Malinowski is unremitting in his exposure of Hohenzollern Nazi-era culpability
With exhaustive research, Stephan Malinowski tears away Friedrich Wilhelm’s pretensions, revealing the former German Crown Prince to be a willing player on the Nazi "team".
The house is imposing but not grand. More manor house than palace. Set in wooded, spacious grounds, it is simply called Huis Doorn. In a small mausoleum nearby are interred the remains of ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last member of the Hohenzollern family to reign as Emperor over Germany.
After mutinies and revolution in 1918 had forced him from the throne, Wilhelm took refuge in The Netherlands. Initially at the stately home of a Dutch aristocrat but from 1921 in a house he had purchased and extensively renovated in the small town of Doorn not far from the university city of Utrecht. There in exile from Germany but supported by a group of German courtiers and with security around the house provided by the Dutch authorities, he lived in hope of a restoration.
To visit Huis Doorn as I have done is to encounter an ossified and oddly Edwardian world in which aspidistras would not be out of place and where English novels and histories sit alongside the German volumes on the bookshelves. The house and its contents are reminders of the connected and cosmopolitan origins of many European royal families long gone from their thrones.
However, the Hohenzollern descendants are still very much around even if no longer on a throne. German noble titles were abolished by the Weimar Republic following the First World War and since the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949 no legal or constitutional privileges have attached to former noble families. But the Hohenzollerns didn’t leave quietly in 1918 and whether by hook or by crook they never really left at all and remained intent on securing what they always viewed as rightfully theirs.
Stephan Malinowski’s “The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration” is a nearly 700-page doorstopper of a book. In its essentials, it might be thought – especially for English readers – a thin book fattened for the German market where it first appeared four years ago. At its heart, it’s a history of the Hohenzollern family’s determination to find a route back from exclusion and disgrace, first, after 1918 from the Kaiser’s role in the causes and conduct of the First World War, and, secondly, after 1945 from a record of collaboration with the Nazis. Malinowski is as much an advocate as an historian. He is unremitting in his pursuit and exposure of Hohenzollern culpability and in his determined undermining of post-Second World War family narratives that sought to associate by threadbare means the Hohenzollerns with eventual resistance to the Nazi regime.
Malinowski’s core focus is not therefore on Huis Doorn where the ex-Kaiser maintained an almost Ruritanian-style mini-court as he forlornly awaited a call back to restoration in Potsdam – a call which never came in all the years before his death in 1941.
The key figure for Malinowski is Friedrich Wilhelm who had been Crown Prince for thirty years until the revolution. In exile, Friedrich Wilhelm was less supine and infinitely more mischievous than his father. He too had settled in The Netherlands in 1918 albeit in comparatively modest circumstances on the (then) island of Wieringen in the Zuider Zee where he lived until 1923, though his wife and children remained in Germany. In exile, he sought political support where he could, not only in Germany but in the US – not least via the US press which remained fascinated by him – and was aided by far-right German royalist supporters who were considerably shrewder than he was himself. Ironically and controversially however, it was the Social Democrat Chancellor Stresemann who was the agent of Friedrich Wilhelm’s fateful return to Germany in 1923.
The ex-Crown Prince who returned to Germany was a man without scruple, vain, philandering and entirely self-serving. Though the former Kaiser was hardly the most scrupulous of men himself he was insistently focussed only on regaining the Crown and far less of a compromiser than his eldest son (or indeed his other sons) in pursuit of personal gain. Malinowski paints a picture of pure political opportunism and unfettered compromise by Friedrich Wilhelm once back in Germany. As the political right re-shaped itself after 1923 and the Nazis moved from obscurity to growing prominence and ruthlessness, Friedrich Wilhelm moved firmly into their orbit. Notwithstanding claims by Hohenzollern apologists after the Second World War, Friedrich Wilhelm never seriously sought to moderate the Nazis’ policies and readily donned uniforms alongside SA leaders at public events and cultivated contacts with the senior Nazi leaders, including Hitler.
Over the key years of 1932-33 Friedrich Wilhelm effectively became an instrument of the Nazis. Like many other German aristocrats in the course of the 1920s, he may have thought that he would be able to “moderate” the Nazis' ascent and policies, to constrain, as it were, the rightist rabble. But if he thought that he only fooled himself. The Nazis were far cleverer operators than he ever was. For Hitler and his senior collaborators, the Hohenzollerns and their ilk offered surface varnish which assisted them in their takeover of the German state in 1932-1933. Thereafter the Hohenzollerns faded from any kind of instrumentality or real influence. Their castles and lands (which they assiduously sought to protect from wartime encroachments) became places of refuge with them as no more than quiet collaborators of the Nazi regime.
With exhaustive research, Malinowski tears away Friedrich Wilhelm’s pretensions and sleights of hand to show him as a willing player on the Nazi ‘team’. In his depiction of the ex-Crown Prince, he sees few if any redeeming features up to and after his father’s death in 1941.
In his telling, the Hohenzollerns deserved their fate in 1918 and spent the years thereafter seeking restoration or, failing that, recovery or compensation for lost lands and houses. Nor does he have any truck with arguments that the ex-Crown Prince and his immediate family had any moderating influences on the Nazis. On the contrary not only did they not constrain the Nazis, the Hohenzollerns, in his account, shared their anti-semitism and overarching objection to “Bolshevism” and the threat from the east.
As Malinowski demonstrates all too clearly, Friedrich Wilhelm and his family – up to and following his death in 1951 – sought to re-shape a murky past to suit the needs of post-war Germany. A shaky narrative of resistance to the Nazis was fabricated or cultivated, even to the extent of intimating that as the Hohenzollerns had known some of the July 1944 plotters on Hitler’s life, they had themselves in some remote way contributed to the resistance effort. Even late in the twentieth and into the present century, the lawyers tried to use such gameplay to facilitate Hohenzollern access to compensation provisions agreed by the re-unified German government in 1994.
But Malinowski will have none of it. His demolition of the Hohenzollerns and their post-war apologists is relentless. Doorstop-sized books may tax the reader but the accumulated detail assembled in Malinowski’s seminal history leaves little if any scope for Hohenzollern evasion of responsibility for their parts in the undermining of the Weimar Republic and the advent of the Nazi state.