Robert Evans and Jamie Loftus dissect Kaiser Wilhelm II's tragic ascent, tracing his psychological fractures from brutal infant medical experiments to a domineering upbringing enforced by his father. They analyze his bizarre incestuous dreams, diplomatic insults toward the Tsar, and strategic incompetence that alienated allies like Austria. Ultimately, the episode argues that Wilhelm's catastrophic role in World War I stemmed not from inherent evil, but from the unchecked power of monarchy combined with severe childhood trauma. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:57
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
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What's doing an episode?
My the podcast that I do.
I'm Robert Evans.
Very badly introducing another podcast of Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about the worst people in all of history.
And here to help me today is one of the best people in all of history.
Jamie Loftus.
Hi, Robert.
How are you doing, Jamie?
I'm good.
I'm having a lovely day.
I'm too cold, bruised deep.
Ooh, too cold, bruised deep.
Are you feeling optimistic and positive about the world?
I'm feeling like who we talk about today might end up actually being a pretty good guy.
A pretty good guy.
That's how I go into every bastards episode now.
I'm just like, you know what?
This guy's going to end up being pretty nice.
I think I might change my opinion on this fella.
I think that I'm going to really have some arguments in his favor.
You might have a couple because the guy we're talking about today is Kaiser motherfucking Wilhelm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Your reaction was pretty intense when I told you that right before the episode.
I was, well, I'm never allowed to know in advance.
And then I just, and then I sit down and it's what fresh hell in terms of person, in terms of facial hair, in terms just in every...
This is a brutal one for me, strictly on a facial hair level.
You're not a fan of his walrus mustache.
Fashion in World War I00:03:32
Listen, I respect someone who makes a choice, right?
He made a choice.
You have to give him that.
I will hand it to him.
Much like Robert Pattinson in the Lighthouse, he is making a choice.
Choices don't always work out.
No.
This is actually, I think this is one of the first subjects that I actually know a fair amount about.
I took a, in high school, for some reason, my last two years of high school, I only learned about World War I. That's great.
I love World War I.
I mean, I stand, and we stand.
I have no choice to stand in World War I.
Oh, the Psalm?
So good.
The trench.
I love there.
We like acted out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
It was a blast.
One of my favorite assassinations of the assassinations.
The fashion.
The fashion.
The fashion, the trenches.
The helmets that didn't stop bullets.
Oh, I love them.
You know it.
You love it.
It's all so good.
An underrated World War IMO.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No.
Way better than the sequel, in my opinion.
I totally agree.
Sequel is overhyped.
We get it.
I mean, I'll pick Terminator 2 over Terminator 1.
I'll pick Aliens over Alien, but I'm going to pick World War I over World War II every day of the week.
I'm going to pick the Cheetah Girls 2 over Cheetah Girls 1, and that's a controversial opinion for those not in the world.
Cheetah Girls 2.
I know you don't, Rar.
I'm still, I had to tell you who Ariana Grande was last year, which is something that it just, I still, it still shakes me to my marrow that that happened.
Well, so you don't know who the cheetah girls are?
Wait.
No.
No, we can't start the show until you know who the cheetah girls are.
You don't know who the cheetah girls are?
Of course I don't.
Oh, I know, but I'm just always waiting for the spice girls.
They wish.
They do wish they were like the Spice Girls, but they're a band that was started by, well, some great novellas for young girls, but it's like Rave and Simone, two of the girls.
Oh, shit.
Right.
She's the alpha.
And then two girls from 3LW, which you also don't know what that is.
And then a fourth girl who has dropped off the face of the planet.
We don't know what happened to her.
The point is, it was good.
The singles were fine.
And they wore track suits.
Oh, I do love track suits.
I am a big track suit fan.
I love people in matching track suits.
They wore like complimentary pastel track suits.
And then the second one, they go to Barcelona.
Yeah, I think when it comes to like, you're talking about the fashion in World War I and how good it was, I hope when we have our next World War that it's basically the same as World War I, but we're all wearing track suits.
Like that's, that is my dream.
