What Happened To Kaiser Wilhelm II's 7 Children After World War I Ended German Empire?

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]On November 9th, 1918, the German Empire collapsed in a single afternoon. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had spent three decades strutting around Europe in absurd uniforms and picking fights with his own cousins, climbed into a train and fled to the Netherlands. Behind him, in a country bleeding from four years of total war, his seven children faced a future no Hohenzollern had ever planned for.

[00:00:29]They were no longer princes and a princess of Prussia. Now they were unemployed aristocrats with extremely expensive habits and no clear job description. The decade that followed turned this family into one of the strangest case studies in the history of European fascism. One son took Nazi Party membership card number 24, donned an SA uniform, and toured Germany convincing monarchists that Hitler was basically Bismarck with better PR.

[00:00:58]Another shot himself in a Potsdam villa at age 29 after his marriage and his finances both collapsed in the same year. A third brother, the Crown Prince, marched in a Nazi Motor Corps uniform, endorsed Hitler in the 1932 election, and then watched the SS murder his closest friend two years later. One brother stood up to Heinrick Himmler face-to-face and saved an aristocratic Christian order from Nazi absorption.

[00:01:29]Meanwhile, the Kaiser's only daughter wrote three best-selling memoirs and somehow neglected to mention the Third Reich at all. Let me show you what became of the children of the last German emperor.

[00:01:48]The House of Hohenzollern had ruled Prussia since 1415 and the German Empire since 1871 until on November 9th, 1918, mutinous sailors in Kiel, hungry workers in Berlin, and a war high command that had given up the ghost [music] combined to push Wilhelm II out the door in less than a week. [music] The Kaiser, who liked to compare himself to Frederick the Great, fled across the Dutch border in the middle of the night. Exile took him to a manor house called Huis Doorn, 50 km southeast of Amsterdam, [music] and he sulked there for the rest of his life. Doorn became a deposed Roman emperor's stage set. Visitors had to address him as Your Majesty, and his adult children, when they came to see him, were expected to bow and click their heels on entering the room. Every morning, >> [music] >> he chopped wood for exercise. He fed the swans, blamed fell on Jews, socialists, the British, [music] and his own grandmother, Queen Victoria, for the collapse of his empire, sometimes in the same conversation. For his children, the practical problem was money. Vast Hohenzollern properties had been seized by the new German Republic in the chaos of 1918, and for almost eight years, no one knew exactly what the family owned, what they could sell, or how they were supposed to live. A left-wing referendum in June 1926 tried to expropriate the former princes without compensation. That vote, called Expropriation of the Princes, fell short of the constitutional majority required, and with public pressure off, the Prussian state caved. On October 29, 1926, a property settlement agreement, millions of marks in cash, large tracts of forest and farmland, and dozens of castles flowed back to the family.

[00:03:58]Cecilienhof in Potsdam went back to the Crown Prince. The estate at Oels in Silesia returned. Hunting lodges, art collections, jewelry, and entire wings of palaces were quietly transferred to the family, and the settlement proved so generous that it gave several of Wilhelm's sons enough disposable income to fund right-wing political activity throughout the Weimar Republic. None of them ever had to find an actual job.

[00:04:32]That money mattered. Without it, the Hohenzollerns would have been irrelevant. With it, they became dangerous.

[00:04:46]Crown Prince [music] Wilhelm, born in 1882, was the eldest son and heir who would never inherit anything. His entire life had been spent in training for a throne his father lost in an afternoon. And the trauma of that loss shaped every bad decision he made for the next 30 years.

[00:05:06]In November 1918, Army Group Crown Prince was under his command on the Western Front. A reasonable tactical mind, a reckless personal life, and a famously high-pitched voice made him a target for satire even before the war ended. When his father bolted for the Netherlands, Wilhelm's command was dissolved overnight, and he fled to the Dutch island of Wieringen, a flat, windswept place where Dutch police housed him [music] in a former parsonage and watched him for the better part of five years. On December 1, 1918, he formally renounced his rights to the German throne. Exile in Holland did not stick. By 1923, Chancellor Gustav Stresemann had allowed him to return to Germany on the explicit condition that he stay out of politics, and he broke that promise within months. Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam became his residence, while the family estate at Oels became his second home. He threw himself into the world of monarchist plotting and right-wing agitation, becoming a patron of the German National People's Party, the DNVP, and a cheerleader for the Stahlhelm, the largest paramilitary veterans association in the country. By 1932, with Hindenburg running for re-election against Hitler, the Crown Prince briefly considered launching his own presidential campaign. Both his father and Hitler personally talked him out of it. In the runoff, Wilhelm endorsed Hitler, [music] believing, with the boundless optimism of a man who had learned nothing since 1918, that a Nazi victory would lead to a restoration of the monarchy. Hitler, who privately referred to the Hohenzollerns as relics, found this delusion useful and let him keep dreaming. Nazi rallies turned Wilhelm into a familiar figure.

