nation delivered
the state into the hands of Hitler, the
criminal of the century.” nBY 1933, WHEN HITLER
BECAME CHANCELLOR,
WILHELM HAD OUTLIVED
HIS USEFULNESS
TO THE NAZIS
From left: Kaiser Wilhelm II, left, and his son Prince Wilhelm visit troops in
the First World War; the prince, left, during the 1932 presidential electionALAMY, GETTY IMAGES
The Sunday Times Magazine • 31