Imagine the, yeah, World War III will be waged in juicy couture, head to toe, like form-fitting track suits.
Yes.
Comfortable waistbands, by God.
Yeah, I don't want those royal tenon bombs, track suits, missed.
I want, I want like a woman.
Like the, yeah, the ones that have like rhinestones on them.
And that's how you'll know who's on what side.
Yeah, yeah.
The color of the rhinestones.
Yeah, it'll be a great war.
Yeah, I think that this is actually going to be the best world war yet.
I feel like we have a real chance to make it.
So before we start, before we start another world war, we should learn about one of the guys who is most behind the first world war.
Yes.
The Prince's Rhinestone Side00:15:45
Now, what I think is interesting about the Kaiser is that most of the people we talk about on the show make a decision at a certain point to be shitty people who do like horrible, exploitative, violent things to other people.
Like they make a choice to be bastards at some point.
But there's also another less common category of bastards who are just sort of born into it.
They have bastardy, you know, thrust upon them by the circumstances of their family and the time they live in.
Sure.
Doesn't like make them mitigate the evils they perpetrated or remove their agency entirely, but I think it makes them more sympathetic figures than guys like Hitler or Saddam who kind of like dove headfirst into that.
Right.
And Kaiser Wilhelm is like once you understand his whole backstory, you're kind of like, yeah, you were a piece of shit, but like, how could this story have ended well?
How could you, yeah, how could you have learned?
Who would you have learned how to be a good person from?
Exactly.
Like, how was this not going to suck?
And that's the story of Kaiser Wilhelm.
Oh, that's a good thing.
That'll be the name of the biopic.
Yeah.
How could this have not sucked?
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Kaiser Wilhelm was born of the Hohenzollern dynasty, a family of German nobles whose history stretches back nearly a thousand years.
To understand where he comes from, we have to start this episode by talking about his father's birth on October 18th, 1831.
Now, this is long before Germany was a thing.
Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was born in Potsdam.
His father was also named Wilhelm.
All of the men in this story are named fucking Friedrich Wilhelm.
And I don't understand why the numbering works the way it does.
I don't understand any of this, but they're all named Friedrich Wilhelm.
Wait, is the numbering out of order?
It's weird.
I think it's because of their middle names and shit, because they have a bunch of names other than Friedrich Wilhelm, but they're all known as Friedrich Wilhelm.
Yeah, it's very dumb.
The gall.
I don't like when rich people try to bamboozle me.
They all have to have the same name.
God damn it.
Yeah, I would love it if the reasoning for that was just that the common people couldn't be trusted to learn a new king's name.
But I know it's something dumber and more arrogant than that.
It's still like, I don't know, why are there 500 Hollywood agents named Scott and that are all the same man?
You know, it's oh, that's that's nominative determinism.
That's because if you're born Scott, you get fast-tracked into CAA.
You gotta.
There's a lot of, you know, the Scots and the Mics, and you know, we love them, but do we, can we tell them apart?
No.
Now, so Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, who is the dad of the Prince Friedrich Wilhelm we'll be talking about this episode, entered the world second in line to the throne of Prussia after his brother, the crown prince, who is also named Friedrich Wilhelm.
His parents had a typically loveless royal marriage.
His father was in love with Princess Elise Radzewil of Poland, but she wasn't noble enough for a Hohenzollern to marry.
So he had to marry one of his relatives, Augusta, while vowing that he would never give his heart to her.
So this is how the relationship that leads to Kaiser Wilhelm starts.
Now, as you might expect, familial compromises like this did not make for the happiest of home lives.
In June 1840, King Friedrich Wilhelm III died after 43 years of ruling Prussia.
His oldest son succeeded him, and Wilhelm became the prince of Prussia.
So Kaiser Wilhelm's dad is now the crown prince of Prussia.
So Wilhelm, the previous Wilhelm.
His brother.
Yeah, his dad dies.
His brother's name Wilhelm, right?
Yeah, he sure does.
He sure does.
His dad dies, and his brother, who is the same name as him and his dad, becomes the king, and he is now the crown prince.
How does that work when it's dinner time?
You just shout one.
