Wilhelm II and the family on nine thrones, 1914

01Windsor and Copenhagen

Two grandparents put their families on most of Europe’s thrones

Queen Victoria (1819–1901) is the grandmother of this story through five of her children; Christian IX of Denmark (1818–1906), through four of his. By 1914, eight of Victoria’s grandchildren and six of Christian’s sat on or beside a throne.

Two of them belonged to both families: George V of Britain and his sister Maud, Queen of Norway, children of Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark. Only two of the fourteen, Ferdinand of Romania and Alfonso XIII of Spain, descended from neither house, and both had married Victoria’s granddaughters.

A large painted group of a royal family in a gilded drawing room, an elderly queen in black seated at the centre. — Queen Victoria in the Green Drawing Room at Windsor, surrounded by her family, painted by Laurits Tuxen in 1887.Painting: Laurits Tuxen, 1887. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A painted group of a royal family in a white garden hall, men in uniform and women in long gowns. — Christian IX of Denmark with his family of European royalty in the garden hall at Fredensborg Palace, painted by Laurits Tuxen, 1883–86.Painting: Laurits Tuxen, 1883–86. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Read across the four and the argument makes itself: the lines of the family and the lines of the war are different lines.

The fourteen, 1 August 1914

Nine men in military dress uniform, six standing and three seated, in a panelled room at Windsor Castle. — W. & D. Downey, 1910. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

1 August 1914

Fourteen people, nine thrones

On the day Germany declared war on Russia, these were the kings, queens, emperors and empresses of nine European countries, with Romania’s heirs, who came to the throne that October. The same people sit in the same places through every step below. Only the lines change.

Head-and-shoulders photograph of a young man with an upturned moustache in uniform. — Viktor Scheurich, 1888. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Queen Victoria’s grandchildren

Eight were Victoria’s grandchildren

Her lines run through five of her children, from Wilhelm II in Berlin to Ena, Victoria Eugenie, Queen of Spain. Two lines through the same child are brother and sister.

① Victoria, Princess Royal · ② Edward VII · ③ Alice · ④ Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh · ⑤ Beatrice

Christian IX’s grandchildren

Six were Christian IX’s, and two were both

The Danish king’s grandchildren held the thrones of Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece and Britain. George V and his sister Maud were grandchildren of Victoria and of Christian IX at once: their mother was his daughter Alexandra.

① Frederick VIII · ② Alexandra · ③ Dagmar · ④ George I of Greece

A young woman in a pale gown and a young man in uniform, posed together in a studio portrait. — Wilhelm Höffert, 1888. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A queen seated and a king standing in ermine coronation robes and crowns. — Peder O. Aune, 1906. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Brothers and sisters

Four pairs of siblings sat on different thrones

Sophie and Wilhelm II; George V and Maud; Alexandra and Ernst Ludwig; and Christian X and Haakon VII. Every pair was split between two different thrones.

A painted wedding ceremony in a gilded Orthodox church: a bride in white and a groom in uniform before clergy, surrounded by court guests. — Laurits Tuxen, 1895. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A painted royal wedding in a church: a bride in white beside a young king in uniform before a bishop, under a canopy with a coat of arms. — Juan Comba García, 1906. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Unknown author, 1922. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Marriages

Three marriages joined the two houses

Nicholas II married Victoria’s granddaughter Alexandra, Ernst Ludwig’s sister; Haakon VII married Maud; Constantine I married Wilhelm’s sister Sophie. In each, a grandchild of one house married a grandchild of the other. Ferdinand and Alfonso married into Victoria’s family from outside both.

Two men in dress uniform standing side by side, one in a spiked helmet. — Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R43302 / Unknown / CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Two bearded men of similar appearance in uniform standing together. — Ernst Sandau, 1913. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The first week of August 1914

First cousins at war, siblings on opposite sides

Germany and Hesse fought for the Central Powers; Britain and Russia for the Entente; the other five stayed neutral. Wilhelm II and George V were first cousins. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. Wilhelm and Nicholas, whose empires went to war first, were only third cousins.

