What Happened To The German Royal Family?

“I am a broken man. I have no country. I have no army.”
Kaiser Wilhelm II, waiting at the Dutch border (November 1918)

In the midst of the First World War’s darkest days, as discontent and grief stalked the German home front, Kaiser Wilhelm II was busy building a palace.

Not even the thunder of artillery could still the baulust of the German royal family – that near-innate urge of Prussian kings to erect grand residences. The result was Schloss Cecilienhof, located in Potsdam’s Neuer Garten and completed in 1917 as the last palace ever built by the Hohenzollern dynasty.

It is a building creaking under the weight of historical irony.

Commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II for his eldest son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, and his daughter-in-law, Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the palace was designed in the English Tudor style. At the precise moment the German war machine was expending millions of lives to crush the British Empire, the German Crown Prince was moving into a home that looked like it had been airlifted from the Cotswolds.

It was a curious time to embark on palace-building: soldiers were dying by the thousands at the front, civilians rioted for turnip soup and sawdust bread; yet the royal family forged ahead.

Cecilienhof shouted that the Hohenzollerns were here to stay, that the war was a temporary inconvenience, and that English country living was simply too good to leave to the English. It was also meant to serve as a tangible reminder of the monarchy’s confidence in its own permanence – the palace a further architectural exclamation point onto their realm.

However, barely a year after Princess Cecilie and her family moved into her new palace – even giving birth to a daughter there in August 1917 – the unthinkable happened.

In November 1918 the German Empire collapsed virtually overnight.