I don't know.
I don't know how they told each other apart.
It sucks so much.
I'm just getting it.
Like, writing this part sucks because it's just incredibly confusing.
Like, reading about royal, I don't understand people who like royal families because it makes me just want to start punching and never stop.
Yeah, I hope that there were some really disturbing nicknames in the mix.
It seems like the only way that this would work.
Yeah, I don't know.
So when he was 18, a very right-wing general named Leopold von Gerlach told Kaiser Wilhelm's dad that he envied the prince's youth, for he would no doubt survive the end of this absurd constitutionalism.
Because there were a lot of democratic movements going through the German states at this point, including Prussia, which is when they established the Reichstag and stuff like that.
So people are starting to get a voice in this period.
Monarchs, you know, when we talk about the Kaisers, we're not talking about absolute monarchs.
They have more power than obviously the British royal family, but they're not like the czar.
They don't get to just make the Kaiser's dad was actually a fan of the growing democratic movements in Germany.
He was a liberal.
He was a very progressive guy.
He believed that the people deserved a constitution that would guarantee their rights and protect them from nobles just wanting to do whatever.
Okay.
Yeah, so the Kaiser's dad's actually a pretty chill dude.
He's not like the other Kaisers or the prince.
He's a prince.
Yeah, he's the crown prince at this point.
He's a prince.
Which is like the next in line for the throne.
There's a fuckload of princes.
The crown prince is the one who's going to be the king next.
Okay.
Yeah, that's the way it works all over in all the different royal families.
Right, right.
So the Kaiser's dad, again, who's also Prince Wilhelm, spent a shitload of his youth in England due to a friendship with the British royal family that was orchestrated in part by our old pal, King Leopold of Belgium.
Oh.
This is actually one of the nice things Leopold did because the goal of it was basically, ah, if all these, if these royal families start fucking and marrying a bunch, then they clearly will never fight in a war.
Wow.
King Leopold.
What a problem solving.
They're like, well, what if this whole family fucked each other?
That would really solve politics.
And he was right for a while there.
For a while there.
For a while there.
If he'd been to the American South, he would have known that having a family that fucks each other does not stop them from shooting at each other.
But alas.
I mean, the American South, once again, coming out on top.
They're way ahead of their time in terms of fucking and also killing their family.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, in 1855, Prince Wilhelm was invited to Britain without his parents to stay with Queen Victoria and her family and propose to the princess, who was also named Victoria, because the British royal family is just as insufferable as the German.
Yeah.
Now, happily enough, it turns out that the Kaiser's dad and his mom, Princess Victoria, were actually a very rare love match, which doesn't happen often in royal marriages.
And they weren't closely related, which is also great.
So by the summer of 1858, Princess Victoria was pregnant and expecting.
This was not treated with joy by Queen Victoria.
She considered this horrid news, which would all end in nothing, because the princess got sick almost immediately and stayed ill throughout much of the pregnancy.
Queen Victoria was not an optimist.
Yeah.
The royal doctors assured everyone that things would be fine, but the princess's midwife, Miss Innocent, knew at a single look that the pregnancy would not end well.
Miss Innocent?
Yeah, named after Pope Innocent, I think.
Oh, that's what I feel like I had a shirt that said that in junior high.
Different meaning.
I had Miss Innocent, Miss Independent after the Kelly Clarkson song.
Yeah.
Miss Innocent.
That's another pope.
Yeah.
99% angel, 1% devil.
Yet another pope.
A lot of popes that you had shirts based off of.
99% angel, 1% devil.
He was of the popes, one of the top.
I mean, pretty close to being a complete angel.
Yeah.
Now, we don't know precisely what went wrong with Kaiser Wilhelm's birth, but it is certain that the doctors who managed the birth fucked up in some way.
Some of this was due to the fact that the infant Kaiser was a breach birth.
At that time in Central Europe, about 98% of babies born in breach were stillborn.
So almost all of the babies born this way died.
But obviously the Kaiser had the very best doctors.
I mean, you might argue that his doctors did a great job of bringing him through alive, but no one at the time said so.