[00:07:17]Photographs from 1933 and 1934 show him in the brown uniform of the National Socialist Motor Corps, the Nazi Motor Corps, frequently misidentified in popular history as an SA uniform. To German conservatives terrified of Bolshevism, the sight of the Kaiser's son saluting the Führer felt [music] like permission to get on board, and his support gave Hitler a particular gift, the visible blessing of the old imperial dynasty.

[00:07:50]Then came June 1934.

[00:07:53]During the night of the long knives, Hitler's SS murdered Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor, along with his wife Elisabeth, and Schleicher had been Wilhelm's close friend. The Crown Prince, who had been politically useful to Hitler precisely because of his social network, suddenly understood that nothing about him was safe. Within weeks, the Gestapo [music] placed him under surveillance. His telephone was tapped, and his mail was opened. He retreated to his estates and spent the next decade in cautious silence, cured at last of his enthusiasm for the new Germany. When the Red Army crossed the Oder in early 1945, Wilhelm fled Oels for Potsdam >> [music] >> and then for the French occupation zone in southwest Germany, where French Moroccan troops captured him near the Austrian village of Bard.

[00:08:50]Allied authorities detained, [music] interrogated, and put him through a denazification trial. [music] The Soviets refused to let him return to his eastern estates, which had passed to Polish administration.

[00:09:04]>> [music] >> Hechingen, in a small house near the family castle, gave him a last address.

[00:09:11]He was broke [music] and bitter and increasingly unwell. He died on July 20, >> [music] >> 1951 from a heart attack. The date is one of those small ironies historians enjoy, since it was also the seventh anniversary of the 1944 plot against Hitler, an event in which Wilhelm had played no role whatsoever. His tomb sits in the chapel at Hohenzollern Castle, the ancestral [music] seat of the dynasty. His marriage to Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, contracted in 1905, produced six children and 46 years of mutual misery. Wilhelm cheated relentlessly.

[00:09:58]Cecil knew they never divorced though.

[00:10:08]Prince Eitel Friedrich, born in 1883, was the soldier of the family and unlike his older brother, he kept his honor on the way out.

[00:10:18]>> [music] >> The first foot guards were under his command in November 1918 and when the revolution arrived, he stayed in Germany. His regiment marched home in good order, weapons properly stored and only then did he go into private life. The contrast with his father, who was already on a train to Holland, did not go unnoticed in the officer core. Through the 1920s, Eitel Friedrich curdled into the kind of man who shouted at newspapers. He led the Semper Talis Bund, a veterans organization for former officers of the Imperial Guards, and threw his weight behind the Stahlhelm. His hatred for the Weimar Republic was clean, traditional, and uncomplicated, a clear and angry thing. Monarchy, the army, the church, and the inherited social order all needed restoring, preferably yesterday.

[00:11:16][music] A founding member of the Habsburg Front in 1931, Eitel Friedrich joined an alliance assembled by Alfred Hugenberg to unite the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, [music] and the Nazi Party against the Republic. Like most German conservatives in 1931, he assumed his side of this coalition would tame Hitler and use the NSDAP as cannon fodder. He was wrong, but he was wrong in good company. Once Hitler took power in January 1933, Eitel Friedrich's politics curdled [music] further. Up close, the new regime looked loud, vulgar, and full of men he considered jumped-up sergeants and he refused to join the NSDAP. Public disagreement broke out with his younger brother August Wilhelm, who had become a Nazi propagandist, and the two stopped speaking for years afterward. Eitel Friedrich spent the Third Reich on his Potsdam estates [music] complaining about Hitler in private and keeping his head down in public. Death arrived on December 8th, 1942 in Potsdam, age 59. The cause was an obstruction of the bowel, which in wartime Germany was effectively a death sentence even for a Hohenzollern prince.

