Hitler's Royal Servants. Hugo Vickers Book Review

This work is substantial in every sense of the word and one that historians will find most fascinating.

It weighs in at 682 pages (though mercifully for the reviewer the last 200 pages are endnotes). It is a welcome contrast to the tabloid and sensational ‘history’ pushed out by so many authors these days.

I came to the book with some enjoyable preconceptions, having been assured by German friends that the author, Stephan Malinowski, was a brilliant scholar. He was greatly admired by the late John Röhl, who spent decades stitching up the Kaiser, proving that everything about the Kaiser was horrible – he was a horrible little boy, a horrible son and so on into a horrible old age.

I’ve just read War and Peace for the first time, in which Tolstoy stresses that history is a sweep of many things, not just (as it were) the decisions or actions of one man – Napoleon.

And so it was interesting to find this story largely told through the prism of the actions of one man – Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the Kaiser’s son.

The Crown Prince has popped up in my own work, The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon – Duchess of Marlborough. He was one of many who fell head over heels in love with Gladys Deacon at Blenheim in 1901, causing some disruption at the time.

At the beginning of WWI, she wrote him a letter which she left with her maid in Paris, asking him to be merciful should the Germans win Paris. It was not needed. I opened that letter and read it 60 years later.

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis

appeared in Germany at a time when Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia, a great-grandson of the Crown Prince, was involved in a prolonged legal battle, seeking compensation from the State of Brandenburg (formerly Prussia) on the grounds that the Hohenzollerns resisted helping the Nazi regime into power.

Malinowski was employed to counter this and effectively proved quite the opposite – that they were crucial to the rise of the Nazis, collaborating with them in numerous ways.

Prince Georg Friedrich’s lawyers suggested that Malinowski ‘possessed insufficient knowledge of the material’, an assertion effectively disproved by this thoroughly researched book.

The Kaiser stomped about in exile at Doorn, in the Netherlands, increasingly withdrawn from reality, believing till the end that he had a right to return.

The Crown Prince returned to Germany in 1923 rather visibly. And, in 1932, there did appear to be a chance that the Hohenzollerns might be put back on the throne by Hitler, which inevitably greatly influenced the Crown Prince’s actions and the support he gave them.

It was an illusion, of course, but even Winston Churchill wrote, ‘If the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittlesbach and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler. A democratic basis of society might have been preserved by a crowned Weimar in contact with the victorious Allies.’

The author points out that in a Republic any leader can emerge. But, with a monarchy, the question is set by hereditary succession, and the monarchical infrastructure has to be strong enough to carry a weak or useless King.

With the Hohenzollerns, besides their many failings outlined in this book, there were too many candidates and they could not make up their mind which one was to be the designated leader. The Kaiser obviously insisted that he was.

The author quotes the line of Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s biographer: ‘The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.’ He then tells us that this should be revised to ‘It wasn’t paved with indifference. It was paved with collaboration.’ He concludes that the Crown Prince was ‘a morally flexible opportunist and not a racist fanatic’.

Having brought myself up on ghosted memoirs of the Kaiser and his son, and tame biographies by the likes of Klaus Jonas, I found it interesting to read what was really going on. The Hohenzollerns were flawed in almost every respect.

The author makes the valid point that at any time Hitler could have ordered his henchmen to exile, arrest or murder the entire Hohenzollern family, but did not do so. He used them to his advantage.

The last chapter of the book is especially fascinating, as we learn how the amiable Prince Louis Ferdinand and others rewrote the narrative of history in an attempt to downplay, indeed deny, the family’s support of the Nazi regime.

Hugo Vickers is author of Clarissa: Muse to Power – The Untold Story of Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon