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

by Justin C. Vovk

  The arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick on July 15, 1920, greatly lifted the mood at Doorn following Joachim’s bitter parting from his father. When they arrived, Sissy immediately received a report on her mother’s health from her physician Dr. Hähner before going in to greet her.

  The day before yesterday Her Majesty suffered a heart spasm which, thanks to treatment, was alleviated. On this account, Her Majesty must keep to her bed and will, therefore, have to greet Your Royal Highness from her bed … The consequences of this attack have not yet been completely overcome, though the strength of the heart itself has improved, but there is nevertheless an increased breathlessness … I hope that if no unforeseen troubles arise, good progress will be made.1177

  Trouble did indeed arise. Instead of returning to Switzerland after leaving the Netherlands, Joachim traveled to one of his family’s old homes, Villa Liegnitz, in Potsdam. Three weeks later, he was dead. On the afternoon of July 18, 1920—three days after Sissy arrived at Doorn—Joachim shot himself. He died a few hours later at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Potsdam. The Berlin correspondent for the New York Times reported that Joachim “had been suffering from great mental depression, according to those intimates of the Hohenzollerns who had seen him.” When the reporter questioned Eitel-Fritz “as to the motive of his brother’s suicide, [he] declined to make any statement, referring … to the official announcement that Joachim was suffering from ‘a fit of excessive dementia.’”1178

  When the news arrived at Doorn, Wilhelm was the first to be told. Overcome by emotion, he collapsed into a nearby chair, holding his head between his hands in shock. That afternoon, as he gazed silently out the window in despair, he summoned the household together and told them. The empress must never be told the truth, he said. With her condition deteriorating, he knew that her youngest son taking his own life would most likely kill her. Everyone therefore agreed to keep up the facade that Joachim had been killed in a hunting accident. On that sunny afternoon when Wilhelm broke the news to his wife, she “took the news calmly and with the usual composure she exhibited when fate dealt her severe blows, but there was no doubt of the pain the news had caused her.”1179 Although she accepted her husband’s explanation and never wavered in her outward calm, everyone around her believed that she knew the truth about her son. In their grief, Wilhelm and Augusta Victoria were denied permission to return to Germany for their son’s funeral. In his memoirs, Willy described his brother’s death: “our parents and we children have suffered a heavy blow: my brother Joachim, utterly broken down, has passed out of this life. Immediately on receipt of the news, I travelled to Doorn, in order to be with my mother in, at any rate, the first and severest hours of her sorrow. What a deal of suffering destiny has heaped upon this poor and sick maternal heart.”1180

  The presence of Willy and Sissy brought Dona comfort. Another relative she delighted in was her grandson Karl Franz. Following Joachim’s death, Wilhelm issued an edict declaring Eitel-Fritz was to take sole custody of the boy, who was promptly sent to Doorn for extended visits with his grandparents—a German court would rule a year later that Wilhelm had no legal authority to issue such an edict, and the boy was returned to Marie-Augusta. Little Karl Franz brought “an atmosphere of gaiety and insouciance to a house where the outlook is often sombre.” One witness observed that Wilhelm “delights in the child’s prattle.”1181 As a living link with Dona’s beloved dead son, Karl Franz had a special bond with his grandmother. But unlike her husband, she could not run and play with him. Her time with Karl Franz was limited to her sitting in a wheelchair at lunch or watching him play in the garden. In the autumn months, Karl Franz was joined by his cousins, Willy and Cecilie’s children. For the first time since their exile, Wilhelm and Dona were surrounded by most of their children and grandchildren, who had largely been spared the horrors of the war and abdication. Wilhelm felt reinvigorated hearing his grandchildren laughing and playing in the halls at Doorn.

  The leitmotif of Dona’s family could not hide the truth: she was dying. It was only a matter of time. On October 22, 1920, the Hohenzollerns celebrated Augusta Victoria’s sixty-second birthday, but it was a somber occasion. Her son Willy poignantly recalled sitting with his mother on her birthday.

