Wilhelm II

Biography

On the night of 27 January 1859, in the Crown Prince’s Palace in Berlin, Princess Victoria’s labour went on for many hours. The child lay in the breech position, the pulse in the umbilical cord had almost vanished, and the newborn had to be drawn out with the aid of chloroform. He was not breathing, and the midwife, against protocol, slapped him until a weak cry came.

His left arm remained about fifteen centimetres shorter than the right. Later he tried to hide this in photographs.

The prince was the eldest son of Prince Frederick William of Prussia (the future Frederick III) and Victoria, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, and the eldest of her forty-two grandchildren. Attempts were made to treat the arm with electricity and daily sea-water baths; the torticollis was later corrected by an operation. His mother insisted that he become a good rider, and the eight-year-old was put on a horse again and again, though he fell and wept. From 1866 he was brought up by a strict tutor, Georg Ernst Hinzpeter. At ten the prince was formally enrolled in the 1st Foot Guards. In 1874–1877 he attended the gymnasium in Kassel alongside the sons of townsmen; after his final examination in January 1877 he began active service, then studied law and politics for four terms at the University of Bonn and joined the student corps Borussia. Among the Guards at Potsdam he found, in his own words, “my family, my friends, my interests”. In 1881 he married Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein. He grew apart from his parents, who held liberal views, and Bismarck took advantage of this.

His father, who had throat cancer, reigned for ninety-nine days and died on 15 June 1888. Wilhelm, aged twenty-nine, became German Emperor and King of Prussia. He wanted to rule in person rather than leave affairs to the chancellor, as his grandfather had done. The quarrel with Bismarck concerned the socialists, the alliance with Russia and the position of the workers: in 1889 the emperor refused to send troops against striking miners, and in February 1890 he issued rescripts on the protection of labour. Bismarck offered his resignation, which Wilhelm accepted on 20 March 1890. The chancellors who followed, Caprivi, Hohenlohe and Bülow, were above all civil servants. Caprivi repealed the anti-socialist law, and an international conference on labour protection met in Berlin in March 1890.

The navy took most of the emperor’s energy. He made the high command read Mahan, spent hours sketching the ships he dreamed of, and in 1897 put Alfred von Tirpitz at the head of the Imperial Naval Office. The naval laws of 1898 and 1900 began an arms race with Britain, which London took as a challenge. Colonial policy in Africa and the Pacific went on alongside. In South West Africa, the Herero and Nama uprising ended in genocide; Wilhelm eventually ordered it stopped and recalled General Lothar von Trotha.

His speeches and interviews more than once led to diplomatic crises. There was the Kruger telegram (1896), the “Hun speech” to troops leaving for China (1900), the visit to Tangier in March 1905 that set off the First Moroccan Crisis, and the interview in the Daily Telegraph (1908), after which members of the Reichstag began to speak of limiting the emperor’s powers. In 1898 he visited Constantinople, Jerusalem and Damascus and promised to be a friend to “three hundred million Mohammedans”. Germany later received a promise to build the Baghdad Railway. His interests were wide: hunting, sea cruises to the coast of Norway, excavations on Corfu, painting, music. He patronised science and founded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.

He met the crisis of 1914 as a man unable to restrain himself. After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June, Wilhelm assured the Austrian ambassador on 5 July of Germany’s support. When he read the Serbian reply, he wrote on it that the pretext for war had fallen away, but it was too late. He exchanged telegrams with Nicholas II, whom he called “Nicky”, and when Britain entered the war he said that “George and Nicky” had played him false. His headquarters were at Pless, but from 1915 command had in effect passed to Hindenburg and Ludendorff. By 1916 the emperor had become a “shadow Kaiser”, occupied with parades and the presentation of honours.

In the autumn of 1918 Woodrow Wilson made it plain that peace with the emperor was impossible. At Spa, at the German headquarters in Belgium, the November Revolution overtook Wilhelm. On 9 November Chancellor Max von Baden announced the abdication without asking his consent, and Wilhelm gave way only after General Wilhelm Groener reported that the army would not fight for him. On 10 November he crossed the Dutch border, and on 28 November he formally abdicated both thrones. The Treaty of Versailles provided for his trial for a breach of the peace, but Queen Wilhelmina refused to surrender him.

He lived first at Amerongen and from August 1919 at the castle of Doorn. His first wife died in 1921, and in 1922 he married Hermine Reuss. He wrote memoirs and works on history and archaeology and corresponded with Hindenburg; in 1926 the Prussian Landtag returned his landed estates to him. In November 1938, as recorded in his recollections, he called the anti-Jewish pogroms “banditry” and said that for the first time in a long while he was ashamed to be a German. In 1940, after the occupation of the Netherlands, he stayed at Doorn and lived practically under house arrest; the property of the Hohenzollerns in the country was nationalised. He died on 4 June 1941 at the age of eighty-two. Hitler ordered a funeral with military honours but did not attend himself. Wilhelm was buried in a mausoleum in the grounds of Doorn.