Wilhelm II

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor, spent much of his adult life holding a pair of white gloves in his left hand. The gloves made that arm look longer than it was. He reigned from 1888 to 1918 over a country that had become Europe's largest manufacturer. Yet the man at its head was restless, theatrical and hungry for applause. Historians still argue about how much of Germany's road to catastrophe was his doing. This documentary asks what shaped him, starting with a frightening birth in Berlin. It asks how a prince raised to rule came to dismiss the most powerful statesman in his country. It asks why an emperor who wanted respect for his nation left it with few reliable friends. And it asks what became of a dethroned monarch during the long years of exile that followed.

  82837795

• 2. A Difficult Birth

  ›

  Shortly before midnight on the 26th of January 1859, Princess Vicky went into labour at the Crown Prince's Palace in Berlin. August Wegner, the family's physician, examined her and found the baby in the breech position. He sent for the gynaecologist Eduard Arnold Martin, who arrived at 10 am on the 27th of January. Martin gave her ipecac and a mild dose of chloroform, administered by her own doctor, Sir James Clark. He then told her husband Fritz that the unborn child's life was in danger.

  The mild anaesthesia did nothing for her pain, and her cries were described as "horrible screams and wails". Clark finally gave her full anaesthesia. When Martin judged the contractions too weak, he added a dose of ergot extract. At 2:45 pm he saw the baby's buttocks emerge, but the pulse in the umbilical cord was weak and intermittent. Despite that warning sign, he ordered another heavy dose of chloroform so that he could handle the infant more freely.

  The baby's left arm was raised up behind his head, and the birth canal was narrow. Martin pulled that arm downward by force and tore the brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves that serves the arm. He then kept hold of the arm while rotating the trunk to free the right one, which probably made the injury worse. Martin realised the newborn prince was short of oxygen, yet he turned his attention to the unconscious Vicky. The infant stayed silent. Martin and the midwife, Fräulein Stahl, worked frantically over him. Over the disapproval of those present, Stahl spanked him hard until "a weak cry escaped his pale lips".

  Modern medical assessments blame the lack of oxygen, the breech delivery and the heavy chloroform for minimal to mild brain damage. They link it to his hyperactive and erratic behaviour, limited attention span and impaired social abilities. The nerve injury produced Erb's palsy, which left his left arm withered and about 6 in shorter than the right. Photographs show him resting that arm on a sword hilt, clasping the left hand with the right, or gripping a cane to suggest a useful limb at a dignified angle. Historians suggest the disability shaped his emotional development. His mother, who lay unconscious through the worst of it, would spend years blaming herself for what happened that day.

  828186

• 3. Making of a Prussian

  ›

  Riding lessons began when Wilhelm was eight, and they were an ordeal. His mother could not accept that an heir to the throne might be unable to ride, so the weeping boy was set on a horse again and again. He fell off time after time and was put back up each time. After weeks of this, he finally kept his balance. Years later he wrote that the torments of pony riding "must be attributed to my mother".

  At the age of four, Wilhelm had already shown his temper at a royal wedding in England. In 1863 he attended the marriage of his uncle Bertie and Princess Alexandra of Denmark, dressed in Highland costume with a small toy dirk. When his 18-year-old uncle Prince Alfred told him to be quiet, Wilhelm drew the dirk. When Alfred tried to restrain him, Wilhelm bit him on the leg. Queen Victoria missed the scene and still thought of him as "a clever, dear, good little child".

  From the age of six, Wilhelm was tutored by Georg Ernst Hinzpeter, then 39 years old. Wilhelm later said Hinzpeter "was really a good fellow" but would not judge whether he was the right tutor. The boy went on to the Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel and finished school in January 1877. On his eighteenth birthday his grandmother sent him the Order of the Garter. He then spent four terms at the University of Bonn studying law and politics, and joined the exclusive Corps Borussia Bonn. His intelligence was quick, but it was often overshadowed by a cantankerous temper.

  As the time approached for his military training, Wilhelm's grandfather, the Emperor, assigned him as a lieutenant to the First Regiment of Foot Guards at Potsdam. Wilhelm was nearly 21. He said that in the Guards he "really found my family, my friends, my interests". The polite student began to strut and bark like a Prussian officer. In later life he was seldom seen out of uniform.

