The silence at the small Dutch border station of Eist was broken only by the shuffling of boots on the platform. It was the morning of November 10, 1918, and a man in a long military coat stood waiting, surrounded by weary officers. He was not a traveler seeking a connection; he was the most powerful man in Europe, now reduced to a supplicant.
Just days prior, Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia, commanded the loyalty of millions of soldiers. Now, he stood on foreign soil, requesting asylum from a neutral neighbor, unaware that he would never set foot in his own country again, a stranger in exile for nearly 23 more years. The monarchy had not ended with a grand battle or a formal decree, but with a desperate plea at a railway platform.
The story of the German Empire’s downfall often stops at the moment of the Kaiser’s flight. The narrative is simple: the Kaiser flees, the republic is proclaimed, the curtain falls. But for the Hohenzollern family, the dynasty that had forged a nation from Brandenburg sands over five centuries, the fall was not a single event but a slow, grinding process of loss, desperation, and in some cases, moral collapse.
This is the story of what became of the Empress, the six sons, the daughter, and the grandchildren after the world they knew violently dissolved around them.
To grasp the depth of their fall, one must first understand the heights they occupied. The Hohenzollerns had ruled Brandenburg since 1415, wearing a royal crown since 1701. They built a state, first Prussia and then the German Empire, crowned in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871 after the defeat of France.
It was the Reich’s zenith, a victory celebrated in the enemy’s palace. In 1888, Wilhelm II took the throne at 29, ambitious and enamored with the trappings of power. The stability of this world was showcased in 1913 at the wedding of his only daughter, Victoria Louise, which brought the Russian Tsar and the King of England to Berlin.
Three crowned relatives at a family celebration were a final gesture of peace; a year later they were at war with each other.
The collapse began with a flight from his own capital. Wilhelm left Berlin for Spa, Belgium, on October 29, supposedly to the army’s headquarters, but truly to escape the clamor for his abdication. A few days later, the sailors in Kiel mutinied, and the revolution spread from the Baltic to Munich like wildfire.
On November 9, in Berlin, Chancellor Max von Baden announced the Kaiser’s abdication without his consent—a mere press release, a shouted proclamation—to appease the street. The monarchy ended not with a profound declaration, but with bureaucratic noise. When the Army’s leader told Wilhelm it would not fight for him and the army would return to Germany without his command, the Kaiser realized his true power base, the military, was gone.
That is when he made the decision to flee.
Back at the Eichen train station, the people on the platform were hostile, seeing him as the man who brought war to Europe. Yet Queen Wilhelmina of Holland granted him asylum. The Kaiser, a nonagenarian in waiting, went to Castle Amerongen, where he requested a cup of hot English tea as his first act in exile.
It was planned as a three-day stay, but stretched to 18 months, until he formally renounced his crowns in a a salon in mid-November, a signature that legally extinguished 500 years of rule. His son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, had already sought the Netherlands, landing on the barren island of Wiergen.
However, the revolution did not build a scaffold. All 22 German monarchies vanished within weeks, but no royal prince was killed by revolutionary violence. They lost their thrones, not their lives.
That important context becomes crucial later. But the question remained: how does an emperor spend his days when there is no empire to govern? The Allied powers demanded to put Wilhelm on trial for his “supreme offense” against international morality, but the Dutch refused to extradite him.
He was safe but trapped. He bought a mansion in the village of Doorn. Then came a relocation that spoke of the absurdity of his position: 59 railway wagons filled with furniture, paintings, silver, and porcelain arrived from Berlin and Potsdam—an entire empire packed in need of a new home.
In Doorn, the daily life was a theatrical mimicry. A small court society still called him “Majesty.” He read the Bible to the household, but his obsession became the axe.
He chopped wood for hours, despite his paralyzed left arm, felling roughly 11,000 trees in his first year, and giving away signed logs as souvenirs. He was mocked as “The Woodcutter of Doorn.”
But he was never able to see his own culpability in the catastrophe that had broken Germany. His wife, Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, dealt with the loss of her regal role with more difficulty. The shock of the collapse was exacerbated by a personal tragedy.
In 1920, their youngest son, Prince Joachim, committed suicide at age 27 precisely because his world of order and rank had been broken. He was the first violent death in the House, not by a revolutionary, but by the prince’s own desperation. Augusta Victoria never recovered.
She died in Doorn in April 1921. In an absurd scenario, her body was allowed to return to Germany, while her husband could not. A cross-country funeral procession took place over a border that was closed to the living Kaiser.
The Kaiser remarried soon after, to Princess Hermine Reuss, who embraced the role of Empress in a small circle. But the Crown Prince had the hardest time in exile. He spent five years on the island of Wiering, learning the blacksmith’s trade and walking through mud.
