Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  She was, as everyone knows, more interested in the hidden domestic life than in the public political one. She believed that the role [sic] of her husband was divinely ordained, and when the foundations of this her world were scattered she could only think it was because malign forces had triumphed. Thus her plight at least seemed pathetic to the onlookers at [Amerongen], and for a woman, distressed in mind and destitute of state, there was only human sympathy.1155

  As his wife glowered and shrank, Wilhelm became immersed in bitter resentment, blaming everyone around him for his failed reign. Writing to August von Mackensen, one of his former generals, he grandiosely decried his abdication as “the deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a person in history, [which] the Germans have done to themselves.”1156 Wilhelm’s behavior and growing victim mentality made him nearly unbearable to his own staff. Even his loyal aide-de-camp General Hans von Plessen wrote in his diary, “The Emperor has a cold heart towards everyone, even towards his children. He is ungrateful, had always acted, but never applied himself. He had never done any serious work.”1157

  By mid-1919, public attention shifted back to the Hohenzollerns. Perhaps because of Wilhelm’s very visible role during the war, he and his family became the subject of scrutiny and curiosity. Legal, political, and academic circles all began putting the former emperor, and also his eldest son, under a microscope. Numerous studies evaluating Wilhelm’s mental stability and fitness to rule were released, including The Madness of Wilhelm II, Kaiser Wilhelm Periodically Insane!, and Wilhelm II as Cripple and Psychopath.1158

  On the international stage, there were constant demands by foreign governments for Wilhelm’s extradition so that he could be tried for war crimes. This became an official objective during the Paris Peace Conference, with Article 227 of the final treaty stipulating that the “Allies and associated Powers publicly indict Wilhelm II von Hohenzollern, former Emperor of Germany, for the gravest violation of the international moral code and the sanctity of treaties.”1159 A special international court to hear the case for extradition was to be convened, presided over by representatives of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. David Lloyd George “suggested he be hanged.”1160 The British press ran the headlines HANG THE KAISER! and MAKE GERMANY PAY!1161 One newspaper showed a cartoon depicting a rope tied between the Eiffel Tower and Cleopatra’s Needle in London with Wilhelm suspended by his wrists. Lloyd George’s demands for Wilhelm’s extradition may have been, at least partly, only rhetoric. Britain was in the midst of an election at the time, and Lloyd George, determined to stay in office, found Germany an easy scapegoat. G. S. Viereck, an American journalist who became acquainted with Wilhelm and Dona in 1921, believed that “Lloyd George’s electioneering campaign was a daily torture to the Kaiserin and a chief cause of her ultimate death.”1162

  Other Allied leaders were going a step further in seeking accountability for the war. They demanded more than a thousand Germans be handed over and tried for war crimes, including Wilhelm’s eldest son and the infamous Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Others wanted to see the former emperor exiled permanently to Africa or South America, similar to the way Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena. Dona was now more protective of her husband than ever. She knew that if he were extradited to Paris or London, he would almost certainly be executed. She was greatly relieved when Queen Wilhelmina refused to give him up, citing Dutch neutrality in the war and the fact that handing Wilhelm over “would have compromised Dutch sovereignty.”1163 Wilhelm took public opinion toward him very personally. He considered visiting a plastic surgeon to have his appearance altered and later escaping unnoticed into the night. He thought about smuggling himself back into Germany to live out his days hiding on the country estate of his friend Princess Maria Christina of Salm-Salm. He also contemplated committing suicide. This last possibility resonated with the increasingly fatalistic Dona, who told him, “William, then we’ll go together into the beyond.”1164

  By January 1920, Wilhelm’s defeatist phase seems to have passed; so too did efforts to extradite him. On March 24, David Lloyd George washed his hands of the ex-emperor and declared he and his wife were solely the responsibility of the Netherlands. Wilhelm realized it was time to make a more permanent home, since Amerongen was intended to be only a temporary lodging while Wilhelm’s fate was decided. He bought a new home, Huis Doorn, three miles outside Amerongen. It belonged to Baroness Ella van Heemstra, the mother of Hollywood actress Audrey Hepburn. Doorn was an eighteenth-century manor house with its own tower and almost sixty hectares of forest surrounding it. What appealed to Wilhelm and Dona most, besides its rustic beauty, was that it offered them a level of privacy they had not experienced since they arrived in the Netherlands. Amerongen was full of curious spectators who were eager to catch a glimpse of the ex-emperor and his reclusive wife. The funds for the purchase of Doorn came from the sale of a number of the Hohenzollerns’ private yachts, including Dona’s beloved Iduna, upon which she had spent so much time traveling the Greek Isles.

