FREE BOOK PREVIEW: The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis.

Over the next week or so I have a couple of free looks at new books for you, where essentially you get to try before you buy. I wouldn’t normally run two so close together, but they are equally as exciting, for different reasons, so I’ve decided to bend my own rules and run with it.

The first dropped on my doormat with a particularly loud thud, because it’s massive, and it sits in my wheelhouse for multiple reasons. The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration has been published by Allen Lane, and I think the thing that made it immediately appealing is that it’s written by a German. A brave German. Not only that, but this uncomfortable piece of history has achieved bestseller status in Germany, so he’s clearly doing something right. Stephan Malinowski is currently at the University of Edinburgh, but he was born in Berlin, and had previously written about members of the nobility flirting with Nazis. This, however is the big one.

A phenomenal amount of work has gone into this. I’ve previously written about Wilhelm II and his silly rhetoric, and how he was utterly unfit for the role to which he was born in both my George V in WW1 book and online. I recently made that article free to read, as it has so many parallels with some of the stuff being spouted by the far right today. You can see that here:

Plumbing completely to the bottom of the murky depths of the Hohenzollerns, who had been about for around a millennia, and their dealings with the Nazis was something I never wanted to touch, so I will be eternally grateful that Malinowski has done it for us, not only because he has done it in a manner that is meticulous in research, but also definitive in results.

The Hohenzollerns were punted off their throne in 1918, when order crumbled in Germany as defeat in the First World War loomed and the Kaiser scurried off into Exile in the Netherlands. He would never return, and yet, the assumption that that was the end of it, and he and his heirs were silent and without influence in the years that followed; or that the Hohenzollern voice was limited to silly spats between a forgotten Emperor and an upstart Austrian in a battle of epic narcissism is wrong.

In the words of the publisher…

Stephan Malinowski's German bestseller is an extraordinary work of recovery. He shows for the first time how it suited both the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to view the Hohenzollerns with contempt, yet how in reality the royal family's tacit approval of the Nazis influenced the views and actions of millions of Germans.

With forensic and often shocking detail, Malinowski reveals that, far from being ridiculous, marginal figures, the Hohenzollerns lay at the heart of Germany's ongoing nightmare. Despite formally losing power, the members of the royal family remained prominent, catastrophically allowing many other conservative Germans to stay distanced from the new republic and to eventually betray conservative traditions and values. Battered from both left and right, the Republic collapsed in 1933 in part because conservative forces, fearful of both Communism and Fascism, had abandoned their own principles just as much as the leading members of the former royal family had, who were themselves beguiled by and fooled by Hitler.

All of which would mean, that if the author is right, that ineptitude had even further reaching consequences than I had imagined. That in fact, they continued to play a leading role in a catastrophic German century long after their dynasty should have been consigned to the dustbin of historical ignominy. I think in this instance, the best sneak preview I can give you is the author’s explanation of all of this, to show you exactly what you’d be getting:

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n the autumn of 1923, a member of the exiled German royal family set off in his sports car on a long journey. He would have to drive some 1,000 kilometres from the Dutch island of Wieringen to one of his family's ancestral homes, a Renaissance castle in the German province of Silesia. The day before he had started this trip, he had sent his father a letter full of confidence about the family's future prospects. On that very same day a political parvenu, while in hiding in the Alpine village of Uffing on the shores of the Staffelsee, composed his political testament. He even contemplated suicide. Two days later, he was arrested.

Before making his way back to his home country, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, former crown prince of the German Empire, had posted the letter to his father, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had for some five years also been living in Dutch exile. In the meantime, Adolf Hitler, the leader of an extreme right-wing splinter party, had gone down to defeat, together with his allies in the Bavarian capital, in a hail of gunfire from the Munich police. This was the end of an early, violent attempt to bring down the Weimar Republic. Both events, the return of the crown prince and the failed Munich putsch, made the front pages of the world's press.

There was no connection between either the events or the men in question. These two enemies of German democracy represented opposed poles of society and came from vastly different social backgrounds. One of the few things common to the Prussian former army group commander and the ex-private from Austria was that they both began agitating against the Weimar Republic at the same time. But their starting points couldn't have been more dissimilar.