Men in long military coats stand on a railway platform beside a train. — Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R12318 / Victor Sniekers / CC BY-SA 3.0 de

A white manor house among trees, seen across a lawn. — Ben Bender, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

By the end of the war

Six of them had lost their thrones

Romania joined the Entente, 27 August 1916; Greece joined the Entente, June 1917. Nicholas II and Alexandra were killed at Yekaterinburg. Constantine was forced out of Greece, Ernst Ludwig deposed in Hesse, and Wilhelm was living in the Netherlands.

02Berlin and Potsdam

He came to the throne at 29, fired Bismarck, and talked away much of his own power

Wilhelm II was born with a paralysed left arm, came to the throne at twenty-nine, dismissed the man who had built the empire within two years, and spent the next twenty-eight talking. He lost much of his authority in 1908, ten years before he lost the throne, and he lived long enough to see the state that replaced him replaced in turn.

The life, 1859–1941, to scale

An oval double portrait lithograph of a young man in uniform and a young woman. — Friedrich and Victoria, Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, in a lithograph of 1858. She was Queen Victoria's eldest child. Their first son was born the following January; her husband's death in June 1888 made that son Emperor.Photo: Unknown author, 1858. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Cabinet photograph of Otto von Bismarck, bald, with a moustache, in uniform with an order star. — Otto von Bismarck in an undated cabinet photograph by Carl Krause of Berlin. Two years into the new reign, in March 1890, Wilhelm dismissed him as chancellor.Photo: Kunstverlag Carl Krause Co. Berlin, 19th century. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Wilhelm was born in Berlin on 27 January 1859 in the breech position. The obstetrician Eduard Arnold Martin pulled the left arm down to free him and tore the nerves at the shoulder — the injury now called Erb's palsy. The arm never grew properly. For the rest of his life it was about fifteen centimetres shorter than his right.

The treatments the court ordered are recorded in the family's own papers. From six months old a hare was killed twice a week and the warm carcass bound around the arm. Electric current was applied before he was two. From about four he was put in a stretching frame for the twisted neck the same injury had caused. His tutor Georg Hinzpeter later made him ride one-handed until he could stay on.

What was never recorded is the arm itself. In formal photographs the left hand rests on a sword hilt, or holds a pair of white gloves to make the arm look longer; his coats were cut with the left pocket raised.

Painted portrait of an admiral with a long forked white beard. — Alfred von Tirpitz, painted by Lovis Corinth in 1917, the year after he left office. He wrote the naval laws of 1898 and 1900 that built a German battlefleet against Britain.Painting: Lovis Corinth, 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Head-and-shoulders photograph of Wilhelm II in uniform, 1902. — Wilhelm II photographed by the court photographer T. H. Voigt in 1902, at the height of the naval programme. This one stops at the shoulders too.Photo: Studio of Thomas Heinrich Voigt, 1902. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Daily Telegraph printed it on 28 October 1908. In it Wilhelm told British readers “You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares”, said he was in a minority in his own country in wanting friendship with Britain, claimed he had sent Queen Victoria a plan of campaign during the Boer War, and said the new German fleet was built against Japan rather than Britain. In the Reichstag that November, deputies of every party attacked him. No law was passed. No power was formally taken away. What changed was that his ministers stopped treating his opinions as instructions, and Bülow was out of office by the following summer. Wilhelm reigned for another ten years with steadily less of the personal rule he had spent twenty years building.

03Berlin and St Petersburg, summer

Ten telegrams, signed “Willy” and “Nicky”, did not stop the war

Between 29 July and 1 August 1914 Wilhelm II and Nicholas II sent each other ten telegrams. They wrote in English and signed them “Willy” and “Nicky”.

“I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war.”