[00:12:40]Hitler, sensitive to any display of monarchist [music] feeling and aware that Eitel Friedrich had refused to bend the knee, banned all military honors at his funeral. There were no soldiers, no salutes, no flags lowered to half-mast.

[00:12:57]The Imperial Guards he had once commanded were not allowed to bury their old colonel. [music] His coffin was placed in the Antique Temple at Sanssouci Park beside other members of the family. Marriage to Duchess Sophie Charlotte of Oldenburg in 1906 >> [music] >> produced no children and considerable scandal. Rumors had her sleeping with men. Rumors had him uninterested in her in any direction. They divorced in 1926 just as the property settlement was making the Hohenzollerns rich again, which the Berlin tabloids found amusing for several weeks.

[00:13:42]If the family had a sensible one, it was Prince Adalbert, born in 1884. The third son was a naval officer, a man who looked at 20th century German politics, decided he wanted no part of any of it, and moved to Switzerland.

[00:14:00]When the revolution came, Adalbert was in command of the light cruiser SMS Dresden. The Kiel Mutiny, which began on the night of October 29, 1918, when sailors of the High Seas Fleet refused orders to put to sea for one final suicidal attack against the Royal Navy, became the first spark of the German Revolution. Adalbert, a Hohenzollern in a uniform on a warship full of mutineers, made a fast and unsentimental decision. He left the Dresden, boarded a train, and got out [music] before someone shot him. Through the years that followed, he set up house in a villa in Bad Homburg, a spa town outside Frankfurt, and tried to make himself invisible. His health was poor.

[00:14:53]Chronic gastric problems and a weak heart limited what he could do and he wanted no part in the monarchist intrigues that consumed his older brothers. By the late 1920s, he had relocated permanently to Switzerland, settling in La Tour de Peil on the shore of Lake Geneva. The Swiss suited him much better. No public position on the Nazi Party >> [music] >> ever came from Adalbert. Hitler received no endorsement from his lakeside villa, but no denunciation either. Occasional letters went to his father at dawn >> [music] >> and otherwise he lived as a quiet country gentleman, gardening, reading, and watching the world burn from a comfortable distance. While his brothers paraded in uniforms and signed manifestos, Adalbert raised three children in a country with no army worth mentioning. He died in La Tour de Peil on September 22, 1948, age 64. Marriage to Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen in 1914 was the only consistently happy union among the Kaiser's adult children, producing three children, no scandals, no infidelities recorded by the Berlin gossip press, and a long, quiet life on a Swiss lakeshore. Historians of the dynasty rarely linger on Adalbert. There is nothing to linger on.

[00:16:29]In the worst century of European history, he chose obscurity and obscurity suited him perfectly.

[00:16:43]This is where the story turns ugly.

[00:16:45]Prince August Wilhelm, born in 1887 and known to the family as Auwi, became the most thoroughly Nazified member of the Hohenzollern dynasty >> [music] >> and possibly the most thoroughly Nazified European royal of any rank. By November 1918, Auwi was working as a junior administrator in the Ruppin district north of Berlin and the revolution stripped him of his post overnight.

[00:17:16]Drifting through the early Weimar years, he felt sorry for himself.

[00:17:22]He fought with his wife, ran through money, and looked for a cause. A Nazi rally in 1929 finally gave him one and the audience there genuinely seemed to want him there. On April 1, 1930, Auwi officially joined the Nazi >> [music] >> and received party membership number 24.

[00:17:44]The number itself was a propaganda gift to Hitler. Here was a son of the Kaiser, the brother of the Crown Prince, the bearer of one of the oldest royal names in Europe signing up for a movement still considered an extremist fringe by most German conservatives. Auwi understood exactly what he was doing, believing that Nazi ideology offered a third way between Bolshevism and decadent liberal democracy, and that Hitler was a man of destiny who would restore the monarchy when the time was right. Inside the SA, the Nazi paramilitary brown shirts, [music] Auwi rose at speed. By 1933, he was a Gruppenführer.

[00:18:33]By 1943, he held the rank of Obergruppenführer, equivalent to a general officer in the Wehrmacht. Hundreds of rallies across Germany between 1930 and 1933 had him working a particular niche, convincing aristocrats, conservatives, monarchists, and the Protestant middle class that Hitler was nothing to be afraid of. The man on the stage was a Hohenzollern in a brown shirt. If the Kaiser's son said Hitler was fine, surely Hitler was fine. His political marriage with the regime did not last.

