Royal fool: Lothar Machtan’s book on the Hohenzollern dispute – culture


On a foggy autumn morning, Kaiser Wilhelm II left the Great Headquarters in Spa and went into exile in Holland without a sound. It was November 10, 1918, the emperor who had contributed significantly to plunging Germany and the world into the First World War, and his dynasty was finally history – even if many Hohenzollernians longed to return to power.

The biography that the Bremen historian Lothar Machtan wrote about the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, also called Wilhelm (1882 – 1951), is about the “madness of the Hohenzollern”: “The Crown Prince and the Nazis. The Blind Spot of the Hohenzollern” . Historical material rarely has such great current importance, and that is also the reason why Economics Minister Peter Altmaier will give a welcome address this Wednesday at the book presentation in Berlin, which is not without tension. Parts of the Hohenzollern family are challenging the German republic. They want compensation for real estate and valuables that were once expropriated in the Soviet occupation zone. Legally, however, everyone is excluded from such claims that have given National Socialism a “considerable boost”. The federal and state governments reject the request. That is the substance of the “Hohenzollern dispute”.

As in the father, the madness also manifested itself in the son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. And as a good historian should do, Lothar Machtan examines the prince’s doings from 1931, in the last two years of the Weimar Republic, out of their time, not out of the knowledge of those born after Auschwitz, the war of extermination and the destruction of Europe. Machtan, who was given access to the Hohenzollern archives, writes knowledgeable and legible, he does not gloss over his “antihero” – and yet his theses will probably provoke some understandable resistance in the historians’ guild.

Crown Prince Wilhelm considered fascism “a marvelous instrument”

Unlike his father, Wilhelm of Prussia was allowed to return home in 1923 – only to find, to his annoyance, that only a few mourned the monarchy. Even for the growing right, kings and emperors were a thing of the past; the enemies of the republic had long thought more extreme. “The Crown Prince,” writes Machtan, “did not want to admit that even for himself there was hardly any prospect of playing a political role. Unless he himself courageously reached for the cloak of power.”

He tried to achieve this with the help of the Nazis, which was not a moral problem for Wilhelm, since he thought fascism, as he wrote after a meeting with Italy’s dictator Mussolini, “a fabulous instrument” anyway. He attested to the Duce: “Communism, socialism, democracy have been exterminated, and with stump and stem, an ingenious brutality has brought this about.”

Although his wife Cecilie and Wilhelm didn’t really like each other, they tried together to get to the top of the empire, for example through an “imperial administration” for the crown prince. Adolf Hitler, who in fact had no intention of sharing power with spoiled Prussian princes, let Wilhelm work on such castles in the air in 1932 and accepted his support with thanks. Hitler himself said in a small circle: “I don’t care about the princes; I made myself, even against their will.”

Lothar Machtan portrays Wilhelm as a political idiot

On the other hand, according to Machtan, the emperor’s son “had no stage, no script and no director. He is not a star, not even one prince charming. “Tactically a fool, personally a boasted bon vivant, strategically without real allies: The Crown Prince, as Machtan’s thesis can be summarized somewhat briefly, was a royal fool and politically such an idiot that he did not contribute anything essential to the rise of Adolf Hitler to power could. It was not needed, especially not in 1933. From “Torschlusspanik” he then turned, as Machtan writes, “unsolicited into the royal figurehead of the Third Reich”.

Of course, it is easy to explain why the thesis of the failed is so explosive. Whether the Hohenzollern have to be compensated in the end is also decided by the answer to the question of whether and to what extent they brought the Nazi tyranny, from a legal point of view, that “considerable advance payment”. Machtan’s book thus approaches the Hohenzollern’s position that this is not the case.

Crown Prince Wilhelm at the Reichsführer conference of the “Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten” in Hanover in 1933.

(Photo: Scherl / SZ Photo)

He is clearly more cautious than his colleague Stephan Malinowski, who will publish his book “The Hohenzollern and the Nazis. History of a Collaboration” at the end of September. In keeping with the gesture of a specialist in ideological debates about contemporary debates, Machtan accuses other historians of having done themselves a disservice as reviewers in the Hohenzollern dispute “with unnecessary concessions to their clients”. And he considers the question of the Hohenzollern’s justiciable “considerable advancement performance” for the Hitler movement to be wrong anyway, because it is posed too politically.

The conclusion that the prince’s “real fall” was to be located after January 30, 1933 does not sound convincing

Even if Machtan was right, however, that the prince’s aid to the Nazis had very little impact on the course of history: is that the crucial question? Without a doubt, Wilhelm was a stirrup holder for the German fascists, even if they didn’t need him to hold the stirrup. Yes, many helped national socialism into the saddle, the Reichswehr, influential industrialists, conservatives and German nationalists, even parts of the Protestant Church. The Playboy Crown Prince only played a minor role – but still a role. And does this complicity really only depend on how big or small this role was? Or is it the indisputable attempt?

Lothar Machtan: The Crown Prince and the Nazis. Hohenzollern’s blind spot, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2021. 300 pages, 24.99 euros.

Therefore, it is not convincing that Machtan’s conclusion that the prince’s “real fall into sin” has only just happened to Hitler’s takeover of power began on January 30, 1933, when he used his famous name to fiercely promote the new regime. This would then no longer have been an incentive, but only the retrospective and foolish ingratiation of a politically lost person who hopes for advantages from it: “In this way, Wilhelm becomes the would-be dictator’s free political resource, from which the regime likes to make use of for a while, without to commit to something. “

But why should the prince’s “fall into man” only begin at the time when Hitler was already ruling? Apparently Wilhelm von Prussia considered himself to be a sponsor of the future Führer even before the Nazis came to power in 1933. The prince once wrote to Hitler: “Long before the National Socialist movement took hold of the majority of the people, I had a personal exchange of ideas with you and stood up for you and your movement with a warm heart Ideas occurred wherever I was given the opportunity to do so. “

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