*
What conclusions can we draw from Wilhelm’s involvement in wartime decision-making? One thing that emerges very clearly from our account is Wilhelm’s continuing centrality in the processes by which some of the most crucial policy issues of the war years were resolved. The emperor may have been starved of day-to-day information and squeezed out of a role in the operations of the military and civilian executives; he may have disappeared, as some contemporaries alleged, behind a ‘Chinese wall’ of aides and advisers but he was still the man at the fulcrum of the political– constitutional structure. Was he merely the passive ‘tongue’ at the centre of the scale, whose vote on policy registered the balance of opinion within the executive? Or did he play a more active, determinant role?
The answer must be a combination of the two. It would be ludicrous to suggest that Wilhelm played a creative role in the shaping of policy – he was far too dependent on the views of those around him and lacked the ability to think ahead in the way that marks out those who set the tone in politics. It would be equally mistaken, however, to suggest that things would have been the same without him. It is inconceivable, as Holger Afflerbach has shown, that Falkenhayn could have held on to the supreme command until the summer of 1916 without Wilhelm’s backing. In this case, Wilhelm was prepared to act (or rather to hold out) against an overwhelming preponderance of opinion against the chief of staff. In the case of unrestricted submarine warfare, too, it seems certain that the restrictions favoured by Bethmann and Wilhelm would not have been imposed in 1916 had it not been for the emperor’s support for the chancellor’s viewpoint. It is worth bearing in mind that a fully democratized, parliamentary Germany would not have sustained the policy of restraint – at least after the early autumn of 1916. In both these cases, Wilhelm was a force of inertia and delay.
It may be argued that Wilhelm’s omissions were more important than his active interventions. We have seen, for example, that he failed to unify the command structure of the German armed forces. But a comparison of Germany’s performance with that of the Entente Powers does not suggest that this negligence did much to hinder the effectiveness of German troops in the field. More important, perhaps, was the failure to coordinate the civilian–political and the military executives and to subordinate the latter to the authority of the former. However, while the wilfulness of the military and naval leaderships had momentous consequences, it was hardly the result of a wartime policy error. The imperial constitution had never satisfactorily resolved the relationship between military and political authority. In the semi-parliamentary system inaugurated in 1871, moreover, the German armed services grew accustomed to deploying all the techniques of modern political mobilization in order to massage the public and its elected representatives into supporting expensive programmes of armament and expansion. The habit of appealing directly to the public over the heads of the responsible political leaders was already deeply ingrained by 1914, when Wilhelm’s nemesis emerged in the form of a hero-general with access to formidable publicity resources. Wilhelm gradually recognized the magnitude of the threat posed to his own authority by the field marshal and Ludendorff, but he failed to penalize their insubordination in 1915, at a time when he might still have succeeded in arresting the formation of a military dictatorship. By October 1918, when the emperor finally intervened to end the rule of the ‘Siamese twins’, it was already much too late.
Exile
It might be said that the twenty-three years Wilhelm spent in Dutch exile fall outside the scope of an analysis centred on the Kaiser’s power, since he possessed no executive authority after 1918. But some brief reflections on the exile are in order, not merely in the interest of narrative closure, but also because revelations about Wilhelm’s preoccupations after 1918 have thrown up questions of significance for an assessment of his place in German history. Of these, the two most important concern his attitude to the Jews and his relations with the National Socialist Party and the Hitler regime. After some general remarks about the ex-Kaiser’s circumstances in exile we shall examine these two issues in turn.
The first two years of Wilhelm’s exile in Holland were overshadowed by the possibility that the Allies would force Holland to extradite him for trial as a war criminal. Wilhelm had been systematically demonized by Allied wartime propaganda, and feelings against him were running high. As early as 2 December 1918, an Anglo–French–Italian conference in London debated the possibility of demanding that Holland surrender Wilhelm for Allied trial as ‘the criminal mainly responsible for the war’, but President Wilson was unenthusiastic and the issue was shelved pending the convocation of the peace conference. After much wrangling among the Big Four in Paris, Article 227 of the Versailles Treaty stipulated that Wilhelm was to be taken into custody ‘for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’, tried by a tribunal of five judges from the Allied states and extradited from Holland for that purpose.