[00:19:15]After Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis no longer needed an aristocratic mascot and Auwi was quietly cast aside. The 1934 Night of the Long Knives killed off the SA leadership he had befriended, including Enck Ström, and reduced the brown shirts to a ceremonial husk. Auwi kept his uniform but lost his platform.

[00:19:42]Understanding what was happening to him seems to have been beyond him. Speeches at small ceremonial events still appeared on his calendar, and private predictions about the eventual restoration of the monarchy still appeared in his letters. In 1942, some intemperate remarks about Joseph Goebbels at a private dinner reached the propaganda ministry, and the regime banned him from public speaking entirely. The Kaiser's son, the propagandist, the SA general, was now muzzled. By 1945, Auwi had fled the Soviet advance and been captured by American forces.

[00:20:26]Denazification in 1948 was a particularly grim affair for him.

[00:20:32]The court classified him as incriminated [music] based on his SA rank and his decade of propaganda work for the Nazi Party, sentencing him to 2 and 1/2 years of hard labor and the forfeiture of much of his property. Americans released him after a few months because his health had collapsed. He died of stomach cancer on March 25, 1949 in Stuttgart, aged 61. His grave lies in the family cemetery at Langenbourg, far from the Berlin he had once tried to lead into a fascist future. His marriage to Princess Alexandra Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, contracted in 1908, produced one son and ended in divorce in 1920. The marriage had been unhappy from the start. Auwi was almost certainly homosexual, a fact the Berlin court whispered about for years before the divorce made it less interesting to whisper about. The Nazis, who had a documented obsession with homosexuality among their enemies, somehow made an exception for [music] the prince who carried party number 24.

[00:21:54]Prince Oskar, born in 1888, was the family's quiet rebel, and his story is one of the strangest in the entire dynasty. A Hohenzollern prince who personally faced down Heinrich Himmler and won. By November 1918, Oskar was serving as a commander on the Eastern Front. After the war ended, he came home, settled in Potsdam, and slipped into private life with little fanfare. He was the least flamboyant of the brothers. Speeches were not his thing. Rallies bored him, and newspaper op-eds were not his style.

[00:22:34]Instead, he took over the leadership of an obscure but ancient institution, the Bailiwick of Brandenburg of the Order of St. John, also known [music] as the Johanniterorden.

[00:22:48]Originally the Protestant successor to the medieval Knights Hospitaller, the Johanniterorden was an aristocratic Christian charity that ran hospitals, ambulance services, and homes for the elderly across Germany. In 1927, Oskar became its Herrenmeister, or Master of Knights, a position he would hold for the next 31 years until his death. On paper, the Johanniterorden was exactly the kind of organization Heinrich Himmler hated. It was aristocratic, its membership was Christian, and it had international affiliations with Protestant orders in Britain and Sweden.

[00:23:32]Real estate, hierarchies, and loyalties belonged to it, and those loyalties had nothing to do with Hitler. From 1933 onward, the Nazi regime tried to dissolve the order, absorb it into the SS, or replace its leadership with reliable party members. Oskar refused repeatedly. He met with Himmler personally, held the line on the order's independence, and used his Hohenzollern surname as a kind of social shield. The Reichsführer SS, who had a famous obsession with Germanic chivalry and aristocratic [music] mystique, did not dare touch the brother of the crown prince directly. By 1938, the order had been forced to dissolve formally as a public corporation under Nazi law, but Oskar kept it functioning underground throughout the war. After 1945, in the Western occupation zones, he rebuilt it openly. The Johanniterorden survives today, still doing hospital work across Germany, because Oskar simply outlasted the Third Reich. When World War II began, Oskar served briefly in the Wehrmacht, but Allied authorities had nothing to do with that part of his removal. The Prinzenerlass dismissed him in 1940 as part of Hitler's purge of former royals from active service. His son, Prince Oskar Wilhelm Karl Hans Kuno of Prussia, was killed in action at Widawka, Poland on September 5, 1939 during the fifth day of the German invasion. The young prince was 23 years old.

[00:25:19]The death broke his father. By 1945, the Soviets had evicted Oskar from his Potsdam home, and he fled to West Germany. His final decade went into rebuilding the Johanniterorden, raising funds for hospitals, and quietly attending state functions in the new Federal Republic. Stomach cancer killed him in Munich on January 27, 1958.

