Kaiser Wilhelm II

Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert of Prussia was born on January 27, 1859, at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, the first child of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia and Princess Victoria, eldest daughter of Britain's Queen Victoria ^[1]. The delivery was traumatic. A breech birth left the infant with a withered left arm, a condition now generally identified as Erb's palsy, which remained with him for life and which he worked hard to conceal in photographs and public appearances ^[2].

His parents held liberal, pro-British views and hoped to raise a constitutional monarch on the English model. The boy's education pulled in a different direction. From 1866 his tutor Georg Hinzpeter imposed a severe Calvinist regime of study and physical discipline, including painful riding lessons intended to overcome the disability ^[2]. Wilhelm attended the gymnasium at Kassel and later studied law and politics at the University of Bonn, an unusual step for a Prussian prince, before joining the First Regiment of Foot Guards at Potsdam ^[1].

Army life suited him far better than the schoolroom. The young prince absorbed the conservative, militarist ethos of the Prussian officer corps and drifted away from his parents, whose liberalism he came to regard with suspicion. His grandfather Emperor Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck encouraged the estrangement, seeing in the prince a more pliable heir than his father ^[3].

The year 1888 became known in Germany as the Year of the Three Emperors. Wilhelm I died in March at the age of ninety. His son succeeded as Frederick III but was already dying of throat cancer and reigned for only ninety-nine days. On June 15, 1888, the twenty-nine year old Wilhelm became German Emperor and King of Prussia ^[1].

The new Kaiser quickly collided with the man who had built the empire. Bismarck, chancellor since 1871, expected to manage the young monarch as he had managed the old one. Wilhelm instead intended to rule personally. The two clashed over social policy toward German workers, over the anti-socialist laws, and over the chancellor's right to control ministerial access to the throne. In March 1890 Bismarck was forced to resign ^[3]. The dismissal, famously caricatured in Punch as "Dropping the Pilot", opened what historians call Wilhelm's period of personal rule.

One early consequence proved momentous. Wilhelm's government declined to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890, a decision that helped push St Petersburg toward alliance with France and began the encirclement Germany would later complain of ^[4]. The Kaiser's foreign policy instincts, a blend of admiration and resentment toward Britain in particular, would shape the next quarter century.

Wilhelm announced that Germany must pursue Weltpolitik, a world policy befitting a great industrial power. Under his patronage, and with Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz directing the program, the Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900 launched the construction of a battle fleet openly designed to challenge British naval supremacy ^[4]. The buildup poisoned Anglo-German relations and contributed directly to Britain's ententes with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907 ^[3].

His reign also brought colonial expansion in Africa, the Pacific, and China, along with episodes that damaged Germany's standing abroad. The Kruger telegram of 1896, congratulating the Transvaal president after the failed Jameson Raid, outraged British opinion. His 1905 landing at Tangier provoked the First Moroccan Crisis. In 1908 the Daily Telegraph published an interview in which Wilhelm's tactless remarks about Britain caused a storm in both countries and forced the Kaiser to promise greater restraint, a promise that marked a real reduction in his personal influence over policy ^[5].

Domestically the Wilhelmine era was one of extraordinary dynamism. Germany overtook Britain in steel production, led the world in chemistry and electrical engineering, and expanded its universities and cities at remarkable speed ^[4]. Wilhelm took genuine interest in technology and science, supporting the founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science in 1911, the forerunner of today's Max Planck Society ^[6]. Any fair account of Kaiser Wilhelm II achievements has to weigh this patronage of research and industry against the diplomatic wreckage his impulsiveness left behind.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo in June 1914, Wilhelm assured Austria-Hungary of German support, the so-called blank cheque that emboldened Vienna against Serbia ^[3]. During the July Crisis he wavered, at one point believing a negotiated outcome possible, but the machinery of mobilization and the war plans of his generals ran ahead of him. On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia, and the continent slid into general war ^[4].

Allied propaganda made the Kaiser the war's central villain, yet his actual wartime role shrank steadily. Supreme command belonged to him on paper, but real authority passed to the General Staff, and from August 1916 Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff exercised something close to a military dictatorship, with Wilhelm reduced to a figurehead who signed what was placed before him ^[5]. He endorsed unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the decision that brought the United States into the war.

