His Ancestors Were German Kings. He Wants Their
Treasures Back.
A public dispute over thousands of artworks and
artifacts could hinge on whether a crown prince supported the Nazis during
their rise to power.
By
Catherine Hickley
March 12,
2021
POTSDAM,
Germany — Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preussen’s quest to recover thousands of
artworks and artifacts that were once in his family’s possession is not going
well.
As the
current head of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which spawned the kings of Prussia
for 300 years and emperors of Germany for half a century, Prinz von Preussen,
44, has been negotiating with officials since 2014 over the ownership of royal
treasures — paintings, sculptures, medals, glass, furniture, tapestries,
porcelain, books and documents — that were confiscated from his family in
eastern Germany after World War II and are now part of museum collections.
Those talks
were conducted in secret until 2019, when documents from the negotiations were
leaked to the news media. The process stalled, and the atmosphere soured.
Officials
in the German states of Berlin and Brandenburg, whose museums hold the disputed
objects, now say a major obstacle to restarting the talks is a slew of
injunctions that Prinz von Preussen has filed against historians and
journalists for publishing what he says is inaccurate information about his
family. These lawsuits, in the states’ view, are stifling a critical debate
about German history and, in particular, the role of Prinz von Preussen’s
great-grandfather in the rise to power of the Nazis. Prinz von Preussen says
this criticism is unfounded.
“I am
confident that we will meet together again, because it is in all of our
interests to reach an agreement,” he said in an interview on Tuesday in his
office in Potsdam, about 20 miles from Berlin. “We have an interest in avoiding
endless court processes that drag on,” he added.
Prinz von
Preussen’s hopes for a negotiated settlement were dealt a blow on Thursday,
when state legislators from Berlin’s governing bloc introduced a motion in the
regional assembly that, if passed, would withdraw the state from the talks.
This would leave the courts as Prinz von Preussen’s only option to continue his
claim.
When news
of Prinz von Preussen’s demands became public, they were characterized in news
media as exorbitant and unrealistic, and he was mocked as “Prince Dumb” on a
satirical German television show. The Left Party pasted posters featuring the
slogan “No gifts for the Hohenzollerns!” around Brandenburg, and, this week, a
petition the party instigated calling for further negotiations to be canceled
collected enough signatures to secure a debate in the legislature of that
state, too.
“The
Hohenzollerns are not just any noble family,” said Torsten Wöhlert, a Berlin
official involved in the talks. “They are the imperial family, and the role
they played in the colonial past, World War I and World War II is always a part
of that.”
Prinz von
Preussen’s great-great-grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was the last emperor of
Germany and by far the richest man in the country before World War I. After
Wilhelm abdicated in 1918, he retained substantial wealth: At least 60 railway
wagons carried furniture, art, porcelain and silver from Germany to his new
home in exile in the Netherlands. The kaiser and his family also held onto
substantial cash reserves and dozens of palaces, villas and other properties.
But after
World War II, the Hohenzollerns’ forests, farms, factories and palaces in East
Germany were expropriated in Communist land reforms, and thousands of artworks
and historical objects were subsumed into the collections of state-owned museums.
Prinz von
Preussen’s claim for restitution was first lodged by his grandfather after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, when thousands of Germans took advantage of new laws
allowing them to seek compensation and restitution for confiscated property.
Officials assessed it for more than 20 years before negotiations with the
family began.
If Prinz
von Preussen pursues the case in court, success could hinge on how much support
his great-grandfather, Crown Prince Wilhelm, gave to the Nazis in the 1930s.
Under German law, if a court deems someone lent the Nazis “substantial
support,” then their family is not eligible for compensation or restitution of
lost property.
The crown
prince hoped that Adolf Hitler would
reinstate the monarchy, and wrote him flattering letters. He defended Hitler’s
anti-Semitic policies and wore a swastika armband in public. If a court were to
agree that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s support for Hitler was “substantial,” then
Prinz von Preussen’s claims would be dismissed.
Prinz von
Preussen said his great-grandfather had “recognized this criminal regime, and
it very quickly became clear that he didn’t have the moral fortitude, or
courage, to go into opposition.” But he questioned whether that amounts to
“substantial” support, adding that this was a “question that has to be cleared
up by legal experts.”
