#944 What happened to Kaiser Wilhelm?

What happened to Kaiser Wilhelm? He was given asylum in the Netherlands, where he lived until he died in 1941.

Wilhelm became Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia in 1888. Germany was not a unified country until after the end of World War 1. What we know now as Germany was a collection of small kingdoms, the most powerful of which was Prussia. He had been kaiser, which is the German word for emperor, for 26 years when World War 1 started on July 28, 1914. He was 59 years old when the war ended, and Germany surrendered. He didn’t sign the armistice on November 11, 1918 because he had abdicated two days earlier on November 9. By the end of the war, 20 million people had died and 21 million had been wounded. Wilhelm was blamed for starting the war and all of these deaths, but he was allowed to go free. At the end of World War 2, most of the German leaders were tried as war criminals, and if the Allies had got their hands on Hitler, he would have been as well. So, what happened to Kaiser Wilhelm, and why wasn’t he tried as a war criminal?

The second part of that question is easy to answer. In 1918, when the war ended, the concept of “war criminal” did not exist. The idea of prosecuting people for crimes committed during war only started after World War 2 and was brought about by the German murder of millions of Jews and other people, and the Japanese treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. The international criminal tribunal to try all of the people responsible began after that and has existed ever since. At the end of World War 1, that concept didn’t exist, and it was the sovereign right of any leader to conduct war with any other country for any reason. Justice could be carried out by the victors, but it wouldn’t be carried out in a court of law. That being said, there was an attempt by the Allies to arrest and try Wilhelm for crimes. There was no system to do it though and, before they could arrest him, he had fled to the Netherlands, which was neutral, and he could not be extradited. What would have happened if the Allies could have arrested him is anyone’s guess and would most likely have been victor’s justice rather than legal justice. It is also difficult to say how responsible Wilhelm actually was for the war. He was responsible for the arms race with Britain and he did encourage the war. He also tried to direct it in the beginning, but he soon began to delegate everything and had very little to do with the running of the war. This in itself is a big reason why things went the way they did.

So, where did Wilhelm go? By the summer of 1918, most people in Germany knew that the war couldn’t be won. The war had very quickly become a war of attrition by 1915 that Germany had never had any hope of winning, but when the Americans joined, they knew there was no solution. The Americans were starting to amass and deploy a huge number of troops and enormous quantities of equipment. The army were in dire straits but Germany was being blockaded and there were also fuel and food shortages back home. In late 1918, President Woodrow Wilson released a list of points that had to be satisfied before peace could be reached and one of those was the overthrowing of the monarchy. For all these reasons, Kaiser Wilhelm had lost all of his support in the military, the government, and with the public. In late 1918, different groups of people began to revolt in Berlin. These groups coalesced into the German Revolution that lasted until 1919. They demanded the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, but he refused. On 9 November, the Chancellor of Germany announce Wilhelm’s abdication, even though Wilhelm hadn’t consented. The Kaiser held out, but he had lost all of his support and knew there was no way he could hang on as emperor. On November 10 he fled to the Netherlands by train. There is a famous photograph of him and his entourage on the platform at Eijsden station, on the border of the Netherlands. He was trying to get permission from Queen Wilhelmina to stay in the Netherlands. Permission was granted and he crossed the border. He finally agreed to the abdication on November 28.

He lived the last twenty-three years of his life at a country house in Doorn, that he bought with his own money. He escaped Germany with 6 train carloads of art, furniture, antiques, and silver. He was a very wealthy person. He lived in his country house and constantly hoped that he would be restored to his throne. He wrote a volume of his memoirs, trying to show that he was not guilty of any crimes in the war. Britain and France tried to halfheartedly extradite him, but the Netherlands refused. It appears that everybody was happy with this decision because they didn’t want to upset the status quo. The leaders of the Allied countries may also have been worried about setting a precedent where the leader of a country that lost a war could be tried for crimes and even hanged. When the Nazis rose to power, Wilhelm hoped that they would bring him back to the throne, but Hitler quickly realized that he didn’t want to be under anybody. Hiler also blamed Wilhelm for Germany’s defeat at the end of the war. Wilhem was not a fan of the Nazis and their methods, but he was very impressed by their victories across Europe and what he saw as returning Germany to her rightful place. He even tried to take credit for it, saying that the generals that led the armies had been lieutenants in his army and had learned under him. He died in 1941 at the age of 82. And this is what I learned today.

Image By Oscar Tellgmann – This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) as part of a cooperation project. The German Federal Archive guarantees an authentic representation only using the originals (negative and/or positive), resp. the digitalization of the originals as provided by the Digital Image Archive., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5418547

Source

https://www.history.com/news/wwi-kaiser-wilhelm-war-crimes-leipzig-trial

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/overview/crimes_1.shtml

https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/kaiser-turned-woodcutter-hundred-years-ago-the-last-german-emperor-moved-into-a-dutch-country-house

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_II