  While Wilhelm made the arrangements for their eventual move, Dona took charge of furnishing their new home before they moved in. For a brief period, she seemed to be her old self again. Perhaps the greatest contributing factor to this reprieve in her long illness was Sissy’s arrival for a visit in March 1920. The journey from Gmuden to Amerongen was a perilous one, the result of the increasing violence of the German Revolution. During a brief stop in Potsdam to visit her former homes, heavy fighting between monarchists and republicans in the streets made the city unsafe. Sissy’s husband was forced to return to Gmunden with their children for their own safety. “The journey was gruesome, for the revolt had spread westwards and I thought I would never see my husband and children again,” Sissy admitted in her memoirs. “However, the thought of my seriously ill mother drove me on.” When she finally arrived at Amerongen, Sissy wrote that the “joy of reunion with my parents was indescribable, but I was upset to see how … my mother’s illness had changed her imposing appearance.”1165

  By the time of her daughter’s visit, Dona was so weak that she could no longer climb the stairs at Amerongen and had to have a lift installed to allow her to move between floors. The presence of her daughter and the time she spent finding and placing furniture in Huis Doorn helped somewhat to reinvigorate Dona’s broken spirit. It also afforded her the opportunity to focus on something other than her family’s mounting problems. Her eldest son, Willy, had settled on Wieringen Island on the Baltic Sea where he took up a job as a tradesman. His wife, Cecilie, refused to join him, using the overthrow of the monarchy as the excuse she needed to finally separate from her adulterous husband. The marriages of Dona’s other sons, who had stayed in Germany as private citizens, collapsed. The childless Eitel-Fritz and Lotte were under constant scrutiny from both their family and the foreign press for lecherous affairs the couple was known to have. Early in their marriage, Wilhelm and Dona were furious when Lotte openly took a lover. Lotte, who had long since drifted apart from her mother-in-law, was called as a witness in a divorce trial where she announced of the accused, “our intimate relations continued even after my marriage to the Kaiser’s son.”1166 By March 1919, the New York Times was reporting that Eitel-Fritz had begun the process of divorcing Lotte. The article also alleged that “the former Prince attempted to begin proceedings before the war [but] his father vetoed the plan.”1167

  In March 1920, Auwi divorced his wife, Alexandra Victoria, after a long and bitter separation. “This marriage,” wrote Sissy, “which was greeted with such joy by the two mothers [Dona and Calma], alas, did not live up to their expectations.”1168 In the divorce proceedings, Auwi won sole custody of their only child, Alexander. Alexandra Victoria eventually remarried to a commoner and later told reporters she was infinitely happier as a commoner’s wife than living as a princess of Prussia. Like Eitel-Fritz, Auwi and his son settled in Potsdam near the Neues Palais. Auwi continued to cause his parents grief by taking an active role in th
e German socialist movement, which eventually paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party in the 1930s. Of Dona’s six sons, the only two who caused her little difficulty were Adalbert and Oscar. Adalbert, along with his wife, Adelaide, and their two young children, settled down to a quiet life in La Tour-de-Peilz, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Oscar’s life remained devoid of scandals as well—though, eventually, he too would join the Nazi ranks. He and his wife, Ina, were raising three children, whom the ex-empress doted on. Since his abdication, Wilhelm had grown so close to Oscar that he forgave his morganatic wedding. This may not have been a great leap, since Ina was reportedly Wilhelm’s favorite daughter-in-law. Using his authority as the head of the House of Hohenzollern, Wilhelm, under the witness of Cardinal Brandr Beekman-Ellner, bestowed upon his daughter-in-law the style and title of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Prussia, although since the monarchy no longer existed, this was purely a courtesy title.