  It was on the 22[n]d, the anniversary of my mother’s birthday.—They were quiet, sad days in Doorn; for it cannot escape the eye of any one who loves her that my mother’s strength is waning, that sorrow is eating her up. The wound made in her maternal heart by the death of my brother Joachim has never healed; he was the weakest of us boys and claimed a greater share of her motherly care.

  On the birthday itself, she had kept to her bed. I could only sit beside her, hold her hand in mine and talk to her. I told her a number of amusing and harmless little anecdotes concerning my island household; and it was a pleasure to see a faint smile light up her kind features every now and then; but it was only a short flicker of sunshine, that was gone again almost instantly. And when she is up and walks through the rooms and her tired eyes wander caressingly over all the old furniture and mementos of her Berlin and Potsdam days, it is as though she were bidding them all a silent farewell.1182

  Within a month, Dona was at death’s door. Newspapers across Europe and North America were on standby to release her obituary. The former empress was suffering from repeated heart attacks, which were complicated by the formation of blood clots. This left her so weak that during the last half of November, she was only semiconscious on all but a few days. It became even more difficult to treat her when she developed a fever of 104 degrees. So often was Dona expected to pass away before the end of the year that her son Willy was summoned to Doorn half a dozen times. On December 1, the New York Times ran the headline GERMAN EMPRESS NEAR DEATH. The article went on to say that Dona’s “death is expected at any moment.” One member of the household at Doorn told reporters, “Her Majesty, realizing the seriousness of her condition, is quite resigned, and actually longs for the end of her sufferings, which began in 1918.”1183 Miraculously, she rallied and made it to Christmas 1920.

  Dona’s final months were made even more unbearable by sinister threats on her husband’s life. Plots abounded claiming that the former imperial couple would be kidnapped and murdered. Dona became obsessively paranoid about her and Wilhelm’s safety. She rarely slept because she was awoken by every noise in the night, terrified that it was someone coming to kidnap them. “They are coming for him,” she would scream and then burst into tears.1184 A few poorly planned kidnap attempts were made on the couple as early as 1919, when a group of American officers based in Luxembourg managed to break into Amerongen Castle, but they were easily thwarted. It was enough to prompt Wilhelm to consider arranging a police guard for himself.

  Dona believed that the British were responsible for all the threats against them. Even in her twilight years, her antipathy for Britain had not subsided. She was so convinced of her final fate that she wrote a farewell letter to her family in the event she and Wilhelm were captured or murdered: “In case Papa and I, by God’s Will, never see you again, this letter brings you our final greetings and out blessings … I know, my dear children, that you will, with God’s help, be brave. It is bitterly hard to say goodbye, but our warm love for you transcends the grave. And now, God protect you until we meet again with God.”1185 She also assured her children that neither she nor Wilhelm “would permit themselves to be delivered to the enemy, but even if that fate was avoided, there was no certainty as to where they could wile away their old age.”1186

  The frail Hohenzollern matriarch spent Christmas 1920 surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She made few appearances during the festivities, being unable to walk even a few steps without needing her wheelchair. By the spring of 1921, there was little doubt that the end was near. She spent most of her time in bed, but she rarely slept in peace. She was restless, spoke in her sleep, and suffered delusions that caused her to think she was surrounded by absent family, especially Joachim. “What s
he said was often surprising, almost clairvoyant,” Sissy recalled. “One night, when my brother August Wilhelm was keeping vigil [at her bedside], she bade us children goodbye in her sleep. Shattered, Auwi told us later what he had heard.”1187

