The Soldier Kings the House of Hohenzollern Review
Georg Pahl/German Federal Archive
Adolf Hitler and 'Crown Prince' Wilhelm during the Day of Potsdam celebrations, Potsdam, Germany, March 21, 1933
In the early hours of Nov 10, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor of the Hohenzollern dynasty, fled past train into exile in the Netherlands. The armistice ending World State of war I was signed the next day. Under the Weimar Constitution of 1919, Germany's monarchy was abolished; its elite lost its privileges but was allowed to proceed much of its property. After World War II, even so, the Soviet regime expropriated the possessions of the former noble families—palaces, manor houses, lands—in their occupation zone of eastern Germany, which was shortly to become the German Autonomous Republic. Following German reunification in 1990, some of those families sought to reclaim what they had lost. A police passed in 1994 allowed for restitution or compensation claims, though simply on status that the claimants or their ancestors had not "given substantial back up" to the National Socialist or East German Communist regimes.
The Hohenzollerns were among those who demanded compensation, too as the return of tens of thousands of priceless artworks, antiquities, rare books, and piece of furniture at present in public museums, galleries, and palaces. Among their requests is the right to reside in i of the Potsdam palaces, preferably the chiliad 176-room Cecilienhof, which today is a museum. Despite years of negotiations betwixt the German land and the family unit, their claims remain unresolved. Final summer, as more than and more details well-nigh the negotiations in the instance were leaked to the German language press, a bitter public controversy erupted over Frg's monarchical past. The critical question is whether the Hohenzollerns had "given substantial support" to the Nazi regime.
To exist certain, the dynasty's history is bleak, tainted by colonial massacres, most notably the Herero and Nama genocide in High german Southwest Africa in 1904–1908, also as past its ambitious warmongering in 1914. After Earth War I, Wilhelm II fabricated no secret of his deep hatred for the Weimar Republic. In 1919, in a letter to one of his erstwhile generals, the exiled emperor, whose anti-Semitism grew more and more virulent during the interwar years, blamed the Jews above all for the fall of the monarchy:
The deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans accept done onto themselves. Egged on and misled past the tribe of Juda whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their cheers! Permit no German language ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites accept been destroyed and exterminated from German language soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German language oak-tree!
"Jews and mosquitoes," he wrote in the summer of 1927, were "a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some mode or other," adding: "I believe the best would be gas!" Later on the outbreak of World War 2, he enthusiastically celebrated the Wehrmacht's victories in Poland, Scandinavia, Belgium, Holland, and French republic. Yet during his years of exile the crumbling monarch, who died in 1941, shortly before Hitler'due south invasion of the Soviet Union, had little influence on German language politics.
More relevant to a resolution of the family's claims are the deportment of the emperor's eldest son, the self-proclaimed "crown prince" Wilhelm, who was the most senior member of the dynasty in Deutschland in the 1920s and 1930s and the possessor of the Hohenzollern backdrop at the time of the Soviet expropriation. The facts, known to historians for decades, seem clear: Wilhelm, who was adamant to destroy the hated Weimar Commonwealth, backed its right-wing enemies, believing that this would pave the way for the restoration of the monarchy. And he came out in support of Hitler early. In the 2d round of the presidential elections in the spring of 1932—later on having abandoned the idea of running himself—he endorsed Hitler rather than his opponent, the elderly president and former imperial field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, thereby legitimizing the Nazi movement amid conservative and royalist segments of German society. Hitler, reportedly "with a smile," told the British Daily Express, "I value the ex–Crown Prince's activity highly. Information technology was an absolutely spontaneous action on his office, and past it he has publicly placed himself in line with the main trunk of patriotic German language nationalists."
Wilhelm also helped the Nazis on other occasions. In 1932, for example, he tried to convince Defense Minister Wilhelm Groener to lift the ban on the Nazi paramilitary groups, the SA and SS. And afterward Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, Wilhelm wasted no time ingratiating himself with Germany'south new leader. In a stream of letters to Hitler, he professed his unconditional loyalty to the regime. In 1934, for the international press, he proudly posed in front of a mirror at Cecilienhof wearing a swastika armband. Nearly of the other Hohenzollerns, although far less prominent, behaved similarly. Wilhelm'due south younger blood brother Baronial Wilhelm ("Auwi"), a high-ranking SA leader, was a committed Nazi.