  Reports of unrest in Hungary had been mounting since the end of the war. The country’s loss of two-thirds of its territory at the Paris Peace Conference triggered turmoil amongst all classes. The people soon turned their anger on Prime Minister Michael Karolyi. By 1919, his government was overthrown by a Communist coup d’état led by the insidious Bela Kun. But Kun’s own junta failed after only six months, when Hungary was humiliated in a short-lived war with Romania. The National Assembly of Hungary soon proclaimed that the country should restore the monarchy—but without asking Emperor Charles I to return as king. In March 1920, with the National Army in control of the Hungarian Parliament Building, the assembly voted Nicholas Horthy, a Hungarian admiral, as regent. An ambitious man with a thirst for power, Horthy served in the imperial navy and had been an aide-de-camp to Emperor Franz Joseph. During the war, one of the archdukes had recommended that Charles promote Horthy to commander in chief of the navy. Upon becoming regent, Horthy’s first condition was that he be granted expanded executive powers and personal equality for him with the position of king.

  In Switzerland, Charles and Zita were alarmed by the chain of events in Budapest. At first, “Horthy immediately sent protestations of loyalty to [Charles at] Prangins but, as the months passed, he became more evasive as Karl pressed him over handing back the throne.” Horthy made the Royal Palace in Budapest his new home, but what was most difficult for Charles and Zita to accept was when “Horthy declared himself, as Regent, to be a [royal] Duke and started receiving foreign ambassadors as ‘His Serene Highness.’”1169

  Prompted by his family and other royalists, Charles traveled to Hungary. He only agreed to go on the condition that Zita accompany him, but when she announced to everyone that she was pregnant for the seventh time, the entire plan fell into doubt. Charles and his advisors wanted a postponement, but Zita would not hear of it. “Every minute counts!” she exhorted her husband.1170 After a long discussion, she convinced him to go. He first traveled to Strasbourg, where he met one of his followers who supplied him with a train ticket and a forged Spanish passport. Dressed in an ordinary gentleman’s suit with a walking stick, Charles arrived in Hungary on March 26, 1921—Easter weekend—to reinstate himself as the rightful king. Having shaved his trademark mustache and using forged passports, Charles slipped across the Austro-Hungarian border and traveled directly to the home of Count Janos Mikes, a well-known Hungarian monarchist who was in favor of Charles’s restoration.

  At Mikes’s palace, the emperor called a secret meeting of his Privy Council, which included Horthy’s minister of education and his military advisor Colonel Antal Lehar, who pledged Hungarian troops to support Charles. “But I don’t want to take Hungary with soldiers,” Charles replied quietly. “I am not usurping a throne, you know. And there is to be no fighting.”1171 But when attempts to negotiate with Prime Minister Pal Teleki failed at 2:00 a.m., Charles decided to confront the regent himself. On March 27, Charles—dressed in a military cadet’s uniform that his aide found at the last minute—arrived unannounced at Horthy’s country estate, Kenderes, as he and his wife were sitting down to Easter dinner. The two men sequestered themselves in Horthy’s office—the same office that had once belonged to Charles. The two-hour meeting was exhausting. The regent would later describe it as one of “the most difficult moments in my entire life” and a “thoroughly odious” experience. Charles told him the time had come to hand over power.

  “This is a disaster,” Horthy replied. “In the name of God, Your Majesty must leave at once and return to Switzerland, before its too late and the [Allied] Powers learn of your presence in Budapest.” The emperor spent the rest of the time locked with Horthy in a battle of wills, using every argument he could think of to induce the regent to surrender the crown. Exhausted from having been awake for more than two days, Charles reached the end of his rope.

  “I stick by my position. I’ll give you five minutes to think it over,” he told Horthy.1172

  Horthy and Charles eventually agreed to a three-week political cease-fire so both men could strengthen their positions, but it soon became clear that the odds were stacked against the emperor. At the end of March, both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia declared that they would be willing to start another war if the Habsburgs were restored to the throne. The Allies, led by France, were unwilling to recognize a Hungarian kingdom led by Charles. By April 6, Charles was forced to concede defeat. Not only was the army still loyal to Horthy, but Hungarian support for the monarchy had all but evaporated. Most of the people were apathetic at the sight of the last emperor. Depressed and suffering from a severe cold he caught on his first night in Hungary, Charles dejectedly returned to Switzerland no closer to reclaiming the throne. The foreign press quickly jumped on the chance to show yet another failed endeavor on the emperor’s part. In England, one newspaper wrote drily,

  the outcome of the interview between Karl and the Regent is best demonstrated by the fact that the ex-King was forced to leave Budapest immediately for Szombathely.

