THE EX-KAISER

Grey River Argus, 31 July 1940, Page 10

THE EX-KAISER

Role in Present War

THE MEANING OF DOORN

The Hohenzollern family was reassured to-day over the safety of the head of the dynasty, former Kaiser Wilhelm 11, by a laconic telegram from General Wilhelm Dommes, chief of the Hohenzollern Administration, saying: “Goal reached, all is well,” reported an American Associated Press message from Potsdam on May 15 ’ - T, The telegram was filed in Emmerich, border station for trains going to the Netherlands from Cologne anti South Germany generally. It was thus not clear whether the former Kaiser still was at Doorn, his home in exile in the Netherlands. Normally, trains for Utrecht and Doorn go via Bentheim. It is possible, however, that General Dommes could obtain transportation only to Emmerich.

Authorised sources said they had heard nothing concerning the former Kaiser, who they declared, is not of interest to the present regime. They expressed the opinion, nevertheless, that he still was at Doorn and would not be molested. Reichsfuhrer Hitler remains silent regarding former Kaiser Wilhelm 11, whose Netherlands estate at Doorn, is now blanketed within German military lines, said the “Christian Science Monitor.”

Some light on the cautious reserve maintained by Germany’s dictator towards the former monarch is given in a statement by Herr Hitler before the Reichstag on January 30, 1934. At that time he refused to consider publicly the Reich’s eventual “state form” until National Socialism had consolidated the country. Kaiser Wilhelm no longer represcirts even a potential candidate for a restored German throne, although there was a movement to restore the Hohenzollerns in 1932. Members of his family were mentioned from time to time as possible restorers of the dynasty. Chancellor Stresemann maintained cordial relations with the Crown Prince and the Kaiser. A famous and controversial Stresemann telegram to the Crown Prince on September 7, 1925, stirred debate over the Chancellor’s use of the word “finassieren.” Some internreters viewed the term as meaning merely “finesse” in German foreign policy, while others read in 'it a measure of duplicity shared by the Hohenzollerns.

National Socialists of late years have felt powerful enough to deal leniently with the Hohenzollerns. In voluntary exile at Doorn, the Kaiser has chopped .wood, thought his thoughts, and said nothing publicly on any subject less than 1000 years old. When Herr Hitler chose to renew the struggle against Britain laid down by the Kaiser in 1918, the recluse of Doorn was reported as feeling that the Fuhrer faced the worst catastrophe in German history. Herr Hitler in “Mein Kampf” speaks scornfully of Imperial Germany’s weaknesses. The National Socialist regime set itself the task of remedying many “mistakes” made by the Kaiser. Even so, Wilhelm II has lived quietly at Doorn, seeing occasional prominent visitors, considering at times the possibility of returning to Germany, and holding himself mostly apart from the post-war world he did so much to produce. [German troops advancing into the Netherlands made a long detour to avoid disturbing the repose of Doorn, according to reports from Berlin published in the “New York Times.”] Doorn, in German hands undergoes 1 subtle changes even though the Nazis allow the Kaiser to go on as before. No longer is the estate a refuge within neutral territory. At least for the time being, a Kaiser who chose not to return to Germany has had Germany come to him. Since the Ka’iser, like Herr Hitler, remains silent on their changed relationships, outsiders can only know that he has never formally given up the hope of a Hohenzollern restoration.

And as the Germans crashed through the Lowlands, he may have recalled his own spectacular initial successes —only at last to see his empire fall around him when the world repeated its ageless cycle of resistance to over-weerting expansion of any single power. Doorn still means all that, as the tanks detour around it on their way to Europe’s new “battlefield of a thousand years.”