One of Wilhelm's nearly important services to the government was his participation in the Twenty-four hour period of Potsdam on March 21, 1933, a spectacle staged by the Nazis to present themselves equally the heirs to a glorious Prussian past. Representing the Hohenzollern dynasty, Wilhelm, along with iii of his brothers, took role in the carefully choreographed proceedings at Potsdam'due south Garrison Church. The highlight of the event was a handshake between President von Hindenburg and Hitler. The Solar day of Potsdam symbolized the pact between the Nazi movement and the erstwhile elites, reassuring the sizable conservative parts of the population. It was the government's first major propaganda triumph, and it was enabled by the erstwhile regal family and its aristocratic allies.
The Hohenzollerns were by no means unrepresentative. Crucial to Hitler's ascension to power was a coalition betwixt the Nazis and Germany'south former bourgeois elites, who hoped they could employ and control him for their ain ends. It was they who arranged Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor, plotted in the backrooms of gentlemen'due south clubs, in officers' messes, and at dinners and shooting parties on yard estates. The High german historian Karl Dietrich Bracher demonstrated as early as 1955, in his Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik, that information technology was their deportment that destroyed Weimar democracy, non an inevitable political crunch. "What is more agonizing to our peace of mind," Hannah Arendt noted around the same time in The Origins of Totalitarianism, "is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and non but on the mob elements in society." Hitler's authorities was supported by a broad spectrum of right-wing groups, including the royalist right, that were united in their hatred of liberal democracy, communism, and Jews.
The Nazis were initially eager to get backing from the monarchists. It was only after their consolidation of power that they lost interest in the sometime royal family. When monarchical organizations were banned in 1934, Wilhelm was forced to realize that Hitler would non help him gain more than political influence. Still, the "crown prince" connected to endorse the government'south policies. During the state of war, he sent telegrams to Hitler, addressed as "mein Führer," to congratulate him on his military victories. Given this historical record, it would seem rather difficult to merits that Wilhelm did non lend the Nazis "significant support."
Yet the electric current head of the Hohenzollern family, the forty-iii-year-quondam Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preußen, the great-great-grandson of Wilhelm II, does not seem too concerned about his family'south dark past. To support his claims, he engaged Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, to write an expert study on the family'south relationship with the Nazis. Clark is the author of the all-time-selling Kaiser Wilhelm II (2000), which depicted the emperor more sympathetically than virtually other major bookish biographies; Iron Kingdom: The Rising and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (2006), which bankrupt with the long-prevailing negative view of Prussia as autocratic and militaristic; and The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to State of war in 1914 (2012), which challenged the view that Deutschland bore the primary responsibility for the outbreak of Earth War I. The books have made him a hero to the German conservative right.
In his 19-page study, which he wrote in 2011, Clark acknowledges that "Crown Prince" Wilhelm, "a man on the right fringes of the political spectrum," showed support for Hitler on many occasions, and lists several examples, including his endorsement of Hitler in the 1932 election and his lobbying on behalf of the SA and SS. Even so he comes to the remarkable conclusion that Wilhelm was "ane of the politically most reserved and least compromised persons" among the aristocratic Nazi collaborators. Overall, Clark contends that Wilhelm mainly acted out of personal interest, that his maneuvers to help the Nazis were largely unsuccessful, and that he was simply as well marginal a figure to accept been able to give "significant support" to Hitler. His study provides a clear endorsement of the Hohenzollern claims.