Contrary to
media reports, Prinz von Preussen said, he has no intention of cleaning out
Berlin and Brandenburg’s museums: He was simply fulfilling his family duty by
pursuing the claim.
Yet
officials in those states said Prinz von Preussen had acted aggressively, and
that one of the major obstacles to resuming talks is the legal battle he has
initiated against what he describes as false statements by scholars and media
figures. Six historians, and a number of journalists and media organizations,
as well as the Left Party, have received warnings from Prinz von Preussen’s
lawyers, or become the subjects of injunctions.
“It’s not a
clever strategy,” Wöhlert said. “The prince is very badly advised. He has an
excellent media lawyer who is winning almost every battle in the first round.
But in the end, he is losing the war.”
In the
interview, Prinz von Preussen conceded some mistakes. “After things became very
stormy, we began trying to counter the incorrect reports,” he said. “Now the
original accusations have faded, but there are new accusations that I am trying
to limit freedom of thought or academic freedom. I am reflecting on these in a
self-critical way.”
Prinz von
Preussen has already changed tack once in the dispute. In 2019, when his claims
became public, his proposal that he should have the right to reside in
Cecilienhof, a former royal palace in Potsdam, provoked outrage and ridicule.
Though he quickly retracted it, “with hindsight, it was regrettable,” he said.
More
recently, a Jan. 29 letter that an adviser of Prinz von Preussen wrote to
lawmakers in Brandenburg has been interpreted by some as a threat.
The letter
refers to items that the Hohenzollern family owns without dispute that are on
loan to Berlin and Brandenburg museums, including a ceremonial sword, cases for
crown jewels, and portraits of Prussian officers. Those objects, the letter
said, are in demand elsewhere in the country and “could just as well be
exhibited in an appropriate context” outside Berlin and Brandenburg.
Manja
Schüle, Brandenburg’s culture minister, said she was “very irritated” by the
letter. “Some of the media coverage even referred to it as extortion,” she
added.
Prinz von
Preussen said the letter was “wrongly interpreted” and he plans to keep the
loans in place “as long as the interest is there” from the museums.
Wöhlert
said it was the Prinz von Preussen’s right to withdraw the loans, but added
that it “would be political suicide. I would send in a camera crew to film the
objects being removed, and I don’t think it would go down well.”
As well as
public opinion, scholarly discourse also appears to be moving against Prinz von
Preussen’s claim. In January last year, his request was scrutinized during a
public hearing in Germany’s Parliament, in which historians were invited to give
their verdict on whether his great-grandfather, the crown prince, had
contributed to Hitler’s ascent. At that time, they were divided on whether the
crown prince’s support for the Nazis could be deemed “substantial.” But now a
consensus among scholars is emerging that it had been, both Wöhlert and Schüle
said.
Christopher
Clark, a professor of history at Cambridge University, argued in a 2011 report
that the crown prince was too marginal to have “substantial” impact. He has
since revised his view in the light of new research by the scholar Stephan
Malinowski: In a letter in The New York Review of Books last year, Clark wrote
that Malinowski had shown “beyond doubt that the crown prince, though never a
collaborator of the first rank, was a more proactive supporter of the Nazis
than we thought.”
Although it
would serve Prinz von Preussen’s claims to downplay his great-grandfather’s
role in Hitler’s rise, he said his family has never tried “to sweep the Third
Reich under the carpet.”
“Many
people are concerned that if an agreement is reached with the state actors,
then the crown prince has been exonerated,” Prinz von Preussen said. “But I
think this is wrong — this discussion has to continue. These restitution
discussions have to be conducted separately from the public historical debate
about the role of my family in the Third Reich.”
While that
debate continues, Prinz von Preussen remains in the public eye — a position he
seems not to enjoy.
“When it
gets personal, it’s unpleasant,” he said. “When posters with my portrait are
hung up around Potsdam, and my children start asking why papa is on the poster,
this does cross a line. Anything else, I can tolerate.”
Helping Hitler: An Exchange
Christopher
Clark and Racheli Edelman, reply by David Motadel
April 9,
2020 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/09/helping-hitler-an-exchange/
In response
to:
What Do the Hohenzollerns Deserve? from the March 26, 2020 issue
To the
Editors:
On the
substantive issues relating to the current Hohenzollern restitution debate, my
former Cambridge colleague David Motadel and I are largely in agreement.