At this juncture in history, the significance of these two events remained unclear. It would have been difficult to imagine that the future belonged to the Nazi movement while the German royal family would be left with little more than the past.This book investigates how the social milieus of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and Adolf Hitler converged and how various segments of the anti-democratic Right in Germany collaborated with one another. It will tell this story from the perspective of the Hohenzollerns, who before being deposed in November 1918 had been one of the most powerful families in Europe. The focus will be on three generations: that of the Kaiser, Wilhelm II (1859-1941), that of his eldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882-1951), and that of the crown prince's six children, among whom his second son, Louis Ferdinand (1907-94), possessed the greatest historical significance…

Post-1789 France is an example of how a nobility toppled by revolution can reinvent itself in 'de-aristocratized society', recasting and relocating itself between adaptation and counter-revolution? After 1918, the same challenge was thrust upon the German aristocratic dynasties and their members, who had lost their centuries-old functions and roles almost overnight. Part of this story is the German nobility's reaction to the extraordinarily deep caesurae Germany went through in 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1990. Every one of these historical ruptures required an immense amount of adaptation and the creation of new figures to publicly represent the Hohenzollerns' self-image as a family. Often, they were accompanied by a new Head of the House', as the leading family member was known in aristocratic jargon.

As is the case throughout the history of the nobility, tropes and techniques, and not just bare facts, are what is most interesting. This book looks at specifically aristocratic forms of memory and representation. It is about estates, castles, hunts and memoirs but also paid family advisors and journalists, lawyers, historians, financial consultants, authors of evaluations and pamphlets, consultants, ghost-writers, spin doctors and public relations specialists. The gap between individuals and public personae is greater with aristocrats than with other social groups - and greatest of all for kings and heirs to the throne. Every biography that goes beyond the private sphere will inevitably place more importance on the figure than the person. Aristocratic personae were created by an effective publicity apparatus and the methods of modern propaganda - and even more by how they were seen and defined by the general public.

The nineteenth-century German poet and critic Heinrich Heine once remarked that aristocracy can only exist if people believe in it.

This is only half true. The various instruments of power at the disposal of the nobility were as real as they were lasting, as many contemptuous adherents of democracy who prematurely dismissed the aristocracy would learn to their own, often physical, dismay.

Even after 1918, millions of Germans retained the sort of faith that allows kings and noblemen to function as such. In theatre, kings are identifiable because of the deference and servility of the actors around them. No aristocracy can make do without representation, ornament and illusion. If aristocracy is indeed considered a kind of theatrical illusion, then the audience necessarily plays a crucial role.

PR work and audience interpretation are crucial factors in whether an individual - be it an heir to the throne or a commoner styling himself as the Führer' - is considered a superhuman messiah or a laughable clown. That's another reason why, in addition to offering a portrait of three generations of the German royal family, this book concentrates on the history of communications between the Hohenzollerns and the general public. From its beginning to its end, the dynastic idea of Prussia carried intense, projected emotional energy. The Hohenzollerns greatest capital was always the rapture they inspired in millions of Germans. That was what granted them special status, which was never fully exhausted.

Before the Wilhelmine Empire collapsed like a house of cards, the Hohenzollerns power naturally went far beyond just the public imagination. In the midst of the First World War, the Cecilienhof Castle - really more of an estate - was opened in the Neuer Garten park in Potsdam. Symbolically, Crown Princess Cecilie had her youngest child baptized and moved into the new residence named after her alone. The ceremony took place on 9 November 1917, one year to the day before the Wilhelmine Empire would fall apart. The baptism was a private family affair. in keeping with the seriousness of the times', newspapers wrote,' and thus without the pomp and circumstance for which the Hohenzollerns were alternately admired and mocked around the world. When construction began on the new residence of Crown Prince Wilhelm and Cecilie, the former Duchess of Mecklenburg, in 1914, it was seen as an intermediary residence for the heir to the throne, whose power and prestige were at their zenith, and his family.

Amidst the ups and downs of the decisive year of 1917, many German navy men believed that Reich submarines were poised to bring down the British Empire and to defy the industrial might of the United States in the Atlantic Ocean. After all, Germany had already achieved military victory on the Eastern Front, and the occupation of the vast area known as 'Ober Ost' had German officers and planners dreaming of colonising Eastern Europe.

At least nominally, Crown Prince Wilhelm commanded Germany's largest army group. And it was the mark of his significance that German newspapers were careful to assure readers that he had only briefly left the field to attend the Potsdam baptism. Part and parcel of the Hohenzollerns' image was the tradition of the Prussian princesses being photographed in military uniforms and the postcards of the prince's four young boys playing with a Gatling gun. But ironically, while the entire Hohenzollern family was at least symbolically at war, a new faux-English royal residence was being built for an heir to the throne who would become one of the most powerful men in the world - but only as long as Germany emerged victorious. This was the role and identity into which Wilhelm of Prussia had been born and for which he had been trained.