[00:25:45]Hohenzollern Castle received his body for burial. Marriage to Countess Ina Marie von Bassewitz in 1914 had been a minor scandal at the time.

[00:25:58]She was not of equal royal birth, which made the union morganatic by Hohenzollern house law, meaning her children would not technically inherit titles. The Kaiser, in one of his rare humane gestures, later elevated her to Princess of Prussia. They had four children, and their marriage lasted 44 years. If you want to know what aristocratic resistance to the Nazi regime looked like at its quietest and most effective, it looked like Oskar. No grand statements, no martyrdom, just the patient refusal to let an institution he cared about be eaten alive.

[00:26:45]The youngest brother died first, and he died terribly. Prince Joachim, born in 1890, was the baby of the family and the one least equipped to handle the loss of empire. A cavalry officer in 1918, he had grown up assuming the imperial system would last forever. It did not.

[00:27:07]After the abdication, adaptation was beyond him. 28 years old in November 1918, Joachim had no profession beyond being a prince of Prussia and no money of his own. The family fortune was frozen in legal limbo and would not be settled until 1926, 6 years after his death. Personal debts from the war years pressed in on him, and his marriage to Princess Marie Auguste of Anhalt, contracted in 1916 over the objection of his mother, was already failing. By 1920, he was deep in clinical depression, although the medical vocabulary of the time would have called it neurasthenia or melancholia. Drinking ran heavy, gambling debts ran heavier. Anguished letters went to his exiled father at dawn, complaining that his rank, his money, his wife, and his future had all been taken from him at once. The Kaiser, who could be a sentimental father in the abstract and a cold one in person, sent back encouragement that landed badly.

[00:28:19]Joachim and Marie Auguste divorced in early 1920. On the evening of July 17, 1920, Joachim attended a party at Glinicke Castle, the Hohenzollern lodge near the Havel River south of Berlin. According to the historian John C. G. Röhl, whose multi-volume biography of Wilhelm II remains the standard source for the family's exile years, Joachim returned that night to his residence at Villa Liegnitz, a small house in Sanssouci Park, and shot himself. His brother August Wilhelm found him alive but mortally wounded. Auwi had him transported to St. Joseph Hospital in Potsdam, where Joachim died the following day, July 18, 1920, aged [music] 29. A telegram brought the news to Huis Doorn. The Kaiser, who had outlived a great deal in 2 years of exile, was struck silent for the better part of a day. Empress Augusta Victoria, his wife, never recovered. Her health, already poor, collapsed within weeks of the news, and she died of heart failure [music] at dawn on April 11, 1921, less than 9 months after Joachim's suicide. The family later said that Joachim's death [music] had killed her, too, and the family was probably right.

[00:29:52]Burial took place in the antique temple at Sanssouci Park. His grave is not signposted.

[00:30:01]Visitors to the park rarely find it. Of all the Kaiser's children, Joachim is the one history forgets first because he is the one who left the smallest mark on the politics that came afterward. He never had to choose between Hitler and the resistance, never had to flee the Soviets, and the Nuremberg courtrooms never summoned him. [music] The revolution killed him in 1918, and it just took him 18 months.

[00:30:37]Princess Victoria Louise, born in 1892, was the only daughter and the family's favorite. A fact never disputed and frequently resented by her brothers.

[00:30:49]Charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and political untouchability all belonged to her, and she made a career out of all four qualities. Marriage in 1913 paired her with Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, in a wedding that healed a 50-year rift between the Hohenzollerns and the Hanoverian Welfs. European royal courts attended in numbers not seen since the Congress of Vienna. The wedding photograph included Tsar Nicholas II, King George V, [music] and Wilhelm II together, the last time those three men would ever stand [music] in the same room. Within 15 months, two of them would be at war with the third. By November 1918, the local workers and soldiers council in Brunswick had deposed her husband as duke and forced the family to flee to Austria. They lost their throne, their palace in the city of Braunschweig, and most of their public role overnight.

[00:31:55]Unlike her brothers, however, Victoria Louise kept something they did not, charm. Being a woman in early 20th century Germany meant the political establishment did not feel obliged to take her seriously, which in turn meant she could move where her brothers could not. Throughout the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, Victoria Louise lived in Blankenburg Castle in the Harz Mountains and at the Hanover residence of her husband's family.

[00:32:25]>> [music] >> Five children came along, including Frederica, who would later marry King Paul of Greece and become Queen of the Hellenes. Open political statements were not her style. She did not join the Nazi Party.