Neither of us wants to see castles and parklands disappear from public
ownership into the hands of the former reigning family. But I must object to
his glib misrepresentations of my role in this dispute [“What Do the
Hohenzollerns Deserve?,” NYR, March 26]. The report I wrote on the political
comportment of “Crown Prince” Wilhelm early in 2011 did not provide “clear
endorsement of the Hohenzollern claims” on which this controversy centers, and
neither could it have done, because these claims did not exist when the report
was written. I have never supported these claims and I do not do so now.
My report
of 2011 described “Crown Prince” Wilhelm as a man of violent ultra-rightist
temperament who repeatedly called for a “final reckoning” with the German left,
sympathized with Hitler, offered to help him into power, wrote publicly in his
support, claimed to have won him two million extra votes with just one
newspaper article, and, after the seizure of power, appeared at ceremonies
designed to project the identity of the new regime. However, I concluded that
the “crown prince,” though willing to help the Nazis and convinced that he had,
was in fact too marginal to the centers of real political power to make a
“substantial contribution” to the installment of Hitler as chancellor. His
appalling personal reputation, his silliness and low intelligence, his lack of
any formal office from which to exert political traction, and his isolation,
even from the monarchist networks that might have been expected to support him,
meant that he was in a poor position to contribute significantly to the
disaster that befell Germany in 1933. He was among those many senior conservatives
who lent a helping hand, but he was not within the first or even the second or
third circle of Hitler’s many conservative helpers.
This
finding did not fly, as Motadel claims, in the face of a historiographical
consensus that had been established “for decades.” On the contrary, it
corresponded precisely with the consensus expressed in the most recent
literature on the seizure of power, in which the deposed prince appeared,
notwithstanding his Nazi sympathies, as a marginal figure, a “parade-pony” who
lacked his “own ideas, will, or leadership qualities” (in the words of Lothar
Machtan). Even Stephan Malinowski, the leading expert on this question
worldwide, initially agreed with my assessment. His remarkable study on the
German aristocracy and the Nazis, Vom König zum Führer (2003), thronged with
aristocratic collaborators but left the Hohenzollern prince on the margins.
Since then, the picture has changed. Through painstaking research over the last
few years, Malinowski has unearthed a plethora of new sources showing beyond
doubt that the crown prince, though never a collaborator of the first rank, was
a more proactive supporter of the Nazis than we thought.
Motadel
describes me as a “hero to the German conservative right” who throughout his
career has catered to the darkest instincts of German nationalists. No
historian can control how arguments are politically construed by readers, of
course, but the claim that my German ones are all conservative nationalists is
laughable, and I have publicly disassociated myself from the machinations of
the Hohenzollern lawyers. What Motadel’s account misses, oddly enough, is the
history of the case, which has evolved since 2011 in unpredictable ways.
Christopher
Clark
Regius
Professor of History
University
of Cambridge
Cambridge,
England
To the Editors:
My late
grandfather Salman Schocken was the owner of a department store chain in
Germany known as Kaufhaus Schocken, which was confiscated by the Nazis in 1938.
Four German banks—the most important ones in Germany—appointed directors to the
board to replace the Jewish owner-directors. They confiscated the company’s
shares and then sold them to the public. The majority of these shares were
bought by the Hohenzollern family, one can assume at a most convenient price.
The
Schocken department store chain was the fourth-largest in Germany at the time.
Everyone knew that it belonged to a Jewish family, just like the other main
department store chains (the Hermann Tietz chain, later called Hertie, the
Leonhard Tietz chain, later called Kaufhof, and Wertheim). After the war there
were talks between the representative of the Hohenzollern family, Graf
Hardenberg, and my grandfather’s lawyers about the return of these shares.
Finally in 1949 my grandfather succeeded in getting back only 51 percent of his
old company, which after the war was in very bad shape compared to when the
Nazis came to power.
Therefore
even according to this example of their behavior, the Hohenzollern family’s
attempt to clear its name from the Nazi crimes has no foundation.
Racheli
Edelman
Schocken
Publishing House
Tel Aviv, Israel
David Motadel replies:
Christopher
Clark writes that he does not support the restitution and compensation claims
of the Hohenzollern family. I am sure that many in Germany will welcome this
statement. There are, however, a few points in his letter that require a
response.