In the concurrently, the German country besides deputed two historians to write expert reports: Peter Brandt, a specialist in Prussia and imperial Deutschland at the University of Hagen (and the son of Germany's former chancellor Willy Brandt), and Stephan Malinowski, a German historian at the Academy of Edinburgh, who is the author of the standard work on the relationship between the German language aristocracy and the Nazi move, Vom König zum Führer (2003). Their long and detailed reports provide many more than examples of "Crown Prince" Wilhelm's support of the Nazis. Particularly fascinating are the passages on his radical ideological affinities. In the 1920s, Wilhelm was full of praise for Mussolini, writing in 1928 to his father from Rome that Fascism was "a fabulous institution": "Socialism, Communism, Democracy and Freemasonry are eradicated, root and branch (!); a bright brutality has accomplished this." Unsurprisingly, Wilhelm was particularly excited by the coexistence of monarchy and nationalist dictatorship in Fascist Italy.
The two reports also exit no dubiety most the prince's deep-seated anti-Semitism. Writing to an American friend in the spring of 1933, he justified the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish policies, explaining that the German people had congenital up an "enormous anger" since the 1918 revolution, which, he declared, had allowed the Jews to accept over ministries, hospitals, courts, and universities. It was only now, equally "our national circles have gained victory and seized ability," led by "the brilliant Führer Adolf Hitler," that an "extraordinary reaction" had followed. It was inevitable that "certain cleanup efforts" would have to be made.
Brandt and Malinowski offer overwhelming show of Wilhelm'southward pro-Nazi activities earlier and after 1933. They brand clear that he was 1 of the almost prominent members of the old imperial elite who put his resources in the service of National Socialism and helped brand Hitler respectable among the bourgeois parts of the population. He welcomed the establishment of the dictatorship and dedicated its repressions in interviews, conversations, and letters. Both historians likewise emphasize that Wilhelm was anything but a marginal figure: monarchists had influence on wide segments of society, and then his endorsements of the Nazi movement had considerable political affect. Malinowski concludes that there tin be no doubtfulness about Wilhelm'southward support for the "creation and consolidation of the Nazi regime," while Brandt summarizes that the prince "contributed steadily and to a considerable extent" to the ascension of Hitler. The facts presented in the two reports make Clark's argument that the "crown prince" was a marginal political figure difficult to sustain.
The Hohenzollerns, however, not prepared to requite upwardly, commissioned a fourth historian to provide an opinion: Wolfram Pyta, an eminent scholar at the Academy of Stuttgart, who has studied the final years of the Weimar Democracy and has written a well-received biography of Hindenburg. Pyta's report argues that Wilhelm did indeed wield significant influence just—and this is the twist—that he tried everything in his ability to cleverly sabotage the Nazis and to support the traditional nationalist right. To testify this signal, Pyta offers an impressively original (though not very disarming) reinterpretation of historical events: Wilhelm's program to run for president in 1932, he claims, was an attempt to stop Hitler. He thereby ignores Wilhelm'southward intention to marry with the Nazis and offering Hitler the chancellorship if he were elected president, and that he simply abased the plan after Hitler gave him the cold shoulder.
Wilhelm'due south subsequent endorsement of Hitler'southward candidacy is seen by Pyta equally a shrewd maneuver to undermine the Nazis, since the "crown prince" believed that, given his ain unpopularity among the working class, his public support for the Nazi Party would cost Hitler votes. This claim is both outlandish and entirely unfounded. In a similar style, Pyta explains Wilhelm'due south lobbying for the lifting of the ban on the SA and SS every bit another cunning ploy to damage Hitler, because the reintroduction of the paramilitaries would take bankrupted the party. This, too, seems far-fetched. In fact, when the ban was somewhen lifted, there were no major negative financial repercussions. The SA had its own fund-raising activites, including selling uniforms and its ain brand of cigarettes; in addition, SA members had to bring together the Nazi Political party, which benefited from collecting their membership fees.
Finally, Pyta claims that Wilhelm was crucially involved in a plan orchestrated by Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher to split the Nazi move. Indeed, in the winter of 1932–1933, Schleicher unsuccessfully tried to forge an alliance with the fly of the Nazi Party led by Gregor Strasser to form a right-fly authorities without Hitler. The plan is well known, yet historical studies of the subject field say nothing about Wilhelm's alleged involvement in information technology, and Pyta presents no solid sources to substantiate his claim. Besides, the consequence of Schleicher'southward scheme would still accept been the abolition of the Weimar democracy.