  His parents tried to educate him in a spirit of British liberalism. He resisted, absorbing instead his tutors' faith in autocratic rule, and he came to suspect his parents of putting Britain first. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck encouraged the split, hoping to use the young prince as a weapon against them. By April 1889 Wilhelm was shouting that "an English doctor killed my father, and an English doctor crippled my arm". He blamed his mother for the second of those.

  His private life ran on a separate track. His cousin Princess Elisabeth of Hesse-Darmstadt turned him down and married into the Russian imperial family. In 1880 he became engaged to Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, known as "Dona". They married on the 27th of February 1881, and the marriage lasted 40 years until her death in 1921. Between 1882 and 1892 she bore him six sons and a daughter. In 1884, at Bismarck's urging, Wilhelm was sent to St. Petersburg for the coming-of-age ceremony of the 16-year-old Tsarevich Nicholas, where his behaviour did little to win over the tsar.

  8281859577

• 4. Bismarck and the New Course

  ›

  Kaiser Wilhelm I died in Berlin on the 9th of March 1888, and the throne passed to Frederick III. Frederick was already dying of incurable throat cancer, and he spent all 99 days of his reign fighting it. On the 15th of June 1888, his 29-year-old son became German Emperor and King of Prussia. Wilhelm had once admired Bismarck greatly. His impatience soon brought them into conflict.

  The new Emperor meant to rule as well as reign. The imperial constitution gave executive power to the monarch, but his grandfather had left daily administration to Bismarck. Bismarck assumed that Wilhelm was a lightweight who could be dominated. Wilhelm disliked the chancellor's careful foreign policy and wanted vigorous, rapid expansion to secure Germany's "place in the sun".

  The trigger was a domestic fight in early 1890 over making the anti-Socialist laws permanent. Bismarck's coalition, the Kartell, wanted police to expel alleged Socialist agitators from their homes by decree. Even the liberal Eugen Richter said, "I fear Social Democracy more under this law than without it". The Kartell split and the law failed. Meanwhile Wilhelm had grown interested in the grievances of the mine workers who struck in 1889. Bismarck refused to co-sign a proclamation on protecting industrial workers, and so blocked it.

  The final break came when Bismarck opened coalition talks with the all-Catholic Centre Party without telling the Kaiser. He had invited its leader, Baron Ludwig von Windthorst, to negotiate, only a decade after branding Catholics enemies of the Empire during the Kulturkampf. Wilhelm, who had a warm relationship with Windthorst, was furious. After a heated argument at Bismarck's estate, he stormed out. Bismarck then wrote a blistering letter of resignation attacking the monarchy's involvement in policy. It was published only after his death.

  Bismarck's admirers later built what became known as the "Bismarck myth". It held that dismissing him destroyed any chance of stable government and peace, and that Russia soon allied with France as a result. Bismarck himself had complained, "That young man wants war with Russia, and would like to draw his sword straight away if he could." The historian Modris Eksteins argued the dismissal was long overdue, because Bismarck had demonised liberals, Catholics and Socialists in turn with the refrain "The Reich is in danger". Wilhelm's grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand, agreed that Bismarck was "certainly our greatest statesman" but had grown overbearing with age.

  Leo von Caprivi became chancellor, and on the 6th of May 1890 the Kaiser told the Reichstag that protecting labourers was the most pressing issue. In 1891 the Reichstag passed the Workers Protection Acts, which improved conditions, protected women and children and regulated labour relations. Caprivi gave way to Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst in 1894, and in 1900 Wilhelm chose Bernhard von Bülow, whom he called "his own Bismarck". These chancellors were civil servants rather than seasoned statesmen. Wilhelm wanted no repeat of a man he remembered as "a boorish old killjoy".

  Wilhelm also backed science and schooling. He sponsored the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, a network of research institutes funded by wealthy donors and the state. A gift from him in 1900 pressured the Prussian Academy of Sciences into adding engineering programs and fellowships. He supported modernisers trying to reform Prussia's rigid, elitist secondary schools. As hereditary Protector of the Order of Saint John, he encouraged its hospitals and nursing schools, and he kept that role after 1918 because it passed with the headship of the House of Hohenzollern.