First,
Clark says that the report that he wrote for the House of Hohenzollern in 2011
on the family’s relations with the Nazis did not endorse their claims for
restitution and compensation because those claims did not exist at that time.
In fact, the first negotiations about the claims had already taken place in the
1990s. According to the Hohenzollern family’s official website, in 2014 the
claims, “after more than twenty years of assessment,” were briefly considered
valid by the state, “also with reference to Professor Christopher Clark’s
report,” before they were challenged again.
The
Hohenzollern family insists that “Crown Prince” Wilhelm did not lend any
significant support to the Nazi movement. In his report, Clark clearly endorses
this argument when he concludes that Wilhelm was politically not important
enough to have done so. For many years now his report has been used by the
Hohenzollern family in their negotiations with the state. It has been discussed
(and criticized) as an argument in favor of their case in the German press and
parliament.
Second,
Clark says that at the time he wrote his report, the historical consensus was
that the crown prince’s support for the Nazis was unimportant. But Malinowski’s
Vom König zum Führer mentions the “early, clear and intensive support for
National Socialism” of two members of the Hohenzollern family, and concludes
that support for Hitler lent by a third, “Crown Prince” Wilhelm, was “of historical
importance.” Moreover, the fundamental facts regarding the “crown prince,” some
of which I laid out at the beginning of my article, have been known for
decades. Among the early biographical works are Paul Herre’s Kronprinz Wilhelm:
Seine Rolle in der deutschen Politik (1954) and Klaus Jonas’s Der Kronprinz
Wilhelm (1962). One might also mention the doctoral dissertation by Friedrich
Wilhelm Prinz von Preußen (an uncle of Georg Friedrich, the current head of the
family), supervised by Gerhard A. Ritter and Thomas Nipperdey, on the history
of the Hohenzollern family between 1918 and 1945 (1983; published in 1985 as
Das Haus Hohenzollern 1918–1945). Although biased toward the family in their
conclusions, these earlier works nevertheless laid down most of the essential
facts.
Finally,
Clark rightly says that it would be “laughable” to claim that all his German
admirers are conservative nationalists. But I never made any such claim. His
books have justly been huge best sellers appreciated by a wide readership in
Germany that goes far beyond conservative circles. Yet it was important to
point out that they have also made him a hero to the conservative right, even
if involuntarily, in order to explain why the Hohenzollern family trusted him
to write the report.
I was
touched by Racheli Edelman’s letter. A recent report in Der Spiegel described a
similar case in which the Hohenzollern family profited from the Nazi
persecution of the Jews: the exiled emperor Wilhelm II, through his connections
in the corporate world, enriched himself by buying up shares of companies owned
by the Jewish textile magnate Walter Wolf, who was pressured into selling under
market value.* Cornelia Rauh at the University of Hannover and Andreas Dornheim
at the University of Bamberg are working on this subject. I hope that we will
soon have a full account of this part of the Hohenzollerns’ history.
Georg
Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia (born 10 June 1976 in Bremen, West
Germany) is a German businessman who is the current head of the Prussian branch
of the princely House of Hohenzollern, the former ruling dynasty of the German
Empire and of the Kingdom of Prussia.
He is the
great-great-grandson and historic heir of Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor
and King of Prussia, who abdicated and went into exile upon Germany's defeat in
World War I in 1918.
Education and career
Georg
Friedrich is the only son of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia (1944–1977) and
Countess Donata of Castell-Rüdenhausen (1950–2015). Born into a mediatised
princely family, his mother later became Duchess Donata of Oldenburg when she
married secondly Duke Friedrich August of Oldenburg, who had previously been
married to her sister-in-law Princess Marie Cécile of Prussia. His only sister
is Cornelie-Cécile (b. 1978).
He attended
grammar schools in Bremen and Oldenburg and completed his education at
Glenalmond College near Perth, Scotland, where he passed his A-levels. He then
served for a two-year commission in the Alpine troops of the Bundeswehr and was
discharged after his term of service. Georg Friedrich earned his degree in
business economics at the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology.
Georg
Friedrich works for a company specialising in helping universities to bring
their innovations to market. He also administered the Princess Kira of Prussia
Foundation, founded by his grandmother Grand Duchess Kira of Russia in 1952,
now administered by his wife. In 2018 he moved from a house near Bremen, where
he had also spent his childhood, to Babelsberg, a district of Potsdam, the
capital city of the German state of Brandenburg.
