World War One, Kaiser Wilhelm II
b. Jan. 27, 1859, Potsdam, near Berlin
d. June 4, 1941, Doorn, Neth.
German IN FULL FRIEDRICH WILHELM VIKTOR ALBERT, German emperor (kaiser) and king of Prussia from 1888 to the end of World War I in 1918, known for his frequently militaristic manner as well as for his vacillating policies.
William II (1859-1941, ruled 1888-1918), the last German emperor, gave up his throne when Germany was defeated in World War I. He was the grandson of William I and the eldest son of Frederick III. His mother was Princess Victoria, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England. Both his grandfather and his father died in 1888 (Frederick III reigned only three months). William was 29 years old when his father's sudden death brought him to the throne as king of Prussia and emperor of Germany.
From birth William had a crippled left arm, but he had enormous energy and as a schoolboy took the motto "If I rest, I rust." At school he acted like a prince and was treated like one. He had ability much above the average. He had many interests, ranging from art and music to science and technology, but he spent little time in serious study. At 20 he began military training and became one of the most dashing officers in the army. When he was 22 he married the young German princess, Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Six sons and a daughter were born to them.
When William II came to the throne, Bismarck, his grandfather's "iron chancellor," was still the chief minister. William had always admired Bismarck, but he forced his resignation in 1890 and chose as his advisers men who were more willing to follow his lead. It was a tradition of the house of Hohenzollern, he said on one occasion, "to consider ourselves as designed by God to govern the peoples over which it is given us to reign."
Germany at this time was forging rapidly ahead to become a great industrial nation. To win for Germany a place among the world powers, William wanted a strong navy as well as army. Before 1900 he began to develop a fleet to rival that of the British. The British then began to increase the number and size of their ships, and other European powers followed their example. Armies also were enormously increased as the nations became engaged in an armaments race.
William continued Bismarck's policy in maintaining the Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy. In 1914, when the heir to the Austrian throne was murdered, he determined to help Austria get satisfaction from Serbia. At the same time, he tried to keep Austria from declaring war on Serbia. He sent personal telegrams to Czar Nicholas II in an effort to keep Russia from going to Serbia's aid. His efforts failed. Germany, along with the major powers of Europe, was drawn into World War I. Although he was nominally the German supreme commander during the war, he did not interfere when his generals took the conduct of the war into their hands. His laxness diminished the chance for a negotiated peace.
In November 1918, when the Germans were retreating, William was on the Western Front. Before the armistice was signed he abdicated his throne and stole away to the neutral Netherlands. He spent the rest of his life there, living in seclusion first in Amerongen and later in Doorn. His wife died in 1921, and the next year he married the widowed Princess Hermine of Schonaich-Carolath. He died during World War II on June 4, 1941. Adolf Hitler gave him a military funeral
Youth and early influences.
William was the eldest child of Crown Prince Frederick (later Emperor Frederick III) and Victoria, the eldest child of Britain's queen Victoria. He was born with a damaged left arm; the limb never grew to full size, and some historians have found the clue to his behavior in this disability.
A more influential cause lay in his parentage. His father was honorable, intelligent, and considerate but had neither the will nor the stamina needed to dominate. That lack was not shared by his wife, who had acquired from her father, the Prince Consort, seriousness of purpose and from her mother, emotion and obstinacy. Her intellect was hopelessly at the mercy of her feelings, and she took rapid likes and dislikes. She tried to force on her son the outlook of a 19th-century British Liberal and bring him up as an English gentleman. The result, however, was to make him sympathetic to those who were urging him to fulfill the ideal that the Prussian people had formed of a ruler--firm, brave, frugal, just and manly, self-sacrificing but also self-reliant.
Difficult as William's relations with his mother were, she left a deep and lasting mark on him. He was never able to shake off the respect instilled into him in the nursery for liberal values and habits of life. To be the tough warrior-king did not come naturally to him, yet this was the role to which he felt he must live up, and the result was that he overdid it. Inclination and a sense of duty (inculcated by a Calvinist tutor) were alternating in him continually, each managing to frustrate the other. The tension between the two, superimposed on his physical disability, is the ultimate explanation of his taut, restless, and irresolute character. In 1881 William married Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, a plain, unimaginative person with few intellectual interests and no talents, who bored him and encouraged his reactionary tendencies but all the same represented a point of stability in his life, besides presenting him with six sons and a daughter.
William as emperor
Seven years later, William's grandfather William I died at the age of 90. Liberals had long hoped, and conservatives feared, that when the Crown Prince came to the throne, he would alter the constitution by making the chancellor responsible to the Reichstag. But by the time Frederick became emperor, he was dying of cancer. Thus, William, who showed little sympathy for his parents in their bitter crisis, found himself kaiser at the age of 29.