Nicholas II to Wilhelm II, 29 July 1914

“It would be right to give over the Austro-Servian problem to the Hague conference.”

Nicholas II to Wilhelm II, 29 July 1914

“Immediate affirmative clear and unmistakable answer from your government is the only way to avoid endless misery.”

Wilhelm II to Nicholas II, 1 August 1914

Russia cancelled its general mobilisation on 29 July and ordered it again the next day. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914; Britain on Germany on 4 August 1914. The two men were third cousins.

04Spa, Berlin, Eijsden, Amerongen

Berlin announced his abdication nineteen days before he signed it

By the autumn the army, not the Kaiser, was running Germany. On 9 November 1918, at Spa, it told him it would no longer follow him. He did not sign until 28 November 1918, in exile.

9 November 1918, Spa. At the Villa La Fraineuse, General Wilhelm Groener tells the Kaiser the army will not march behind him. Hindenburg, standing beside him, does not contradict it.
Wilhelm offers to give up the imperial crown and keep the Prussian one. Under the constitution the two could not be separated.
Before any answer reaches Berlin, the Chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, announces that the Kaiser has given up both crowns. Wilhelm has not agreed to this and does not yet know of it.
That afternoon Philipp Scheidemann proclaims a republic from a window of the Reichstag.
10 November. The imperial train leaves Spa. Wilhelm crosses into the Netherlands at Eijsden.
28 November 1918, Amerongen. Wilhelm signs a written renunciation of both crowns — nineteen days after Germany had been told he had given them up.

Two officers in greatcoats standing outside a building. — Erich Ludendorff, right, with Ahmet Tevfik Pasha of the Ottoman Empire at Spa in October 1918. Spa was the German Great Headquarters from March 1918, and by then Ludendorff and Hindenburg, not the Kaiser, were effectively running Germany.Photo: Unknown author, 1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles arraigned him for “a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties”. Queen Wilhelmina had granted him asylum, and in January 1920 the Dutch government refused the Allies' demand to hand him over. He was never tried.

05Doorn, the Netherlands

In exile at Doorn he wrote, in private, that Jews should be destroyed

Wilhelm spent eighteen months at Amerongen, then moved into Huis Doorn, which he had bought in 1919, in May 1920. He stayed twenty-one years. He read, wrote his memoirs, and cut firewood most mornings. He never accepted that the army had not betrayed him.

An elderly man in a dark suit writing at a standing desk by a window, in a room hung with pictures. — At his desk at Doorn, September 1929.Photo: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, J 312 Nr. 10, 1929. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

An elderly man with a white upturned moustache and beard, in a dark suit. — Wilhelm II at Doorn, September 1929, aged seventy.Photo: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, J 312 Nr. 10, 1929. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

From exile he wrote what he had never said from the throne.

To Field Marshal August von Mackensen on 2 December 1919 he described the Germans who deposed him as “egged on and misled by the tribe of Juda whom they hated, who were guests among them”, and wrote: “Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil.”

To the American writer Poultney Bigelow in 1927: “Press, Jews & Mosquitoes … are a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or another. I believe the best would be gas.”

These are private letters, published by his biographer John Röhl.

He praised the German victories of 1940 and was angry that Hitler would not restore the monarchy. He died at Doorn on 4 June 1941, aged eighty-two. His will of 1933 said he would be buried in Germany only if the monarchy had been restored by then, and it had not, so he was buried at Doorn on 9 June. He had asked for no Nazi emblems. Hitler sent a wreath and swastika flags, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands, attended.

A procession of German officers in uniform and peaked caps walking along a path in front of a house. — The funeral of the former Kaiser at Doorn, 9 June 1941, in a Scherl press photograph: German officers in uniform walk in the procession.Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-L19106 / Fritz / CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The family that filled nine thrones had no seat at the quarrel that started the war. The lines of the family and the lines of the war were different lines.

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Fourteen members of one family sat on or beside nine European thrones in 1914. The kinship set none of the sides.