He owns a
two-thirds share of his family's original seat, Hohenzollern Castle, while the
other share is held by the head of the Swabian branch, Karl Friedrich, Prince
of Hohenzollern. He also owns the Princes' Island in the Great Lake of Plön. In
2017 he founded a beer trademark called Kgl. Preußische Biermanufactur (Royal
Prussian Beer Manufactory) producing a Pilsner brand called Preussens.
Prince
Georg Friedrich continues to claim compensation for land and palaces in Berlin
expropriated from his family, a claim begun in March 1991 by his grandfather
Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia under the Compensation Act (EALG).
House of Hohenzollern
Georg
Friedrich succeeded his grandfather, Louis Ferdinand, as Head of the Royal
House of Prussia, a branch of the House of Hohenzollern, on 26 September 1994.
He stated that he learned to appreciate the history and responsibility of his
heritage during time spent with his paternal grandfather, who often recounted
to him anecdotes from the life in exile of his own grandfather, the last German
Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
His
position as sole heir to the estate of his grandfather was challenged by his
uncles, Friedrich Wilhelm and Michael, who filed a lawsuit claiming that,
despite their renunciations as dynasts at the time of their marriages, the loss
of their inheritance rights based on their selection of spouse was
discriminatory and unconstitutional. His uncles were initially successful, the
Regional Court of Hechingen and the higher Regional Court of Stuttgart ruling
in their favour in 1997 on the grounds that the requirement to marry equally
was "immoral". However, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany
overturned the original rulings in favour of Georg Friedrich's uncles, the case
being remanded to the courts at Hechingen and Stuttgart. This time both courts
ruled in favour of Georg Friedrich. His uncles then took their case to the Federal
Constitutional Court of Germany which overruled the previous court rulings in
Georg Friedrich's favour. On 19 October 2005, a German regional court ruled
that Georg Friedrich was indeed the principal heir of his grandfather, Louis
Ferdinand (who was the primary beneficiary of the trust set up for the estate
of Wilhelm II), but also concluded that each of the children of Louis Ferdinand
was entitled to a portion of the Prussian inheritance.
On 21
January 2011, Georg Friedrich announced his engagement to Princess Sophie of
Isenburg (born 7 March 1978). The civil wedding took place in Potsdam on 25
August 2011,[8] and the ecumenical religious wedding took place at the Church
of Peace in Potsdam on 27 August 2011, in commemoration of the 950th
anniversary of the founding of the House of Hohenzollern. The religious wedding
was also broadcast live by local public television. The dinner, which many
members of German and European royal families attended, was held in the
Orangery Palace at Sanssouci Park.
As a
Protestant descendant of Queen Victoria, Georg Friedrich was in the line of
succession to the British throne from his birth until his marriage in 2011. As
he married a Roman Catholic, according to the Act of Settlement 1701, he was
thus debarred from the British line of succession until the implementation in
2015 of the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which restored any succession
rights to British dynasts who had earlier forfeited them to marry Roman
Catholics. Georg Friedrich is currently 170th in line to the British throne.
On 20
January 2013, Georg Friedrich's wife, Sophie, gave birth to twin sons in
Bremen, Carl Friedrich Franz Alexander and Louis Ferdinand Christian Albrecht.
Carl Friedrich, the elder of the two, is his father's heir apparent.Their third
child, Emma Marie Charlotte Sofia, was born on 2 April 2015. On 17 November
2016, Sophie gave birth to Heinrich Albert Johann Georg, their fourth child.
Property claims
In mid-2019
it was revealed that Georg Friedrich had filed claims for permanent right of
residency for his family in Cecilienhof, or one of two other former
Hohenzollern palaces in Potsdam, as well as return of the family library, 266
paintings, an imperial crown and sceptre, and the letters of Empress Augusta
Victoria. This sparked a public debate about the legitimacy of these claims and
the role of the Hohenzollern during and before the Nazi regime in Germany,
specifically Crown Prince Wilhelm's involvement.
In June
2019, a claim made by Georg Friedrich that Rheinfels Castle be returned to the
Hohenzollern family was dismissed by a court. In 1924, the ruined castle had
been given to the town of St Goar, under the proviso it was not sold. In 1998
the town leased the ruins to a nearby hotel. His case made the claim that this
constituted a breach of the bequest.
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