  On February 22, Dona’s controversial brother Ernest Günther, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, died at Primkenau at the age of fifty-seven. “According to the doctors who are treating the Kaiserin,” reported the New York Times, Dona was not “informed about her brother’s death, due to the frailty of her own health.”1188 A week later, a faint glimmer of gaiety appeared at Doorn as Dona and Wilhelm commemorated their fortieth wedding anniversary. The former empress barely noticed the milestone because was she so ill she could only remain conscious for a few hours each day. It was the last occasion the Hohenzollerns celebrated as a family. In mid-March, Augusta Victoria’s death vigil began. Her five sons dutifully arrived at Doorn, but the instability in Germany and Austria prevented Sissy from arriving in time. Willy recalled that Dona “was so feeble that she could scarcely speak; and yet the slightest attention was received with ‘Thank you, my dear boy’; and then she gently stroked my hand.”1189 Along with Wilhelm, each of the princes took turns holding the vigil at Dona’s bedside. In one of her last conversations with her husband, Dona told him in her typical selfless fashion, “I must live, because I cannot leave you alone.”1190

  Spring came early that year, and the warmer weather made Dona more comfortable. Wilhelm and Eitel-Fritz spent the most time at her bedside, but these were long hours passed in silence since even simple conversation exhausted her. Occasionally, on days when Dona showed strength, she was propped up next to her window where she enjoyed looking out into the garden with its flowers and budding trees. Her physician, Dr. Hähner, kept her pain to a minimum by giving her frequent hypodermic injections of a heart stimulant. By the predawn hours of April 11, 1921, her breathing had become extremely labored. At 5:00 a.m., Dr. Hähner, Countess Keller, and the nurse moved Dona into a position they hoped would make it easier for her to breathe. Over the next hour, her pulse grew weaker and weaker. Wilhelm and Adalbert were both summoned to her bedside where, at 6:00 a.m., Augusta Victoria died from massive heart failure. She was sixty-two years old. Sissy, who had been en route back to Doorn, was unaware that her mother had died. She received the news during a stopover in Nuremberg, where placards had been posted announcing the empress’s death.

  The tributes that poured into Doorn were heartfelt. They amounted to some ten thousand messages of condolence, “a mark perhaps more of the respect with which Dona had been regarded in Germany than real enthusiasm for” Wilhelm.1191 Even American newspapers paid tribute to “the life of the once beautiful Empress and Queen of Prussia, Augusta Victoria who, for nearly 40 years had been the most beloved hausfrau of the German people.”1192 It stung Wilhelm deeply that no message of condolence arrived from King George V or the British royal family.

  Dona’s body rested at Doorn with a round-the-clock vigil provided by her husband and sons, who were dressed in full Prussian military uniforms. Scattered throughout the room were pine-scented wreaths and bundles of flowers. Willy spent the first night after his mother died seated next to her coffin. He was struck by how much her passing reminded him of Queen Victoria’s. He had great difficulty coming to terms with his mother’s death. He wrote in his memoirs, “I was unable to grasp the idea that she would no more speak to me, that her kind eyes would no more be turned upon me. She was the magnet which attracted us children, wherever we might be, toward the parental home. She knew all our wishes, our hopes, our cares. Now she had been taken from us forever.”1193

  In a gesture of sympathy, the Allied Mission in Berlin and the German government allowed the empress’s body to be buried in Potsdam, in accordance with her wishes. “I will sleep in my own homeland,”1194 she once told her daughter. But there were stipulations. To avoid arousing monarchist sentiments, the train carrying the coffin and its caretakers was required to travel without any fanfare or official ceremonies at any point on German soil until it reached Potsdam. The German government took great pains to keep many of the details of Dona’s funeral a secret in the hope of attracting as little attention as possible. The publicly announced date for the funeral was changed without warning just for this reason. The final, most important condition was that Wilhelm must not accompany his wife’s coffin. This was deeply painful for the former emperor, since “it meant he would never be able to stand at his wife’s grave.”1195 In the end, it would fall to his sons to escort Dona to her final resting place; Auwi and Eitel-Fritz immediately left for Germany to begin funeral preparations, while Oscar and Adalbert decided to accompany the coffin on its last journey.