That it never came to an extradition for trial was the consequence of four factors. First, the Allied demands lacked any agreed basis in law. The Allies themselves were aware of this and increasingly couched their requests in terms of a diffuse concept of ‘international morality’. Secondly, the Dutch government, though caught unawares by Wilhelm’s arrival and anxious about possible consequences, refused to comply with Allied requests, on the grounds that to have done so would have compromised Dutch sovereignty. Thirdly, Queen Wilhelmina of Holland and King Albert of Belgium were opposed to Wilhelm’s being arraigned as a war criminal. In Albert’s case in particular, the monarch’s preference exerted an important constraining influence on the Belgian government, which might otherwise have pressed for extradition (George V was also opposed, but elected not to intervene).75 The international dynastic network that had contributed so little of substance to Wilhelm’s exercise of sovereign office now operated to his advantage as a private person. Fourth, and most importantly, the Allies themselves were divided over the issue. It was above all the British who pushed ahead with proposals that Wilhelm as an ‘enemy of the human race’ should be either tried or alternatively banished in the Napoleonic manner to some remote corner of the earth’s surface. But the Americans were opposed and the French were unenthusiastic. These divergences, together with differences among British policy-makers themselves, condemned the extradition campaign to failure, and the issue gradually died away after March 1920.76
In the meanwhile, the ex-Kaiser and his dwindling entourage had moved from Amerongen, where they had been the guests of Count Bentinck, a phenomenally obliging Dutch nobleman, to the more spacious and stately Huis Doorn, where Wilhelm was to remain until his death. The strain of the extradition proceedings together with early fears of a communist takeover in Holland, a botched kidnap attempt and rumours of impending assaults on the residence by infiltrators had taken their toll on the health of the empress. More pragmatic and focused than Wilhelm, she did not share his ability to take refuge in the realms of fantasy and suffered more acutely under the uncertainties of their condition. She died on 11 April 1921 and her body was translated, at her own wish, to Germany, where the republican government agreed that she could be buried in the royal mausoleum at the Neues Palais in Potsdam. As the cortège progressed across northern Germany – by night, at the insistence of the German authorities – mourners turned out in astonishing numbers to watch it pass, forming, it was said, ‘an unbroken human chain’ across the country. In Berlin, observers reported a gathering of at least 200,000 mourners, many of whom had camped out overnight to get a good view. It was a demonstration that testified not only to the substantial reserves of royalist feeling in the German population during the early Weimar Republic, but also to the special place that ‘Dona’ had won in the affections of the public.77
Wilhelm’s genuine devastation at the empress’s death did not prevent him from remarrying just over eighteen months later, and the household at Doorn soon settled into an agreeable, if rather dull, routine. Imperial titles
and some vestiges of court ritual were retained – within the boundaries of the estate, Wilhelm remained the ‘German Kaiser’ and the ‘King of Prussia’. He occupied himself with the chopping and sawing of wood, wide reading, especially in popular science and archaeology, and the writing of self-exculpatory memoirs. He collaborated with publicists willing to promote a positive image of his reign, granting interviews to favoured writers or editing the manuscripts of friendly biographical works. He coordinated a ‘research association’ that concerned itself with grand cultural–historical speculations drawn from the ambit of the then fashionable field of ‘cultural morphology’. And he conducted a voluminous correspondence now scattered across the archives of Europe and the United States.
One of the central preoccupations that emerges from this correspondence is a desire to fix blame on specific persons and groups for the collapse and humiliation of Germany and for his own fall from the throne. As John Röhl, Lamar Cecil and Willibald Gutsche have shown, the Jews figured large in Wilhelm’s explanatory scenarios. The Weimar Republic, he declared in a letter of 1925, had been ‘prepared by the Jews, made by the Jews and maintained by Jewish pay’; the revolution which inaugurated the republic, he told two of his correspondents, was an act of ‘betrayal by the German people, deceived and lied to by a pack of Jews’.78 There were also other, more disturbing, utterances that suggested an affinity with the racial thought of Nazism: ‘Jews and mosquitoes’ were ‘a nuisance that humankind must get rid of some way or other’, Wilhelm wrote to his American friend Poultney Bigelow in 1925, and added: ‘I believe the best thing would be gas!’79 These remarks have understandably attracted special notice. John Röhl in particular has argued that an increasingly radical anti-Semitism runs like a red thread through the Kaiser’s adult life and has proposed that Wilhelm was ‘a sort of precursor of Adolf Hitler, the missing link, so to speak, between the “Blood and Iron Chancellor” and the Führer’.80