[00:32:40]She did not denounce it, either. By [music] 1945, Victoria Louise was one of the very few members of her family with no obvious political baggage. [music] In 1945, she fled the Soviet zone, settled in Hanover, and over the following decades wrote three best-selling memoirs.

[00:33:02]A life as daughter of the emperor in 1965, >> [music] >> the glamour of the crown in 1967, and image of an emperor in 1969.

[00:33:14]They are warm, nostalgic, and beautifully evasive. The Third Reich barely appears at all. Her brother Auwi's Nazi career is mentioned in passing, the way one might mention an embarrassing uncle's drinking problem at a family wedding. The Holocaust does not feature. [music] The 1944 plot against Hitler does not feature. And her father's anti-Semitic tirades at dawn do not feature. What does feature is endless detail about imperial banquets, royal weddings, and the kind of small, charming anecdotes that sell books. She outlived all her brothers, two world wars, three German states, [music] and four generations of European monarchies passed before death came for her in Hanover on December 11, 1980, age 88. By then, she had become something none of her brothers achieved, a beloved public figure in the Federal Republic, a living link to a vanished world, treated by German television audiences as a kind [music] of charming royal grandmother of the entire nation. Her entire adult life had been spent selectively forgetting the worst parts of her family's history.

[00:34:32]The German public, which had its own reasons for wanting to forget, found this enormously appealing.

[00:34:45]By 1940, the relationship between the Hohenzollerns and the Nazi regime had collapsed into mutual loathing, and a single funeral made the rupture official. In May 1940, Crown Prince Wilhelm's eldest son, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, was killed in action during the Battle of France, age 33, serving as a young officer in the German army. His grandfather, the Kaiser, sent flowers from Doorn. His father attended the funeral in Potsdam. What Hitler did not expect was the crowd.

[00:35:23]Over 50,000 mourners turned out for the funeral procession through Potsdam. They were not Nazis.

[00:35:31]Ordinary Germans filled the streets, and many of them appeared to be there because the dead man was a Hohenzollern.

[00:35:39]After 20 years of Republican government and 7 years of Nazi rule, the old monarchist sentiment was still alive enough the streets of a major Prussian city. Hitler watched the newsreels and decided this could not continue. In May 1940, he issued the Prinzenerlass, the princes' decree.

[00:36:01]The decree pulled members of the former royal houses out of frontline service.

[00:36:06]By 1943, it had escalated into a full discharge of all former royals from the Wehrmacht.

[00:36:14]The Hohenzollerns, the Wittelsbachs, the Habsburgs, the Württembergs, and dozens of smaller dynasties were all evicted from the army they had once led. Hitler did not want them dying as heroes, and he did not want them serving as officers, either.

[00:36:31]The propaganda risk in either direction was unacceptable to him. Within the family, individual Hohenzollerns paid the price of war regardless of the decree. Oskar's son had already died in Poland in 1939.

[00:36:49]Other distant cousins fell on the Eastern Front. The Crown Prince's own circle of friends and aristocratic acquaintances became increasingly tangled in the conservative resistance to Hitler, including Henning von Tresckow, Claus von Stauffenberg, and Ulrich von Hassell, all of whom would die in the aftermath of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer.

[00:37:18]No member of Wilhelm II's immediate family was a primary conspirator in that plot. There is no evidence that Crown Prince Wilhelm, Eitel Friedrich, Adalbert, August Wilhelm, Oskar, or Victoria Louise knew the assassination was being planned [music] in advance. After the bomb went off in Hitler's headquarters at Wolfsschanze and Stauffenberg was executed, the Gestapo cast a wide net >> [music] >> interrogating dozens of aristocratic figures connected to the conspirators.

[00:37:53]Several Hohenzollerns were questioned.

[00:37:55]None were charged. Auwi, whose Nazi credentials remained impeccable on paper, was untouched while the Crown Prince was placed under closer surveillance, but escaped any concrete sanction. In other words, the Hohenzollerns were too associated with the Nazi regime to join the resistance, and too aristocratic for the Nazi regime to fully trust. They were stuck in a no-man's land of their own making.

[00:38:27]Hitler had been legitimized by them in 1933, and after 1934, they discovered he had no use for them. By 1944, they were spectators in a war their decisions had helped to start.