  Soon thereafter it became known that Regent Horthy had minced no words in informing Karl that the ill-timed visit was detrimental to the best interests of Hungary, since the country needed nothing so much as peace and time for recovery.

  The Regent further assured His Majesty of his, Horthy’s, unchanging loyalty and devotion, explaining nonetheless that the mandate placed upon him by the Nation could not be laid down except by parliamentary procedure.

  At half past five the ex-King left Budapest in the company of Prime Minister Teleky, Count Sigray and the commanding officer of the Hussars, Captain Gjörgy …1173

  The first Hungarian power play had ended with a resounding victory for Nicholas Horthy. But what Charles did not realize was that in less than a year, another opportunity would present itself to reclaim the throne of Hungary, with permanent consequences for the House of Habsburg.

  25

  The Last Journey

  (1920–21)

  It took nearly a year, but eventually Dona and Wilhelm were able to move into their new home at Huis Doorn. When they relocated, their court numbered nearly fifty people, more than half of whom were servants. Many of the other courtiers remained in and around Amerongen, making the commute to Doorn when needed.

  By the time the estate was ready, Dona’s health was barely hanging on. Suffering from a failing heart, arthritis, and high blood pressure, she was confined almost entirely to a wheelchair or her bed. Many of her friends and family were afraid “that the empress, terminally ill, would not live to warm her new house.”1174 The prospect of moving into her new home, surrounded by its bucolic forests and rolling hillsides, sustained Dona. When they finally moved in on May 15, 1920, it was the happiest Wilhelm had seen his wife since they left Germany. To help her feel more at home, he had an elaborate rose garden planted near her rooms. Of all her life in Germany, it was the beautiful gardens at the Neues Palais in Potsdam that Dona said she missed the most. The garden at Doorn included a species of rose, the Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria, which had been named in her honor in
1890. With the burdens of state no longer on his shoulders, Wilhelm took an almost selfless devotion to caring for his wife. Once the garden was finished, he had a small greenhouse built so that fresh roses could be grown and delivered daily to her room.

  The Hohenzollerns’ fortunes seemed to be improving as more of their family came from Germany to visit. Their son Willy was a regular guest, though his movements on Wieringen Island were strictly monitored. He could only leave the island and visit his parents with the permission of the Dutch authorities. During one of Willy’s first visits to Doorn, he and Dona were sitting in the gardens outside. In one of the rare moments of her life, Dona confided her great depression to her son when he remarked of the natural beauty surrounding them. “My boy,” she said, “yes, it is beautiful here, but oh! it is not my Potsdam, the New Palace, my little rose-garden, our home. If you only knew how homesickness often gnaws at me. Oh, I shall never see my home again.”1175

  In mid-June, Dona’s youngest son, Joachim, visited from his home in Switzerland, where he had bought a villa after the war. He had spiraled into a tailspin of grief and depression and was never able to accept life as a commoner after the end of the monarchy. The idea of having to work for a living and being just like everyone else, without the extravagant comforts of royalty, proved too much for the thirty-year-old former prince. Though Dona was happy to see him, it was not a pleasant reunion between father and son. Wilhelm never forgave Joachim for what he considered cowardice and weakness. In the sitting room at Doorn, Joachim told his parents that his marriage to Marie-Augusta was over. Theirs had never been a happy marriage, “but an arrangement.” According to one contemporary source, Joachim “suffered from depression and other mental health issues, and may have been an abusive husband. The princess fled the marital home”1176 once already. Joachim had since become addicted to gambling, and his wife left him a second time. He filed for divorce, winning custody of their only child, Karl Franz (b. 1916). Wilhelm was furious and ordered his son out of the house. In a tearful embrace, Dona said good-bye to her son. She would never see him again.