The death of Wilhelm II

On 4 June 1941, at about half past twelve, the former German Emperor and King of Prussia Wilhelm II died at Huis Doorn, his estate at Doorn in the Dutch province of Utrecht. He was 82. The cause of death was a pulmonary embolism. The man who had led Germany into the Great War in 1914 and lost his throne in November 1918 had lived in exile for more than twenty-two years – long enough to see his country under Adolf Hitler unleash the Second World War and German troops occupy the country that had given him refuge. He died less than three weeks before the German attack on the Soviet Union, in a Holland occupied by the Third Reich, guarded by German soldiers standing at the gate of his park.

More remarkable than the death in exile itself, however, was what followed: a dispute over the funeral in which the dead monarch defied Hitler one last time, and a ceremony at which the old Empire and the new Reich met over a single coffin.

The last months

Wilhelm II had lived in the Netherlands since 10 November 1918, when, after the outbreak of revolution and on the eve of the Armistice of Compiègne, he crossed the border from Spa in Belgium. For the first year and a half he was a guest at the castle of Amerongen, where on 28 November 1918 he formally renounced both his crowns, and in May 1920 he moved to the estate in nearby Doorn that he had bought the year before. The Netherlands refused to hand him over to the Allies as a war criminal, but in return obliged him to keep out of politics; he could move freely only within a radius of a few kilometres of his home. For more than twenty years Queen Wilhelmina avoided all contact with him.

On 10 May 1940 Germany attacked the Netherlands. The old man turned down an offer of asylum in Britain made to him in the first days of the invasion: he wished to meet whatever awaited him at Doorn. Wilhelmina and the government left for London, and at his gate German soldiers appeared as early as 14 May bearing a letter from Hitler, who ordered a guard of the Secret Field Police to be posted at the estate. The former Emperor was treated with respect, but he could leave Doorn only briefly and under escort. He never again set foot on German soil.

According to those around him, on 1 March 1941 he collapsed while engaged in his favourite pastime, chopping wood in the park. He soon recovered, however, and the children who had gathered at Doorn went home in May; only his only daughter, Viktoria Luise, Duchess of Brunswick, remained. Towards the evening of 3 June Wilhelm II was suddenly seized by severe pain and began to choke. His condition deteriorated rapidly; in the evening he lost consciousness and never regained it. He died the following day in the presence of his daughter, his second wife Hermine Reuss, and his aide-de-camp Sigurd von Ilsemann, who since 1918 had kept a diary of the exile, one of the most important sources for those years.

The dispute over the funeral

The news from Doorn faced the authorities of the Third Reich with an awkward choice. Hitler despised Wilhelm II, whom he blamed for the defeat of 1918 and for fleeing the country in its hour of trial. At the same time he understood the power of symbols. According to accounts from his circle, he wanted to bring the body back to Germany and hold a grand state funeral in Berlin or Potsdam, at which he himself would appear as heir to the Reich’s former greatness – demonstrating the continuity between the Empire and the National Socialist state on the eve of the greatest war Germany had ever waged.

The obstacle was the dead man’s own will. In his testament of 1933 Wilhelm II had laid down that if the monarchy had not been restored in Germany at the time of his death, he was to be buried at Doorn, and that his remains might return home only when Germany was once again a monarchy. He also prescribed a funeral in the smallest possible circle, without funeral orations, wreaths or flags – which in practice meant, above all, no swastika flags. The Reich authorities respected the Emperor’s wishes only as to the place of burial. At the same time they banned memorial services in Germany, and the press was to report the former monarch’s death with restraint. Only the closest family and a small group of former officers were allowed to travel to occupied Holland.

This caution is easy to understand. A year earlier, in May 1940, the Emperor’s eldest grandson, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, had been killed in the French campaign. Although the press and radio passed over his death in silence, according to German studies more than 50,000 people came to his funeral in Potsdam on 29 May 1940, lining the route in silence between the Church of Peace and the tomb of Empress Augusta Victoria in the park of Sanssouci. It was the largest unorganised demonstration in the whole history of Hitler’s rule. Alarmed, the Führer soon afterwards issued a secret order, which historians call the “Prinzenerlass”, removing princes of the former ruling houses from front-line service. A grand funeral for the Emperor himself in the heart of Prussia could have become an even greater demonstration.

The ceremony at Doorn

The funeral took place at Doorn on 9 June 1941. According to various accounts, several hundred people attended. The coffin, which had previously lain in state in the house, was accompanied by the dead man’s sons and grandsons, led by the former Crown Prince, Wilhelm, as well as by his daughter and Hermine. The most conspicuous figure was the ninety-one-year-old Field Marshal August von Mackensen, one of the last surviving commanders of the Great War, in the uniform of the imperial-era Hussars.