Pyta'south conclusion is clear: "Crown Prince Wilhelm did not support the Nazi system." Assessing his report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Ulrich Herbert, one of Germany'southward leading scholars of Nazi Germany, wrote that the "almost drastic attempt" to portray Wilhelm every bit a figure who tried to cake Hitler was "if annihilation bizarre rather than convincing." The distinguished historian Heinrich August Winkler dismissed it in an interview with Dice Zeit equally a "pure apologia" reminiscent of the reactionary scholarship of the 1950s that tried to exculpate conservatives who helped Hitler to ability in 1933. He besides sharply criticized Clark'southward claim that Wilhelm was one of the politically least compromised of the Nazis' aloof helpers equally "contradicted by all historical findings."
More and more than details near the Hohenzollern claims—and the proficient reports themselves—take go public in contempo months, and the controversy in the German press has grown more and more heated, involving almost every notable historian of modern Frg. Most hold with the reports of Malinowski and Brandt. Norbert Frei, another major expert on Nazi Germany, in an commodity in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, accused the Hohenzollern family of "a brute reinterpretation of history" that "distorts historical facts, blurs responsibilities, and destroys disquisitional historical awareness." In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Richard J. Evans, Regius Professor of History Emeritus at Cambridge, criticized his colleagues for non reflecting more than carefully before accepting offers to produce expert reports.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
The reconstruction of the Berlin Palace, Jan 2020. The original palace—the Hohenzollerns' main residence from 1701 to 1918—was damaged in World War Two and demolished by the East German government. Its rebuilding after German reunification, David Motadel writes, is the result of 'a new nostalgia for the country'southward majestic past and a neo-Prussian revival.'
In that location seem to be few serious supporters of the Hohenzollern claims. One of them is Benjamin Hasselhorn, a theologian and historian from Würzburg, who in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung denounced the 1994 constabulary for making "potential holding claims dependent on the political views and actions of the ancestors." (He also wrote that the anti-Semitic statements of Wilhelm II, which he trivialized as "private comments," had to be contextualized properly.) In the aforementioned newspaper, Hans-Christof Kraus, a historian at the University of Passau, repeated Clark's thesis near Wilhelm's political insignificance, claiming that after 1918 the Hohenzollerns' reputation was in tatters.
Every bit the public debate gained momentum last fall, Clark tried to qualify his conclusion in an interview with Der Spiegel: "I stand up past what I wrote at the time. Merely in view of the form that the case has taken, it seems to be more important today to inquire about the crown prince's willingness to collaborate than well-nigh his bodily influence on events." He claimed that rather than assessing whether Wilhelm had supported the Nazis, he had assessed whether his support had been of whatever use to them. At the same time, he doubled down on his insistence that it had not:
The crown prince suffered from overconfidence bordering on the delusional. If one were to listing Hitler's most important supporters, he would not be among the first 300…. Many celebrities crowded effectually the Nazi leaders, including industrialists, bankers, church leaders and military leaders. Were the photographs featuring the crown prince more important to the regime than others? I doubt that.
It is uncontested that others in the establishment were as or more implicated—only this does non lessen the significance of the prince'southward support.
Anxious to control the public discussion of the case, the Hohenzollerns' lawyer, Markus Hennig, has issued lawsuits against some of the major German language newspapers that have reported on information technology, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit. The family has also started an ambitious legal battle against historians who contested their version of history. The first was Malinowski, not because of his good report but because he made public statements on diverse details connected with information technology, such as public admission to the family annal and the question of whether the Hohenzollerns intended to manipulate their representation in a planned museum. Other historians facing legal activity for expressing opinions on the fence include the Potsdam professors Martin Sabrow and Winfried Süß and the Princeton scholar Karina Urbach. In a recent open letter to Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preußen, Sabrow, the director of the Middle for Contemporary History in Potsdam, warned that these actions posed a real "threat to liberty of scholarship."