  56829699

• 5. Temperament and Family

  ›

  The historian Thomas Nipperdey described Wilhelm as gifted, quick and sometimes brilliant, with a taste for technology, industry and science. In the same breath he called him superficial, hasty and unable to relax, and "desperate for applause and success". Nipperdey added that Bismarck had said early on that Wilhelm wanted every day to be his birthday. In his view, the Kaiser was also sentimental, theatrical and never lost the tone of the officers' mess.

  David Fromkin saw a love-hate bond with Britain. He wrote that Wilhelm was "wildly jealous of the British, desiring to be British and to be better at being British than the British were". At the same time, Fromkin said, Wilhelm hated them because they would never fully accept him. Langer and his co-authors judged that Wilhelm lacked stability and hid his insecurity behind "swagger and tough talk". They noted that he often fell into depressions and hysterics, and cared more about asserting his will than about winning specific goals.

  Family made this tension personal. As a grandchild of Queen Victoria, he was a first cousin of King George V and of the queens Marie of Romania, Maud of Norway and Victoria Eugenie of Spain, as well as Empress Alexandra of Russia. His uncle Bertie, the future Edward VII, treated him as just another nephew, and Wilhelm called him "the old peacock". From the 1890s they raced yachts against each other at Cowes Week on the Isle of Wight. Bertie's wife Alexandra still resented the Prussian seizure of Schleswig-Holstein from her native Denmark.

  Still, in January 1901 Wilhelm went to Osborne House and stood at Queen Victoria's bedside when she died. He stayed for the funeral, and he attended Edward VII's in 1910. His sister Sophia married Constantine, Crown Prince of Greece, in 1889. When she converted from Lutheranism to Greek Orthodoxy, he tried to ban her from Germany. In 1913 he hosted a lavish wedding in Berlin for his only daughter, Victoria Louise, with Tsar Nicholas II and King George V among the guests. Her marriage to the Duke of Brunswick helped heal the rift between the Hanover and Hohenzollern houses that followed the annexation of Hanover in 1866.

  On the 6th of March 1901, in Bremen, something struck Wilhelm in the face as his coach rode to the railway station at 10:10 pm. It proved to be a fishplate, thrown by Johann-Dietrich Weiland, who was judged insane. The object cut a wound an inch and a half long below his left eye. The Chief of the Naval Ministry noted that a blow to the temple or the eye could have been devastating. Wilhelm had not felt it and, in the rain, had not noticed the blood until others pointed it out. At the end of the month he told an audience that "nothing is more false than to pretend that my sanity has suffered in some way".

  Between 1906 and 1909 the Socialist journalist Maximilian Harden published accusations of homosexual activity involving ministers, courtiers, army officers and Wilhelm's closest friend and advisor, Prince Philipp zu Eulenberg. Homosexuality was a criminal offence in Germany, and the mere accusation could bring social ruin. The robust coverage meant, in Robert K. Massie's words, years of scandals, trials, resignations and suicides. The affair brought on a nervous breakdown in Wilhelm, and Eulenberg and others of his circle were removed from court. Scholars increasingly judge that Wilhelm was a deeply repressed homosexual or bisexual who never came to terms with the romantic side of his feelings for Eulenberg. Harden, like some in the military and Foreign Office, resented Eulenberg for approving of the Anglo-French Entente and for urging Wilhelm to rule personally.

  8189102324

• 6. Words Abroad

  ›

  In 1896 Wilhelm sent what became known as the Kruger telegram, congratulating President Paul Kruger for preventing the Transvaal Republic from being annexed by Britain during the Jameson Raid. British opinion of the Kaiser, quite favourable in his first twelve years on the throne, turned sour in the late 1890s. During the First World War he became the central target of British anti-German propaganda.

  On the 16th of October 1898, Wilhelm reached Constantinople as the guest of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He travelled on by yacht to Haifa, visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and reached Damascus on the 7th of November. At the Mausoleum of Saladin the next day, he praised Saladin as a knight "sans peur et sans reproche". He assured the Sultan and the Muslims who revered him as caliph that "the German Emperor will be and remain at all times their friend". An earlier visit in 1889 had won the sale of German-made rifles to the Ottoman Army. The 1898 trip secured a promise that German companies would build the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and a German Fountain in Constantinople commemorates it.