By the autumn of 1918 the German army was beaten and revolution was spreading through the fleet and the cities. On November 9, 1918, Chancellor Max von Baden announced the Kaiser's abdication before Wilhelm had actually agreed to it, and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. The following day Wilhelm crossed the border into the neutral Netherlands, and on November 28 he signed a formal act of abdication, ending the Hohenzollern monarchy and the German Empire itself ^[1].

In 1881 Wilhelm married Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, known in the family as Dona. The marriage produced seven children, six sons and a daughter, and lasted until the Empress's death in exile in 1921 ^[1]. The following year the sixty-three year old former Kaiser married Princess Hermine Reuss of Greiz, a widow thirty years his junior, who remained with him until his death.

Wilhelm was a man of restless, contradictory enthusiasms. He designed warships and uniforms, delivered speeches at a rate no adviser could control, and traveled so constantly aboard his yacht and imperial train that Berliners called him the Reisekaiser, the travelling emperor. He painted, collected art and antiquities, and in exile wrote memoirs and studies of archaeology, sponsoring excavations at Corfu, where he owned the Achilleion palace ^[2].

His relationships were as tangled as his politics. He revered his grandmother Queen Victoria and was present at her deathbed in 1901, yet his feelings toward Britain oscillated between longing and hostility. His closest friendship, with the diplomat Philipp zu Eulenburg, ended in scandal when Eulenburg was accused of homosexuality in a series of trials from 1907 that embarrassed the court ^[5]. Biographers from Michael Balfour to John Röhl have debated how far Wilhelm's damaged arm, his harsh upbringing, and his craving for approval explain the bombast that so often undermined his own aims ^[2].

The Treaty of Versailles named Wilhelm personally in Article 227, which called for his trial before an international tribunal for a supreme offence against international morality. The Dutch government of Queen Wilhelmina refused every extradition request, and the trial never took place ^[3]. In 1920 the former Kaiser purchased Huis Doorn, a small manor house near Utrecht, where he settled with a reduced household and dozens of railway wagons of furniture and art shipped from his Berlin and Potsdam palaces ^[7].

Exile settled into routine. Wilhelm chopped wood by the thousand of logs, fed the ducks, read, and received a thinning stream of visitors. He published memoirs in 1922 that blamed nearly everyone but himself for the catastrophe of 1918. His hopes of restoration flickered when the Nazis rose to power, and two of his sons flirted with the movement, but Adolf Hitler had no use for the Hohenzollerns and the old man's letters and table talk grew bitterly contemptuous of the regime, even as his private writings continued to express the antisemitism that had marked his outlook for decades ^[5].

Wilhelm lived long enough to see German troops overrun the Netherlands in May 1940. Winston Churchill offered him asylum in England; he declined, preferring to die at Doorn. Death came on June 4, 1941, from a pulmonary embolism, at the age of eighty-two. On his instructions he was buried at Huis Doorn rather than in a Germany that was not a monarchy, and he asked that no swastikas appear at his funeral, a wish the attending German authorities did not fully honor ^[7].

Few modern rulers have been argued over as fiercely. Early historians, and Allied opinion in 1919, cast Wilhelm as the chief author of the First World War. Later scholarship shifted blame toward Germany's military and civilian elites, portraying the Kaiser as a shadow emperor whose influence on decisions was smaller than his rhetoric suggested. The monumental three-volume biography by John C. G. Röhl swung the pendulum back, arguing that Wilhelm's personality and his court shaped German policy far more than apologists allowed ^[2].

What is not disputed is the scale of what ended with him. The abdication of November 1918 closed five centuries of Hohenzollern rule in Brandenburg and Prussia and dissolved the German Empire founded in 1871. The naval race he sponsored, the alliances his diplomacy alienated, and the war fought in his name redrew the map of Europe and set the conditions for the disasters that followed ^[3].

His physical legacy survives in unexpected places. Huis Doorn is now a Dutch national museum preserving his exile household exactly as he left it ^[7]. The research society that bore his name continues as the Max Planck Society, one of the world's leading scientific organizations ^[6]. For students weighing Kaiser Wilhelm II facts, the essential ones remain stark: a reign of thirty years, a war that killed millions, and a Kaiser Wilhelm II biography that reads as a study in how temperament and unchecked power can combine to unmake an empire.