The princess would later write of the bungling way she was treated.
And it seems like what happened is while they were pulling him out of the birth canal, they basically ripped his left arm off of his body and fucked it.
Like, like, they didn't sever it, but like, ripped the muscles and shit.
So he has his arm is fucked up from the jump.
Now, the princess was confined to bedrests after the birth for a month, but both she and the child survived, albeit not without permanent damage.
When the birth was announced to the people of Prussia by a field marshal, the baby prince was described as as sturdy a little recruit as a heart could wish to see.
But the obstetrician told a different story.
The infant was seemingly dead to a high degree.
Yeah, that's how they described it.
That is an absolutely savage take on that infant.
Yeah, yeah, really roasting the baby Kaiser.
Jesus.
His survival was considered close to miraculous.
And I'm going to quote next from the book Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany's Last Emperor by John Vanderkist.
Okay.
Three or four days after the birth, Miss Innocent drew Dr. Martin's attention to the baby's left arm hanging lifelessly from the shoulder socket.
The father was told at once, when he asked the German doctors, they reassured him that the damage was only temporary paralysis, which would improve with a little gentle massage at first, followed by exercises at a later stage.
This would prove to be optimistic and untrue.
Even as an adult, William's left arm was six inches shorter than the right.
He reminds me of Nemo.
Who?
No, Robert from Find Nemo, the one that gets found.
Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He is, he is.
And like Nemo, he grows up to spark a war that kills 17 million people.
That is what happened.
XR hasn't gotten to that movie yet, but that's how the story goes.
Well, they're all about revisionist history over there.
It's a disaster.
Yeah.
Nemo did become, yeah, like a brutal general.
He's, he's actually...
People blame global warming for the whole like coral reef dying off, but that's simply not the case.
It's Nemo.
And also, like the Kaiser, super anti-Semitic.
Didn't come up in the movie much, but really, really, really far off that.
It's horrible.
You get the feeling that they're just cutting away just before something terrible happens.
It's yeah, in every scene in that movie, he has a copy of the protocols of the elders of Zion tucked beneath his good fin.
Oh my God.
Yeah, you know, again.
I love fun fact.
I love movie trivia.
So the young Kaiser's hand looked normal when he grew up, but the actual arm and hand itself were too weak to hold anything much heavier than a piece of paper.
He spent his life hiding it out.
Yeah, that's fucking hard.
Yeah, that's yeah.
If you look at pictures of him, he's always hiding his left arm out of sight in a coat pocket or like kind of up to his side with like a glove on.
And he had gloves that would help extend the length of his hand a little bit to make it look more normal.
I've decided I forgive him.
Now we're cool.
Yeah.
You're going to wind up feeling very sympathetic throughout a significant chunk of this until we get to the parts of it where he's a giant piece of shit.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, as Vanderkist's book notes, hiding this deformed arm became a guiding motivation for the young prince.
Throughout his life, few photographs showed his left arm clearly, let alone the hand.
From an early age, the art of concealing it from the camera lens became second nature to him.
At meals, he could not manage an ordinary knife and fork, but his bodyguard always carried a special combined one, while the person sitting next to him discreetly cut up his food.
As if to compensate, his right hand had an iron grip, something he would often exploit as an adult one greeting people for the first time with a vice-like handshake, sadistically turning the rings on his fingers inward first so as to add to the other person's discomfort.
If these men or women were English, he laughed heartily at their winces as he made jibes about the mailed fist.
Okay.
Yeah, he grows up with a bit of a thing.
He's getting a bit of a guess you have to, it begs the question, like, if I had power or influence as a 12-year-old with a back brace, would I have oppressed other people?
I don't know.
And yes, I feel like you absolutely would have.
Yeah.
Any furious 12-year-old that feels out of place, if they had the, it's just no 12-year-olds have the ability to.
He's the rare one.
Yeah, if I had absolute power at the age of 12 when I was like an insecure fat kid who didn't know how to be social, I would have killed millions.
Millions.
What wouldn't I?
I know, like, I was a gigantic walking rectangle for most of my formative years.
What if someone could have suffered for that?
