The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis, Stephan Milanowski, Allen Lane, £40

One day in 1923, five years into his ‘vengeful exile’, the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II came across a pig, doffed his cap, and said ‘My dear little swine’ three times, as if reciting an incantation. That may seem innocuous enough, perhaps even endearing. But, in fact, he was participating in a tradition well-known in army circles: the supreme commander, according to superstition, would ensure victory by greeting a pig every time he saw one behind German lines on enemy territory. For the ex-kaiser, as he smouldered away in the Netherlands, the Great War still wasn’t over.

Wilhelm II cuts a pathetic figure in Stephan Malinowski’s The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis, recently translated from the German by Jefferson Chase. After his abdication, he seems not to have known what to do with himself. Neither did his pitiable sons. Malinowski’s protagonist is the Crown Prince, confusingly also named Wilhelm; ‘in him’, said Count Harry Kessler, ‘the genetic debility of the Hohenzollerns has taken on nearly monumental proportions’. The ex-kaiser is largely kept in the background, nursing his delusions of grandeur (he is Don Quixote, with his lackey, Sigurd von Islemann, a ‘north German Sancho Panza’) and occasionally launching into antisemitic diatribes. At one point, in 1934, we find him ranting and raving to Randolph Churchill about his plans to team up with the Japanese, rid the world of Bolshevism, and declare a new world order from the Kremlin.

The mock-court at Doorn kept up all the intrigue one would expect from a decadent royal family. The ex-Kaiser’s sister Viktoria made herself a laughing-stock in 1927 when she married a Russian swindler named Alexander Zoubkoff, a man 35 years her junior. In 1920, Prince August Wilhelm, who was probably a homosexual, divorced his wife, Alexandra zu Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, partly on the grounds that, in his doctor’s judgement, she was a nymphomaniac. That same year another of the princes, Joachim, killed himself, leaving behind a young son; a bitter custody battle ensued. Then, a few years later, the family was rocked by yet another acrimonious divorce, this time between Prince Eitel Friedrich and Sophia Charlotte, later to marry a humble policeman.

These anecdotes are colourful and entertaining, but Malinowski’s subject is a serious one, and his book a shot, perhaps the final one, in a long-running culture war. In 1991 Louis Ferdinand – the eldest son of Crown Prince Wilhelm, and at his birth the third in line to the Kaiserreich – petitioned the freshly unified German government for compensation. Matters were complicated by a law excluding the descendants of those who ‘significantly abetted’ the Nazi regime from restitution. Did the House of Hohenzollern significantly abet the Nazi regime?

Malinowski was one of many historians summoned to ponder this question, and he answers with a resounding ‘yes’. He picks apart the evaluation of Wolfram Pyta and Rainer Orth, the pair of scholars hired by the Hohenzollerns to press their case. They had already got a good drubbing in 2019. The comedian Jan Böhmermann, the German John Oliver, ruthlessly mocked the new head of the House of Hohenzollern on his show; he sardonically gave Georg Friedrich an ‘Eier aus Stahl’ (‘balls of steel’) award for his audacity in asking for compensation. He cracked wise about Wilhelm II being like Trump (what would his Twitter account have looked like?) and ends the segment on the more sombre subject of imperial Germany’s genocide of the Herero people, who are in his view more deserving of compensation. And he encouraged his viewers to Google ‘Hohenzollern.lol’, where they could read the previously confidential historians’ reports, including that of Pyta and Orth.

Their report claimed that the Crown Prince ‘played a thoroughly active part in preventing a Hitler chancellorship’ and was close ‘right from the start to resistance networks that were forming’. But there is no evidence for any of this. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The weight of Malinowksi’s case for the prosecution, tearing apart a century’s worth of Hohenzollern-funded PR, leaves one wondering why it was a matter of debate to begin with.

Here is a small sample of what we know. The Crown Prince endorsed Hitler in the presidential election of 1932. Shortly after Hitler came to power, in 1933, he wrote to a friend that he would ‘smack anyone in the gob who tries to introduce unrest and mistrust’ into the new government. In a letter written after the Night of the Long Knives, he wrote of the ‘enormous debt of gratitude that the German people owes to Adolf Hitler’. August Wilhelm was ahead of the curve: he joined the NSDAP and the SA as early as 1930. The House of Hohenzollern did not permit Malinowski access to their family archives; one wonders how many other smoking guns he might have found if they had.

It was, however, a rather one-sided game of footsie. The Nazis, unlike other elements on the German right, never had a taste for monarchism. Göring wanted monarchist groups banned and dissolved: ‘Monarchy and republic are both alien to us – both have failed.’ When, in 1937, the Crown Prince and his wife received a standing ovation at the Berlin opera house, Goebbels censored all mention of it in the press. Wilhelm II liked to fantasise about returning in splendour, like King Arthur, or Frederick Barbarossa awaking from his Kyffhäuser slumber. ‘Huis Doorn confines Wilhelm II like the mountain prison walls the red-bearded Kaiser’, wrote the ex-Kaiser’s second wife in 1927; ‘but, unlike Barbarossa, he never sleeps.’ It was a potent myth indeed, but it was Hitler, not he, who was able to exploit it and, however momentarily, play the role of the restorer of Germany’s European empire.

Still, the support of the Hohenzollerns meant something to the Nazi regime. In his 1932 book Hitler’s Way, Theodor Heuss, later president of West Germany, described them as part of the ‘advertising books’ of national socialism; their function was to make it palatable to conservative elites. And they may also have helped to appeal to the masses, too; the Crown Prince once boasted that his endorsement of Hitler in 1932 had delivered him two million votes. ‘The road to Auschwitz’, the historian Ian Kershaw remarked, ‘was built by hate, but paved with indifference.’ Malinowski gives us good reason to favour its recent revision: ‘the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but it was paved with collaboration’.