Many Germans are bewildered by their former royal family unit'due south demands. "This country does not owe a single coffee loving cup to the next-born of a luckily long-vanquished undemocratic regime, let alone art treasures or existent manor," wrote Stefan Kuzmany, a columnist for Der Spiegel. "Even the request is an insult to the Republic." The Hohenzollern wealth, he argued, was the production of historical injustice: "The aristocracy in general, [and] the Hohenzollerns in particular, have ever been a plague on the country and the people. Similar all then-chosen noblemen, they have snatched their fortune through the oppression of the population." As Clark noted in his interview, "In that location seems to be a strong animus against the nobility within parts of the High german public."
Behind the controversy is the broader question of Federal republic of germany's monarchical legacy. Afterwards German reunification in 1990, the country's political identity was renegotiated. Communist East Germany was in ruins, its socialist story shattered. Just West Frg's political narratives also seemed out of date. In this vacuum, older conservative versions of German language nationhood began to reemerge. The reunited republic experienced a new nostalgia for the country's majestic by and a neo-Prussian revival. This resulted, for example, in major reconstruction projects, near notably (and controversially) the rebuilding of the Berlin Palace in the capital letter, the Potsdam Metropolis Palace, and the Garrison Church. In a k ceremony, the remains of Friedrich the Great and his begetter, the "soldier male monarch" Friedrich Wilhelm I, were solemnly transferred from Hohenzollern Castle in Baden-Württemberg to Potsdam. Books glorifying Prussia suddenly found a wide audience.
All this expressed a longing for a proud High german past, no matter how imaginary, and a desire to reorient the democracy's official culture of memory away from the twelve years of Nazi barbarism. Some have observed these developments with business organisation, fearing the emergence of a new nationalism. Equally early on equally 1995, Jürgen Habermas, in his essay "1989 in the Shadow of 1945: On the Normality of a Future Berlin Democracy," powerfully warned that a new emphasis on more than positive periods of German language history—new "historical punctuations," equally he put it—would diminish the importance of the plummet of culture in 1933–1945.
The German government had planned to settle the Hohenzollerns' case through mediation behind airtight doors. Unmoved by the heated public fence of the past months, Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Matrimony—in contrast to its more reluctant Social Democratic coalition partner—seems determined to pursue a conciliatory form toward the former purple family. This became clear during a debate in the German parliament about the case earlier this year, when her political party found itself agreeing with the far-correct Culling für Deutschland in supporting arbitration. At the official hearing in the parliament's cultural committee a few days later, on January 29, 2020, positions seemed to take further hardened. Whereas the Social Democrats, Greens, and Left Political party chosen the Potsdam historian Stefanie Middendorf, Brandt, and Malinowski as historical expert witnesses, all of whom underlined once more the Hohenzollern family's troubling historical tape, the conservatives brought in Hasselhorn, who skillfully, though misleadingly, claimed that the case was highly contested among historians and that there was a lack of historical research on "Crown Prince" Wilhelm. It seems that Merkel's party feels it would lose even more credibility if it were to modify its course of the last decade. Some other concern is that negotiations might lead to a amend deal for the country than an unpredictable and protracted court case. Still, there is a adventure that a German language court will ultimately accept to decide.
Postwar Deutschland, where the tragedies of the past are omnipresent, has experienced a series of major public historical controversies, among them the fence over Fritz Fischer's claims in the 1960s that Deutschland was mainly responsible for the outbreak of Globe War I, the and so-chosen Historikerstreit in the 1980s nearly whether the Nazis' crimes were different in nature from those of the Soviet Matrimony, and the argument in the 1990s over Daniel Jonah Goldhagen'southward book about the responsibility of ordinary Germans for the Holocaust. These public renegotiations of the past tell united states as much about contemporary German society as nearly history. The Hohenzollern controversy is not merely nigh the long shadows cast by the Nazi period, but also most the place of the monarchical heritage in today's democratic Frg.
—February 26, 2020
Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/26/what-do-the-hohenzollerns-deserve/
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