Nothing can qualify the repugnance we feel when we, as witnesses of what the Nazi regime visited upon the Jews of Europe between 1938 and 1945, encounter this kind of language. And yet Röhl’s conclusion seems to me in some respects problematic. Firstly, there is the question of what it would mean to be a ‘missing link’ between Bismarck and Hitler, given that the latter’s intellectual biography was rooted in the very different political and ideological environment of Habsburg Austria. Nor can it be said that Wilhelm in any sense paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power – as we shall see, suspicion and hostility were the dominant notes in his attitude to the Nazi movement. Then there is the question as to whether Wilhelm’s place in history can be defined in the way Röhl suggests by commitment to a racial, anti-Semitic world-view. It is certainly the case, as Röhl and others have shown, that Wilhelm shared the anti-Semitic prejudices that were so widely held within the German – and other European – elites throughout his adult life. On the other hand, as Lamar Cecil and Werner Mosse have pointed out, Wilhelm cultivated close friendships with prominent wealthy Jews – the so-called Kaiserjuden, who included the shipbuilder Albert Ballin, the bankers Max Warburg, Carl Fürstenberg and Ludwig Max Goldberger, the ‘Cotton-King’ James Simon, the coal magnate Eduard Arnhold and others. To be sure, these relationships were partly utilitarian, in the sense that they sometimes involved soliciting funds in support of various pet causes. But they also reflected Wilhelm’s genuine interest in, and respect for, men who had acquired wealth by their own efforts. They were also a source of the kind of impartial information on economic matters that he could never trust his ministers to give him. Finally, the Jewish business magnates, with their worldliness and vigour, were a refreshing alternative to the sometimes torpid atmosphere of the entourage. Wilhelm allowed himself to be seen walking and talking with these figures in public, he sat next to them at banquets, praised and thanked them in speeches, chatted with them in synagogues.81
It is worth dwelling briefly on the intensity of these associations. While government ministers complained of how difficult it was to gain access to the Kaiser, Wilhelm found the time for long meetings with Walther Rathenau (chairman of the supervisory board of AEG from 1912); there were at least twenty meetings with Rathenau during the last years before the outbreak of war, many of them lasting several hours. Wilhelm was a frequent guest at the Hamburg home of the ‘Ocean-Jew by Imperial Appointment’, Albert Ballin, visiting the family up to six times a year.82 He consulted Franz von Mandelssohn in the Berlin Grunewald to get tips for the interior fittings of newly acquired properties. Whereas the first two German Kaisers ennobled only two Jews during the years 1871–1888, Wilhelm II ennobled seven. In addition to these there were a number of converted Jews among those men of commerce and industry who accounted for a growing proportion of those ennobled during the Kaiser’s reign. This socially open and relatively modern approach to elite-building did not escape the attention of contemporaries such as the Alldeutsche nationalist and anti-Semite Heinrich Class. In his widely read pamphlet of 1912, ‘If I were the Kaiser’, Class (writing under a pseudonym) asked his readers how it was possible that ‘he [the Kaiser] became an even worse sponsor of the Jews than his instinctless uncle Edward, drawing nouveau-riche Jewish entrepreneurs, bankers and merchants into his orbit and even asking their advice’.83 Indeed, the Kaiser’s preference for these talented representatives of modern economic and industrial life gave rise – particularly among the lesser Prussian nobility – to a growing sense of alienation from the court, which appeared in their eyes as the refuge of a Jewish elite of finance magnates presided over by a ‘liberal’ Kaiser who had broken ranks with the old nobility.84
Wilhelm’s anti-Semitism was reactive – it tended to peak at times when he felt under assault, especially from the press, as during the Stoecker affair, for example, or in the aftermath of the Daily Telegraph and Eulenburg crises, when he focused his venom above all on the critical Jewish journalist Maximilian Harden. But at no time did he attempt to curtail through legislation the freedoms gained by German Jews under the emancipation laws of 1869. More importantly, there is no evidence that he ever planned or seriously wished to do so. He publicly rejected and dissociated himself from the anti-Semitic positions adopted by the Conservative Party in the early 1890s. In 1896 he disregarded the view of his ministers in supporting Karl Julius von Bitter, a civil servant of Jewish background, for appointment as Prussian minister of trade. Hohenlohe, by contrast, had rejected Bitter as an ‘ambitious Jew’ and threatened that if Bitter entered the ministry ‘through one door’, he (Hohenlohe) would ‘leave through the other’.85 In the aftermath of the colonial crisis of 1904–7, Wilhelm became an enthusiast of Bernhard Dernburg, the Jewish secretary of state for colonial affairs.
The flight into exile marked a crucial break. As Willibald Gutsche has observed, Wilhelm’s increasingly intense preoccupation with the ‘Jewish question’ was no ‘singular phenomenon’.86 Racial anti-Semitism swiftly gained ground in right-wing circles during the last years of the war and exploded in the early years of the Weimar Republic, intensified by the experience of a German revolution in which Jews were perceived as having played a prominent role. In Wilhelm’s case, a bitterness nurtured by many Germans over the disasters that had befallen the nation was admixed with a personal rancour that reflected his own unique connectedness with events. Wilhelm was intellectually and emotionally incapable of self-criticism. His was an ‘extrapunitive personality’: the blame for personal misfortunes always rested with others, and the knowledge that he was widely held to be the chief author of the war and of his empire’s ignominious termination merely reinforced the need to deflect guilt and responsibility from himself. Seen through the lens of anti-Semitism, the painful upheavals of his reign all fell reassuringly into place: the Harden campaign against Eulenburg, for example, was the first stage of a ‘Jewish’ campaign against the monarchy that had culminated in the revolution of 1918, the collapse of the western front, the premature death of his wife and so on.87 Cocooned in the unreal world of imperi
al Doorn, where he lived daily with the consequences of his failure, Wilhelm found in the vicious fantasies of racial anti-Semitism the easy answers he needed to the difficult questions that haunted him.
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