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
Now, the Kaiser's hand was not the only part of him injured by the circumstances of his birth.
His neck was also damaged and his head tilted to the left his entire life.
His left ear was likewise unformed and he was partly deaf and had problems with balance as a result of this his entire life.
Oh my God.
He suffered from constant ear infections and required a series of surgeries, which left him eventually completely deaf in his left ear and frequently subjected him to intense pain that probably contributed to his infamous temper tantrums.
There's also a chance that he was born profoundly mentally ill with a specific kind of mental illness that is common among royal families as a result of inbreeding.
There's no proof of this.
And I kind of think that the other stuff explains his temper tantrums and shit more than Porphyria, I think it was the name of the illness.
But it's possible he had like a brain thing going on too.
Got it.
Now, in short, the prince who would one day become the Kaiser came into this world with very serious difficulties to overcome, even for a child born as wealthy as a child could possibly be born.
Right.
His father, Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, was a decent guy and handled this with love and support.
But his grandfather, who was the Kaiser, was said to have noted that he wasn't sure if he should even congratulate his son on the birth of a defective prince.
And like one of the German generals who's around when the Kaiser's like a little kid is like, no one with a fucked up arm should ever become the Kaiser.
Like he shouldn't even be alive.
So like this is not his parents are really good and really loving, but like he also grows up in this very unforgiving culture that cannot tolerate physical imperfection.
Right.
I mean, and being, I feel like especially for like young, oh God, just an emasculated 12-year-old, is there anything with more potential for danger?
Yeah, no, not at all.
Not really.
No.
So the princess was a devoted and loving mother.
In a letter to his grandmother, Queen Victoria, the kid who would become Kaiser Wilhelm was Queen Victoria's first grandchild.
Right.
So in a letter to his grandmother, his mother wrote, your grandson is exceedingly lively and when awake will not be satisfied unless kept dancing about continually.
He scratches his face and tears his caps and makes every sort of extraordinary little noise.
I am so thankful, so happy he is a boy.
I longed for one more than I can describe.
My whole heart was set upon a boy and therefore I did not expect one.
So kid is very deeply loved and has, you know, kind of your best case scenario for parents in this period of time.
Oh, you're like, sure, he was a preached birth, but at least he wasn't a girl child.
We would have hated that.
Queen Victoria's Grandchild00:05:11
Well, you know, I think I don't get that feeling from her.
I get the feeling more that she just like, number one, like one of your jobs as a princess in this period is to like give birth to an heir.
Like they had daughters and she treated the daughters well.
Like they, like, they weren't like, didn't hate their daughters.
That's yeah.
Well, there's, there's just a lot of shit built up around having a son to continue the line.
And the fact that her first child was a son, like, that takes a lot of the pressure off her.
That's good for her because then people stop giving her shit.
Exactly.
I think that's a big part of why she feels that way.
That's nice.
It's also, you know, even today, like, my friends who get married have expressed preferences, like, oh, I hope it's a boy.
I hope it's a girl for whatever thing they want to do with the kid.
Like, I don't get the feeling that she was being shitty by saying that, which you do when you hear about the czar.
Well, no, yeah, it's weird.
Like, the czar, their first kid was a girl, and like, his, the czar, like, his, his wife wrote to him that, like, oh, I'm so sorry, basically, that I wasn't able to provide a son.
And he was like, no, no, it's fine.
We have a son.
The son belongs to Russia.
This daughter, you know, is ours.
So we get to really just like spoil her and enjoy having a child.
And we'll have the son later.
So I don't know.
You get a mix of reactions from the royal families.
They're all people.
Yeah.
As far as that situation goes, I guess that's one of the better ways it could shake out.
All right.
Yeah.
Cool.
So we know a lot about the life and particularly the childhood of the Kaiser more than we know about the life and childhood of literally anyone else I've ever talked about on the show because he was born to be king.
So every scrap of correspondence from his parents and his teachers and his relatives about him and from himself has been saved and is in archives.