In March 1890 William drove Bismarck into resigning as chancellor. Bismarck had found brilliant answers to the problems facing him when he first took office but in doing so had given the Prussian upper classes a veto on political change and had made France Germany's implacable enemy. He was not at 75 the man to solve the problems he had largely brought about in creating the German Empire, so that William's action would have been justifiable if he himself had been in possession of a solution. As it was, however, he dropped vague plans for helping the working classes as soon as he ran into court opposition, and he allowed Bismarck's successors to decide against renewing his 1887 Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. Superficially, this decision again could be justified, but it opened the way for Russia in 1891 to make its alliance with France.
For four years after Bismarck's departure, Leo, Graf von Caprivi, as chancellor, tried unsuccessfully to find a policy that would be acceptable both to the Reichstag (lower house of the parliament) and to the ruling classes. He was followed by the aged prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who fared no better. In 1897 William appointed the debonair Bernhard, Fürst von Bülow, as foreign secretary and in 1900 made him chancellor; the intention was that Bülow would persuade the Reichstag to accept the policies that the Kaiser and the upper classes chose to adopt. This did little or nothing to bring about the political changes that Germany's very rapid industrialization called for. Instead, Bülow was allowed to divert attention by an exciting foreign policy.
Foreign policies.
British anger had already been aroused by a telegram that, on the advice of his foreign secretary, William had sent in 1896 to Pres. Paul Kruger of the South African Republic, congratulating him on defeating the British-led Jameson raid; and alarm followed anger as the implications of the German Naval Bills of 1897 and 1900 sank in. The Kaiser often indignantly denied that Germany was challenging Britain's domination of the seas, but there is clear evidence that this was in fact the aim of Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz, whom he made secretary of the navy in 1897. When in 1904 Britain settled its outstanding disputes with France, the Kaiser, at Bülow's suggestion, went to Tangier the following year to challenge France's position in Morocco by announcing German support for Moroccan independence. His hopes of thereby showing that Britain was of no value as an ally to France were disappointed at the 1906 Algeciras Conference, at which the Germans were forced to accept French predominance in Morocco.
In 1908 William caused great excitement in Germany by giving, after a visit to England, a tactless interview to The Daily Telegraph, telling his interviewer that large sections of the German people were anti-English. He had sent the text beforehand to Bülow, who had probably neglected to read it and who defended his master very lamely in the Reichstag. This led William to play a less prominent role in public affairs, and, feeling that he had been betrayed by Bülow, he replaced him with Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Bethmann's attempts to reach agreement with Britain failed because Britain would not promise neutrality in a war between Germany and France unless Germany would limit its fleet. This the Kaiser and Tirpitz refused to allow. The Moroccan (Agadir) crisis of 1911, in which Germany again tried to intervene in Morocco against French encroachment, might have led to war if Germany (with the encouragement of the Kaiser) had not given way.
Role in World War I.
World War I began as an attempt to save Austria-Hungary from collapse; it was transformed into a world conflict by Germany. William, having encouraged the Austrians to adopt an uncompromising line, took fright when he found war impending but was not able to halt the implementation of the mobilization measures that he had allowed his generals to prepare. During the war, although nominally supreme commander, he did not attempt to resist his generals when they kept its conduct in their own hands. He encouraged, instead of challenging, the grandiose war aims of the generals and of many politicians that ruled out all chance of a compromise peace. By the autumn of 1918 he realized that Germany had lost the war but not that this had made the loss of his throne inevitable. Refusing to abdicate, his hand was finally forced on November 9, when he was persuaded to seek asylum in The Netherlands. He thus avoided captivity and perhaps death but also by this move made impossible the retention of a monarchy in Germany. He lived quietly as a country gentleman in The Netherlands until his death in 1941.
William often bombastically claimed to be the man who took the decisions. It is true that the German constitution of 1871 put two important powers in his hands. First, he was responsible for appointing and dismissing the chancellor, the head of the civil government. Admittedly, the chancellor could only govern if he could get a majority in the Reichstag, but this limitation on the emperor's freedom of choice was more apparent than real, because most members of the Reichstag felt it their loyal duty to support whomever the Kaiser appointed. Secondly, the German Army and Navy were not responsible to the civil government, so that the Kaiser was the only person in Germany who was in a position to see that the policy followed by the soldiers and sailors was in line with that pursued by the civil servants and diplomats. Thus, British journalists and publicists had some justification when during and immediately after the war they portrayed the Kaiser as Supreme War Lord, and therefore the man who, more than anyone else, decided to make war.
As time passes, however, historians are increasingly coming to see William as an accomplice rather than an instigator. In the years after 1890 the German upper and middle classes would have wanted a larger say in the world's councils no matter who had been on the throne, and this "urge to world power" was almost bound to bring them into collision with some of the existing great powers. The chief real criticism to be made of the Kaiser is that, instead of seeing this danger and using his influence to restrain German appetites, he shared those appetites and indeed increased them, particularly by his determination to give Germany a navy of which it could be proud. He was a quick-witted, well-meaning man who went with the stream instead of having the vision and strength of judgment to stand out against it.