  In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion in China was put down by the Eight-Nation Alliance. Wilhelm's farewell address to departing German soldiers urged them to be merciless. He told them that "no quarter will be given" and that prisoners would not be taken. The Foreign Office, embarrassed, issued an edited text. It cut one incendiary paragraph that compared the troops to the Huns under King Attila, from which the speech takes its name. The word "Hun" later became a favoured insult in Allied propaganda during the First World War.

  Wilhelm invested in colonies in Africa and the Pacific, but few turned a profit and all were lost in the First World War. In South West Africa, now Namibia, a revolt against German rule led to the Herero and Nama genocide. Wilhelm eventually ordered it stopped and recalled its mastermind, General Lothar von Trotha. He also tried to stir fear of a "yellow peril", urging other European rulers to see the dangers of invading China. Few paid attention, and after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War he warned that a resurgent Japan might ally with China.

  On the 31st of March 1905, Wilhelm rode through Tangier on a white horse. He met representatives of Sultan Abdelaziz of Morocco and declared that he had come to support the Sultan's sovereignty. This challenged French influence in the country. The Sultan rejected French-proposed reforms and invited the powers to a conference, and the resulting Algeciras Conference left Germany more isolated in Europe.

  In 1908 the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an article drawn from Wilhelm's talks with Colonel Edward Stuart-Wortley in 1907. Wilhelm had hoped it would promote friendship with Britain. Instead he claimed he was among the minority of Germans friendly to Britain, and that the German naval buildup was aimed at the Japanese. He told the English they were "mad, mad, mad as March hares". The remarks angered the British, French, Russians and Japanese alike, and in Germany there were serious calls to limit the emperor's powers. Wilhelm fell into a severe depression and, in July 1909, forced the resignation of Bülow, whose defence of him in the Reichstag had mainly shifted blame away from himself. After the scandal he had less influence for the rest of his reign. One rare success in personal diplomacy had come in 1900, when he helped end Emperor Franz Joseph's opposition to the marriage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophie Chotek.

  1618191213

• 7. Fleet and War

  ›

  Wilhelm once confided to his uncle, the Prince of Wales, that his dream was to have a "fleet of my own some day". He had inherited a love of the British Royal Navy from his mother. Two humiliations pushed him to act: his fleet's poor showing at the Fleet Review for his grandmother's Diamond Jubilee, and his failure to gain influence in South Africa after the Kruger telegram. In 1897 he appointed Alfred von Tirpitz to head the Imperial Naval Office. Tirpitz's "Risk Theory" held that a powerful battlefleet in the North Sea could force Britain to bend to German demands.

  Wilhelm backed the naval bills of 1897 and 1900 and ordered his high command to read Alfred Thayer Mahan's book The Influence of Sea Power upon History. He spent hours sketching the ships he dreamed of building. By 1906 he had committed to the larger, costlier dreadnought type, and the strain on German finances was severe by 1914. Britain relied on naval superiority, and its answer was to make Germany its most feared enemy. The Kiel Canal, opened in 1895, had meanwhile sped movement between the North Sea and the Baltic.

  On the 28th of June 1914, Franz Ferdinand, a friend of Wilhelm, was assassinated. The Kaiser was deeply shocked. He offered to support Austria-Hungary against the secret organisation behind the plot and sanctioned force against Serbia, a promise often called the "blank cheque". He wanted to stay in Berlin until the crisis passed, but courtiers persuaded him to go on his annual North Sea cruise on the 6th of July. He reached Berlin on the 28th of July and read the Serbian reply. He wrote on it that it was "a great moral victory for Vienna" and that every pretext for war had fallen away.

  By then he was too late. Austro-Hungarian ministers and generals had already persuaded the 83-year-old Franz Joseph to sign a declaration of war on Serbia. Russia began a general mobilisation in response. On the night of the 30th of July, handed word that Russia would not cancel it, Wilhelm filled the margins with fury. He concluded that England, Russia and France had agreed to use the Austro-Serb conflict as a pretext for "a war of annihilation against us".