He finally returned to Germany under the general amnesty of Chancellor Stresemann in 1923, but the shift to the radical right gave him glimmers of his lost status. In 1932, he made a historic blunder: in the run-up to the presidential elections, he publicly called for the election of Adolf Hitler. He followed this with a highly publicized appearance at the “Day of Potsdam” in 1933, where he stood in uniform while the vacant Kaiser’s box was ostentatiously honored.
The Hohenzollerns were actively lending their name and legitimacy to the Nazis, with hopes of a renewed monarchy. But Hitler never intended to restore the empire, and in 1934, after the murder of the ex-chancellor Schleicher, the Crown Prince realized he had misjudged his allies, moving away from political life.
The old Kaiser, in Doorn, remained paradoxical as history judges—sometimes saying he was ashamed to be German after the pogroms of 1938, but also sending Hitler a teleucongratulatory telegram after the fall of France in 1940. One son, as if to solve the family’s moral ambiguity, took the path of radical fascism. Prussian Prince “Auwi,” an a bit of an Obergruppenführer in the SA, wasn’t just an observer but a propagandist and a showpiece for the Party.
His eventual postwar sentencing was resolute, and he died in 1949 as a man disconnected from any real meaning.
Other sons sheltered themselves in quiet, but the fate of the legacy was sealed when the regime, fearing any competition for loyalty, banned the Prussian princes from active military duty after the funeral of Prince Wilhelm, the young grandson who died in the 1940 campaign. Since so many people honored this prince in a mass act of loyalty, the Nazis saw a threat. The dynasty, even as a symbol, had become truly obsolete.
When the old Kaiser died on June 4, 1941, in a Netherlands under German occupation, his testament was a final act of defiance: he was to not be buried in Germany until the monarchy was re-established. His body was placed in a mausoleum in Doorn, a highly symbolic and suspended existence. Meanwhile, the world must move on, and in February 1945, Crown Princess Cecilie fled from her town to the East, just before the Red Army arrived.
Soon after, the palace she left in Potsdam played host to Truman, Churchill, and Stalin during the fateful post-war meeting to redraw Europe. One son, Louis Ferdinand, who had been introduced to the U. S.
and worked a Ford assembly line in Detroit, had a hope for a more moderate future, but the now modern world also had the best symbol of how much of the line had fallen from grace.
Regarding the broader point, how did the family fare financially? They did not lose everything in 1918. They lost the crown, but not the accounts.
The German states negotiated settlement agreements with the royal houses. Only when the Soviets expropriated their lands without compensation in Germany’s East in 1945 was the financial watershed. This became the long-term conflict for the 21st century.
Georg Friedrich, the current head of the house, a great-great-grandson of the Kaiser, was born in 1976. He has maintained a lifestyle of a businessman, even founding a beer brand. But he also engaged in legal battles to reclaim the family’s lost property, triggering a massive public debate in 2019 when the Hohenzollerns under his leadership sued for the return of and compensation for.
The climax of this final act seemed unexpected. In March 2023, Georg Friedrich announced that he would drop his claim and stop lawsuits because the family’s high level of historical support for National Socialism was an undeniable legal blot that shielded the kingdom from liability, and in a act of prudently, he was looking to discharge the past from the weight of a financial dispute. In 2025, an official state settlement placed the contested art collection into a joint foundation, with the public taking a two-thirds majority and the family gaining a smaller share.
A hundred-year-old, deeply bitter feud ended under the Gesture of a parliamentary man, not a judge.
The legacy of the Emperor may be viewed in various ways. The Hohenzollern castle remains a major tourist destination, the Schatzkammer with the now-symbolic King’s Crown. During the Second World War, a shallow, small, persistent group of monarchists still has an annual commemoration at the mausoleum in Doorn for a dying world.
The Prussian Heritage is strangely present, but behind the barriers of museums and as a family name with no political power. In contrast to other German dynasties, the Bavarian Wittelsbachs went into the camps during the Nazi era; the Hohenzollerns, by one of their own, wore the brown shirt. The choice was individual.
What remains? The descent of a dynasty is not a singular event but a slow, prolonged tragic act. The Hohenzollerns lost their power in 1918, their material wealth in 1945, and the last claims of significance, the recent past, and this decade.
They never died through a violent revolution but through the process of administration. Palaces transformed into museums; subjects transformed into tourists; a dynasty transformed into a legend, a name. At the end of his days, he, Wilhelm, was a man who waited to be allowed across a border, a man waiting for a restoration that will never come.
This is history on a human scale, a family that, by falling, survived, but only as a ghost in the great narrative of a modern state.
