Wilhelm II 1859-1941
German emperor and King of Prussia

He was born in Berlin, the eldest son of Prince Frederick, later Frederick III and of Victoria, the daughter of Great Britain's Queen Victoria. He received a strict military and academic education at the Kassel gymnasium and the University of Bonn, taking part in military exercises despite a deformed left arm. A military enthusiast, he had a deep conviction of the divine right of the Hohenzollerns, and was intelligent if somewhat temperamental. Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia from 1888 until 1918, he quarrelled with and dismissed (1890) Bismarck, who disapproved of his efforts to capture working-class support and who had forbidden any minister to see Wilhelm except in his presence. A long spell of personal rule followed, but in 1908 he suffered a nervous breakdown which greatly lessened his influence on policy-making in the last 10 years of his reign. Wilhelm's speeches revolved around German imperialism. In 1896 he sent a telegram to President Kruger of South Africa congratulating him on the suppression of the Jameson raid. His anti-British attitude at the start of the Boer War was replaced by serious, if clumsy, endeavours at Anglo-German reconciliation. However, he also backed Admiral von Tirpitz's plans for a large German navy to match the British, and as an ally of Turkey, he encouraged German economic penetration of the Middle East. He supported immoderate demands on Serbia after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo (1914), but made strenuous efforts to avoid the world war he saw as imminent. Political power passed from him to the generals, and during World War I he became a mere figurehead, contrary to the popular image of him as the great warlord. The defeat of Germany forced him to abdicate (9 November 1918) and flee the country. He and his family settled first at Amerongen, then at Doorn near Arnheim, where he wrote his Memoirs 1878-1918 (translated 1922), and ignored the Nazi 'Liberation' (1940) of the Netherlands. He also wrote My Early Life (1926). In 1881 he married Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, by whom he had six sons and one daughter, and after her death in 1921, he married Princess Hermine of Reuss.