[00:38:48]Kaiser Wilhelm II died at Huis Doorn on June 4, 1941, age 82, of a pulmonary embolism. He had outlived two of his seven children. The empire he had been born to inherit was, by then, a Nazi state at war with most of the world. And Hitler initially considered using the Kaiser's death for propaganda purposes before deciding the funeral might draw too much monarchist sympathy. The body was buried at Doorn under a small mausoleum.

[00:39:24]His last instruction was that he be buried only after the German monarchy was restored. That instruction was ignored. The mausoleum went up anyway, and he has been there ever since. The German empire he had ruled was gone. The Weimar Republic that replaced it was gone. The Third Reich was burning. The Federal Republic was 20 years away. His children, raised to inherit a world, had spent their adult lives presiding over its destruction. In the decades after 1945, the surviving Hohenzollerns rebuilt private lives in West Germany, most of them in the south, far from the lost eastern estates. They wrote memoirs, restored chapels, sat on corporate boards, and watched their grandchildren grow up as ordinary German citizens with unusual surnames. The dynasty that had ruled Prussia for 500 years quietly converted itself into a wealthy private family. After German reunification in 1990, a new chapter opened. The House of Hohenzollern, now headed by Crown Prince Wilhelm's grandson, Georg Friedrich, sued the German state for the restitution of art, antiquities, and real estate that had been expropriated by the Soviet Military Administration in 1945 in the Eastern Occupation Zone. Legal stakes ran into hundreds of millions of euros. Tens of thousands of objects were potentially involved. Under the 1994 German Compensation Act, restitution is denied if the claimant's ancestors substantially supported the National Socialist system. The case, therefore, turned on a historical question with sharp political edges. Did Crown Prince Wilhelm and August Wilhelm provide that level of support to the Nazi rise to power between 1930 and 1934? If yes, the family lost its claim.

[00:41:39]If no, the family won. A small war broke out among historians. Stephan Malinowski, in his book Nazis and Nobles and in expert reports for the German government, argued that the Hohenzollerns had provided important symbolic capital for Hitler's consolidation of power and that the Crown Prince, in particular, had played a documented role in normalizing the Nazi Party to conservative voters. Lothar Machtan, in Der Kronprinz und die Nazis, took a similar position. Christopher Clark, the British historian best known for The Sleepwalkers and Iron Kingdom, initially submitted an expert report suggesting the Crown Prince had been too politically inept and peripheral to qualify as a substantial supporter of Hitler. Clark later modified his position >> [music] >> in light of further evidence and a broader historiographical consensus. The case dragged through the 2010s and into the 2020s. The Hohenzollerns withdrew some claims under public pressure.

[00:42:50]Newspapers ran headlines and German politicians demanded transparency. By 2023, the family had announced it was dropping most of its compensation claims, accepting that the political damage from the lawsuits exceeded any plausible financial reward. What remains is the historical record. The seven children of Kaiser Wilhelm II had inherited the largest private fortune in Germany, the most distinguished royal name in Europe, and a national reputation built up over five centuries.

[00:43:23]A property settlement in 1926 had made them millionaires twice over.

[00:43:30]Political latitude no commoner enjoyed had been theirs. Access to chancellors, generals, and industrialists was theirs whenever they asked. With all of that, they spent the 1920s and early 1930s helping to legitimize the most destructive political movement in modern history. Some of them, like Adalbert and Oskar, kept their distance [music] or quietly resisted. Joachim did not survive long enough to make any choice at all. Auwi and the Crown Prince threw themselves at the new regime and were eventually thrown back. Viktoria Luise, the daughter, lived long enough to remember it all and to leave most of it out of her memoirs. The Hohenzollerns are still in Germany, still owning property, still attending society events. The current head of the house, Georg Friedrich, gives interviews and runs a charitable foundation. He is not the German emperor. He has no realistic prospect of ever becoming the German emperor. The family's status is the residue of a dynasty that ended in November 1918 and refused to accept it for the next 30 years. And that refusal had consequences. It shaped the politics of the Weimar Republic. Its weight softened the reception of the Nazi Party in conservative circles. If you want to go deeper on the Hohenzollerns and the Weimar Right, the companion podcast covers the historiographical fights, the Malinowski-Clark exchange, and the smaller, bizarre details that did not fit into this script. The link is in the description. Hit the like button if this video was useful to you.

[00:45:24]Drop a comment letting me know which of the Kaiser's children surprised you most, and consider subscribing or joining the channel membership for more long-form history. See you in the next one.