Wilhelm II

Wilhelm II was the last German emperor and king of Prussia, reigning from 1888 until his abdication in November 1918. A grandson of Queen Victoria, he dismissed Bismarck, set out to make Germany a world power with a great navy and colonies, and through erratic diplomacy helped to isolate his country. His support for Austria-Hungary in July 1914 was a crucial step towards the First World War, which ended with the fall of the German Empire and his flight into exile.

Wilhelm was born on 27 January 1859 in Berlin, the eldest child of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia and Victoria, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. The birth was a breech delivery that nearly killed mother and child and left his left arm withered and some six inches shorter than the right, a disability he spent his life trying to hide. His tutor, the stern Calvinist Georg Hinzpeter, subjected him to a punishing regime of study and riding lessons. He attended a grammar school in Kassel and the University of Bonn, but felt most at home among the officers of the Prussian guards regiments in Potsdam.

His relationship with his liberal, English-born parents was poor. He drifted towards his grandfather, Emperor Wilhelm I, and the chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and came to share the outlook of the Prussian military aristocracy. In 1881 he married Princess Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein, with whom he had six sons and a daughter.

1888 was the "year of three emperors". Wilhelm I died in March at the age of 90, and his son, Frederick III, already dying of throat cancer, reigned for only 99 days. On 15 June 1888 Wilhelm, aged 29, became emperor. He was intelligent, energetic and quick, but also restless, boastful and easily offended, and he believed he ruled by divine right.

He soon clashed with Bismarck, who wanted to continue the anti-socialist laws and keep control of policy himself. In March 1890 Wilhelm forced the old chancellor to resign. His "New Course" was meant to bring personal rule by the emperor, and he made and dismissed ministers, interfered in policy and gave speeches that his officials then had to explain away. The first important decision of the new government was to let the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia lapse, which opened the way for an alliance between Russia and France in 1894.

Under Wilhelm Germany became the leading industrial power on the continent, and he wanted it to have a matching place in the world. With the naval secretary Alfred von Tirpitz he backed the Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900, which aimed to build a battle fleet strong enough to challenge the Royal Navy. The naval race did more than anything to turn Britain against Germany. Germany seized a base at Qingdao in China in 1897 and expanded its Pacific possessions, and in 1900, sending troops against the Boxer rising in China, Wilhelm told them to give no quarter and make the name of Germany feared as the Huns had once been.

In German South West Africa, today's Namibia, the army under General Lothar von Trotha crushed the Herero and Nama uprisings of 1904 to 1908 with a campaign of extermination. Herero were driven into the desert to die of thirst, and survivors were held in concentration camps with very high death rates. Tens of thousands died, perhaps 80 percent of the Herero and half of the Nama. The killings are widely recognised as the first genocide of the twentieth century, and in 2021 the German government acknowledged them as genocide.

Wilhelm's personal diplomacy repeatedly backfired. His telegram of 1896 congratulating President Kruger of the Transvaal on defeating a British raid caused fury in Britain. In March 1905 he landed at Tangier and declared support for the independence of Morocco, hoping to break the new friendship between Britain and France; at the Algeciras conference of 1906 Germany found itself almost isolated. In 1907 his close friend Philipp zu Eulenburg was brought down by accusations of homosexuality, and in 1908 an interview in the Daily Telegraph, full of tactless remarks about the British, caused such an outcry in Germany that the Reichstag demanded limits on his powers and Wilhelm briefly withdrew from public life. A second Moroccan crisis in 1911, when Germany sent a gunboat to Agadir, again drew Britain and France closer.

Wilhelm was a friend of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and was shocked by his murder in Sarajevo. On 5 and 6 July 1914 he and his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, promised Austria-Hungary unconditional support against Serbia, the so-called blank cheque. In the last days of July he made hesitant attempts to avert war, exchanging telegrams with his cousin Nicholas II of Russia, but he did not overrule his generals when Germany declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium. How far Germany and Wilhelm personally bear responsibility for the First World War has been one of the great debates of modern historiography.

As supreme war lord, Wilhelm had little real control over the war. From August 1916 the army high command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff dominated Germany. In autumn 1918, with the army defeated and sailors mutinying in Kiel, revolution spread across Germany. On 9 November the chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, announced the emperor's abdication on his own authority, and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. The next day Wilhelm crossed from army headquarters at Spa, in Belgium, into the Netherlands, and he signed his formal abdication on 28 November.

The Treaty of Versailles called for Wilhelm to be tried for "a supreme offence against international morality", but the Dutch refused to hand him over. He bought a manor house at Doorn, where he spent his last two decades chopping wood, writing memoirs that denied any guilt for the war, and blaming his fall on socialists, foreigners and, in letters full of violent antisemitism, on Jews. After the death of Auguste Viktoria in 1921 he married Hermine Reuss in 1922. He hoped for a time that the Nazis would restore the monarchy, and his son August Wilhelm joined the party, but Adolf Hitler had no such intention. When German troops occupied the Netherlands in 1940, Wilhelm sent Hitler a telegram of congratulation on the fall of France. He died at Doorn on 4 June 1941, aged 82, and was buried there, as he had wished, rather than in a Germany without a monarchy.

For a long time historians saw Wilhelm as a weak and theatrical figure manipulated by others. Later research, above all by his biographer John Röhl, argued that his personal rule mattered a great deal, and that his choices of ministers and his support for the navy and for a forceful foreign policy did much to create the dangerous situation of 1914. Others stress the role of the army, the bureaucracy and German society as a whole. Most agree that his impulsive, boastful style made Germany seem threatening and unpredictable to its neighbours. His story continues in the History of Germany.