  When it became clear that Germany would fight on two fronts and that Britain would enter the war if Germany invaded France through Belgium, a panicking Wilhelm tried to turn the main attack against Russia. Helmuth von Moltke, who had chosen the old plan drawn up by General von Schlieffen, told him this was impossible. Wilhelm answered, "Your uncle would have given me a different answer!" He is also reported to have said, "If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it."

  On the 19th of August 1914, he predicted victory. Soon his role shrank to parades and awarding honours, and one description calls him a "shadow Kaiser", out of sight and relegated to the sidelines. By 1916 the Empire was effectively a military dictatorship under Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff. Wilhelm swung between defeatism and dreams of victory depending on the armies' fortunes. He still held the final say on appointments. He approved replacing Moltke with Erich von Falkenhayn in September 1914, and in 1917 he accepted Ludendorff's suggestion of Georg Michaelis as chancellor, a man Ludendorff barely knew. When George V renamed the British royal house Windsor, Wilhelm joked that he would see Shakespeare's play "The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha". In the autumn of 1918 President Woodrow Wilson made clear that the monarchy had to go before the war could end.

  9480259127

• 8. Exile at Doorn

  ›

  At the Imperial Army headquarters in Spa, Belgium, uprisings in Berlin and elsewhere took Wilhelm by surprise in late 1918. The mutiny in his beloved imperial navy shocked him deeply. He could not decide whether to abdicate, and hoped to keep the Prussian crown even if he lost the imperial one. That was impossible, because the constitution tied the two together. On the 9th of November 1918, Chancellor Prince Max of Baden announced the abdication of both titles, and Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic the same day. General Wilhelm Groener told Wilhelm that the army would march home in good order but would not fight for his throne. Hindenburg, a lifelong monarchist, advised him to give up the crown. On the 10th of November, Wilhelm crossed the border by train into the neutral Netherlands.

  Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles provided for his prosecution "for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties". The Dutch government refused to extradite him. George V privately called his cousin "the greatest criminal in history" yet opposed David Lloyd George's idea to "hang the Kaiser". London expected Holland to refuse, and the request was reportedly meant to save the face of politicians. President Woodrow Wilson also opposed extradition, fearing it would destabilise international order.

  On the 28th of November 1918, at Amerongen, Wilhelm issued a belated formal abdication from both thrones and released his soldiers and officials from their oaths. He bought a country house at Doorn, known as Huis Doorn, and moved in on the 15th of May 1920. It stayed his home for the rest of his life. The Weimar Republic let him remove twenty-three railway wagons of furniture and twenty-seven of packages from the New Palace at Potsdam, plus a car and a boat. Reports said at least 60 wagons carried his furniture, art, porcelain and silver. He had been seen as the richest man in Germany before 1914.

  In 1922 he published the first volume of his memoirs, a slim book insisting he was not guilty of starting the Great War. He grew a beard and let his moustache droop, much like his cousins George V and Nicholas II. He learned Dutch. He kept up the archaeology he had begun at the Achilleion on Corfu, where he excavated at the Temple of Artemis. He hunted thousands of animals and chopped down thousands of trees, and when bored he sketched plans for grand buildings and battleships.

  In the early 1930s Wilhelm hoped Nazi successes might revive interest in a Hohenzollern restoration, with his eldest grandson as Kaiser. His second wife, Hermine, petitioned the Nazi government for him. Hitler, who blamed the old Kaiser for Germany's greatest defeat, felt nothing but contempt and ignored the petitions. Wilhelm hosted Hermann Göring at Doorn at least once but came to distrust Hitler. After the Night of the Long Knives he said, "We have ceased to live under the rule of law." After Kristallnacht on the 9th and the 10th of November 1938, he called the attacks gangsterism and said, "For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German".

  Yet he did not stay consistent. When the Netherlands surrendered in May 1940, Wilhelm telegraphed Hitler to hope that "under your marvellous leadership the German monarchy will be restored completely". Hitler remarked to his valet Heinz Linge, "What an idiot!" A month later, on the fall of Paris, Wilhelm sent another telegram congratulating Hitler and the German armed forces. He died on the 4th of June 1941, in a country still occupied by the Germany whose triumphs he had once cheered.

  7631323435