Beside the past, however, stood the present. Representatives of the occupation authorities came to the funeral: the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and the commander of the Wehrmacht in the Netherlands, General Friedrich Christiansen, as well as the head of military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and General Curt Haase. Wehrmacht detachments took part in the ceremony, and at the end, in accordance with the dead man’s wishes, a military band played the hymn “Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe”, the traditional prayer of the Prussian Grand Tattoo. Hitler did not come and did not send any of the party’s top dignitaries, but he did send a large wreath. Its ribbons and the flags at the ceremony bore swastikas – against the dead man’s express wishes. All this was recorded by a Dutch photographer who, despite the tight security, managed to photograph the ceremony.

Wilhelm II was laid to rest first in the chapel by the gate of the estate; three handfuls of earth brought from Potsdam, from near the tomb of Empress Augusta Victoria, were scattered on the coffin. A year later, on 4 June 1942, it was moved to a small neoclassical mausoleum in the park at Doorn, built to the Emperor’s own sketches. The coffin stands there to this day, above ground, awaiting the return to Germany that his testament made conditional on the restoration of the monarchy.

The Emperor and National Socialism

Wilhelm II’s attitude to the Nazis was ambiguous and is still judged in different ways. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, which he hated, he hoped that Hitler’s movement would pave the way for a Hohenzollern restoration. Hermann Göring visited Doorn twice, in 1931 and 1932; the Emperor’s second wife courted the new rulers; and his fourth son, August Wilhelm, known as Auwi, joined the NSDAP and became a senior SA officer. Disillusionment came quickly. According to Ilsemann’s diary, Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 23 March 1933, in which the new Chancellor made it clear that restoring the monarchy was not on the agenda, struck the Emperor like a blow. After the Night of the Long Knives, in which General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were among those killed, Wilhelm II is said to have remarked that Germany had ceased to be a state governed by law. In letters written after Kristallnacht he called the pogrom “gangsterism”, though he did not condemn it publicly; the widely quoted sentence that he was “for the first time ashamed to be a German” comes from an interview whose authenticity some historians, such as Stephan Malinowski, question.

This criticism did not stem from a rejection of the ideology. After 1918 Wilhelm II embraced extreme antisemitism as an explanation for his own fall, and in letters of 1940–1941 he wrote of “Judah the Antichrist”, from whom England had to be “liberated”, and of a Europe united under German leadership. He greeted the Wehrmacht’s victories with enthusiasm. On 17 June 1940, when France asked for an armistice, he sent Hitler a telegram congratulating him on the “mighty victory granted by God”, and in other letters he credited the generals’ successes to the schooling they had received under his reign. According to the memoirs of Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge, the Führer dismissed one such telegram with the words “What an idiot”. The armistice for which the Emperor gave thanks was, moreover, signed on 22 June 1940 in the same railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne in which Germany had accepted the Allies’ terms in November 1918 – Hitler deliberately reversed the humiliation for which he blamed none other than imperial Germany.

Place in the war

The death of Wilhelm II did not alter the course of the war, and in June 1941 it passed almost unnoticed; the world’s attention was absorbed by Crete, the Middle East and rumours of German troops massing in the east. It did, however, carry symbolic weight. The last monarch under whose reign Germany had entered the First World War died just as the Third Reich was preparing the blow meant to settle what the imperial army had failed to settle in the east in 1914–1918. The funeral at Doorn also showed a line Hitler had no intention of crossing: he was happy to draw on the prestige of the old army, its field marshals and the Prussian tradition, but he wanted no rival focus of loyalty. Monarchism, which had already weakened in Germany after the Emperor’s flight in 1918, did not become a force capable of standing up to the dictatorship, and the Hohenzollerns, although some of them gradually turned away from the regime, did not act against it as a family. Some figures from the old world, such as the Emperor’s grandson Louis Ferdinand, later maintained contacts with the opposition circles that tried to kill Hitler in July 1944.

After the war the Dutch government confiscated Huis Doorn as enemy property – partly because the congratulations sent to Hitler from the soil that had given the Emperor asylum had been regarded in London as an act of ingratitude. The estate is now a museum, while the mausoleum has remained the property of the Hohenzollern family. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, German monarchists gather there. The remains of the last Emperor still wait in the Netherlands for the condition he laid down in his testament, which has never been fulfilled.