  Rather than have a funeral at Doorn, the Hohenzollerns chose to have a small memorial for Dona at the train station at Maarn, five miles away. On the dark, misty night of April 17, Dona’s coffin, decorated in the traditional Prussian style with pine fronds and covered with the Standard of the Queen of Prussia, was taken to the dimly lit Maarn station in a specially modified automobile. Mourners stood along the entire route, their heads bare and bowed low in silent respect. The only sound that could be heard was the clattering of hooves from the horses pulling the coffin. Following close behind was a procession of black automobiles. The first was filled with bouquets and funeral wreaths. The second contained Ernst von Dryander, the court chaplain, wearing his black clerical robes. The third bore members of the former imperial court. Ten minutes after these vehicles arrived at Maarn, a fourth, large motorcar pulled up. Oscar and Adalbert stepped out, both wearing the uniform of the Prussian Guards, complete with iconic, black, spiked helmets and gray capes over their shoulders. Wilhelm’s attire was that of a general of the Brandenburg Infantry, which was one of the last uniforms he would ever be seen wearing. Sissy and the other women wore the traditional mourning black. Their long black dresses were in such stark contrast to the resplendent military uniforms that some witnesses thought they were nuns.

  Along with Dona’s husband and children, the service at Maarn was attended by a surprisingly impressive group of former courtiers, government officials, and representatives sent on behalf of Queen Wilhelmina and the kings of Spain and Sweden. When it was time for the service to begin, Dr. Dryander had everyone assemble on the train platform around the coffin, where he said a few words, “his voice vibrating with emotion.” Reporters at the scene noted that the ex-emperor “wept bitterly” over his wife’s coffin. After the brief service, Adalbert, Oscar, and the other male members of the court loaded their mother’s casket into the last of three dark-green compartments attached to the funeral train, which was scheduled to depart before dawn the next morning. Sleeping on the train that night in the second compartment outfitted with beds were the two princes, Dr. Dryander, and the empress’s ladies-in-waiting, who were permanently returning to Germany after the funeral. In the morning, they would accompany the coffin back to Potsdam. Willy asked the Dutch government for permission to go but was told if he did, he would not be permitted to reenter the Netherlands. Accompanied by Sissy, father and son boarded the train for a final good-bye. Afterward, Wilhelm proceeded into the travel car to thank those who were sleeping on board for their devotion to the late empress in accompanying her body to Potsdam. When Wilhelm emerged a few minutes later, according to the New York Times reporter on the scene, his “figure was that of a man broken by sorrow.”1196 Without any words, he and Sissy got into their automobile and drove back to Doorn. Willy, Sissy’s husband, and the rest of their courtiers who were remaining in the Netherlands followed shortly thereafter.

  At 7:45 a.m., the funeral train left Maarn. News reports from that day imply Wilhelm had planned to return to see the train off. However, the Associated Press reported that he “suffered all through the night from severe nervous depression” and could not bring himself to return to Maarn when the “funeral train departed with the body of his wife, Auguste Viktoria.”1197 The Dutch government paid their respects by flying the
ir flags at half-mast at all the stations through which the train passed on its way out of their country. The Dutch people were no less reverent. Thousands of ordinary citizens, most of whom had never even laid eyes on Dona, lined the train tracks. When the train crossed into Germany at 10:00 a.m., the outpouring of affection for the country’s last empress was even more heartfelt, despite the best efforts of the republican government. The entire journey from Maarn to Potsdam—more than three-hundred-and-seventy miles–was lined in “an unbroken human chain” of tens of thousands of mourners who had come to pay their last respects.1198 All along the way, the people echoed the same words: “The Kaiserin is coming!” So many people lined the railway tracks that the train was forced to delay its arrival in Potsdam. A number of towns forced the train to stop at their stations to allow their citizens the chance to mourn. Hundreds—and in some cases, thousands—of people surrounded the train at different stations. Dressed in black, they dropped to their knees and prayed. In other towns, church bells tolled, choirs sang, and bands played hymns. “A whole people were mourning their beloved Empress,” wrote Sissy.1199