The central question of this book is: what was the relationship of the Hohenzollern dynasty to the Weimar Republic and to National Socialism? This question resurfaced in Germany five decades after the end of the Second World War for political and legal reasons. In the early 1990s, the Hohenzollern family filed compensation claims for the Soviet expropriations after 1945. It was the start of a long process of legal discovery conducted, in part, in the public eye.

Historically, this dispute was about the question of whether the last German crown prince had directly or indirectly supported National Socialism. The dispute was the result of a peculiarity of the compensation regulations after German reunification. A 1994 law regulating compensation claims excluded claims if the last owner of the expropriated property had supported the Nazi dictatorship. The total amount in dispute in the case of the Hohenzollerns has been estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. Additionally, historically minded observers were, of course, keenly interested in the question of how one of the formerly most powerful families of the European high nobility had positioned itself in relation to National Socialism.

Malinowski has been part of the most recent discourse surrounding the Hohenzollerns and their reputations, as he explains.

The starting point of my own involvement with the former crown prince's post-1918 activities was an expert evaluation I was commissioned to write by the Ministry of Finance in Potsdam in 2014. For its part, the Hohenzollern family had engaged and financed renowned historians as experts - including Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, one of the leading historians of Germany worldwide, as well as Wolfram Pyta and Rainer Orth, two excellent historians of the periods under discussion. The Hohenzollern family later also co-financed and provided organisational support for an entire monograph by the historian Lothar Machtan. It was launched at considerable expense in the summer of 2021 at a gala featuring a musical band, the acting German minister of finance and the acting 'Head of the House' at Berlin's Kronprinzenpalais, a symbolic location in Berlin's historic centre.

More than other historical debates, the dispute over the Hohenzollern claims played itself out between historical scholarship, jurisprudence, politics and the mass media. By the summer of 2019, the debate had reached a popular audience, not primarily through the work of historians, but rather through an investigative story in the news magazine Der Spiegel and, even more, a satirical segment by the TV comedian Jan Böhmermann. In a November 2019 programme, Böhmermann delivered an extremely cutting polemic against the family's claims to restitution. On his website, he published the four expert evaluations, which had previously been treated as confidential. This episode of Böhmermann's programme now has over 4 million views on YouTube.

By that point, the debate had attracted the attention of nearly all leading German media - newspapers, magazines, television, radio, blogs - as well as international outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Times, The Spectator and Le Figaro. The regional state parliaments of the cities of Berlin and Brandenburg discussed the case, as did the Bundestag, which convened a commission of historical and legal experts. Meanwhile, Hohenzollern family lawyers sued newspapers, politicians and historians in more than eighty lawsuits.

The nature of German law means that the many court cases associated with the Hohenzollerns restitution have to be focused on a lone individual, Crown Prince Wilhelm, forcing complex historical questions into an either/or, black-and-white straitjacket.

This may appear right and necessary from a judicial perspective. But one task of historians is to try to relocate the individual figure in his proper societal setting. The questions surrounding the crown prince inevitably lead us back to his family and the conservative, anti-democratic segments of German society. There is no way to reasonably assess Crown Prince Wilhelm without placing him in the broader, historical context of post-1918 German counter-revolutionary movements.

The German revolution of 1918 may have done away with one of the most powerful dynasties in Europe, but it also made peace offers German aristocrats never accepted. Their refusal to do so is a key factor when historians consider whether the revolution could have more firmly and consistently established democratic principles in Germany. The figure of Wilhelm inevitably raises the issue of the German nobility, a dramatically under-researched topic, and immediately opens up a historical avenue rarely examined by leading scholars of the Weimar Republic. The history of the Hohenzollerns after 1918 is by no means terra incognita. There is a whole series of older and more recent' studies on the German nobility after it was 'abolished' - at least in terms of political power. Nonetheless, and rather inexplicably, the Hohenzollerns and the aristocracy play next to no role at all in the standard histories of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

I never imagined that Little Willy, the Crown Prince, had much significance post WW1 other than writing some ridiculous books based largely on his own imaginary version of events. This book prove the opposite, and honestly, you need to read it to believe it, certainly if you’re given the choice between this balanced account and the narrative that the family themselves have spun for you ever since.

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration, is published by Allen Lane and is available in the UK now. It is released in the US at the end of April.