So it's fair to say there's more detail on the early life of this guy than any other person I've covered on the show, which is probably why I'm more sympathetic about this guy because when you have that much detail to draw on, like it's hard not to feel some sympathy for a kid.
When you know that much about a kid's miserable childhood one way, exactly.
That's tough.
Yeah.
Nemo.
That's why they made Finding Nemo.
That's why they made Finding Nemo.
They're all with a monster.
They're like, well, he lost his mother young.
He got kidnapped by the ocean.
And he had a difficult fin.
So we should forgive him for his sins.
Yeah, for his rabbit anti-Semitism.
I mean, I can't say it enough.
It's really impossible to overemphasize.
So Prince Wilhelm was baptized on March 5th, 1859.
Queen Victoria was unable to attend and was represented by Lord Raglan, the British commander during the Crimean War, and one of the guys in charge of the Light Brigade.
He's that dude.
So that's who represents his grandmama at the baptism.
Well, that's nice.
Yeah.
In general, the future Kaiser had a very British upbringing.
His nurse, Mrs. Hobbs, was English.
His chief doctor, Sir Benjamin Brody, was also British.
These are the most British ass names I've ever heard.
Yeah, very British.
Yeah, this kid is half British.
You have to remember that because his mom is an English princess.
His grandmother is the fucking literal Queen Victoria.
And he's raised by, like, he grew up without, he spoke English perfectly with almost no accent.
You can listen to speeches by this guy in English, and you can barely notice the accent.
So that's, yeah.
It's impossible to overstate how intermarried and intermingled the royal families that helped launch World War I were.
Prince Wilhelm, the guy who became the Kaiser, was also the Prince of Orange and in line for the throne of England.
His current great-grandson, who's alive today, is 170th in line for the British throne.
Over in Russia, the Tsar's wife was a German princess, and the Tsar and the Kaiser were cousins.
All of the monarchs in charge of the primary belligerents in World War I shared grandparents and aunts and were cousins and had grown up together.
Those are my favorite letters.
I wish I haven't, like, it's been like almost 10 years now, but like the reading through the letters between cousins where they're like, are we going to start a war?
Like, are we going to get all these people killed?
So fuck, it's so bizarre being like, what if I could just write my cousin Tammy and be like, so like, how attached are we to people?
Yeah.
How much do we like four to six million of our young men?
Like, can we just do you feel able to just?
It's so bizarre knowing that they're cousins that, like, for the most part, know each other.
Like, it's just very weird.
Yeah.
And love each other.
Yeah.
We're like, there's those letters between Wilhelm and this and the czar, they're so bizarre.
It's just, yeah.
Yeah.
You know what's not bizarre, Jamie?
What, Robert?
The products and services that support this podcast with their advertising petrodollars.
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Well, here's both.
Okay.
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
And after a long day of reading about terrible people, nothing helps me calm down like cooking and eating a great meal.
Calming Down After Reading Bastards00:15:27
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Oh, what a nice product or service that was just described.
It was nice.
Now, let's get back to talking about Prince Wilhelm's misshapen arm.
His poor little fin won't swim right.
Yeah, his damaged arm was a matter of serious concern for the German royal family, or Prussian at this point, royal family.
His nurse rubbed massage oil on it daily to try and stimulate growth.
Wilhelm's doctors ordered that his arm be tied to the side of his leg for an hour a day in order to try to force it to grow normally.
Oh my God, he is a back brace for his arm.
Oh, we're getting to the back brace.
Oh, yes, okay.
Yeah, now the infant prince had almost no feeling in the limb and barely noticed most of this.
While most of his treatments were ineffective but benign, some were really brutal.
And I'm going to quote now from the book Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Concise Life by John Roll.
Okay.
When the infant was six months old, Professor Bernhard von Langenbeck of the Cherite Hospital in Berlin prescribed animal baths.
Twice a week, Wilhelm's left arm was inserted into the body of a freshly slaughtered hare for half an hour in the hope that the wild animal's warmth and vigor would be transferred to the arm.
No, they stuck him arm deep in a dead animal.
No.
Why?
He was a baby.
You're just like, he's.
How is this?
How would this grow up to be a good person?
This is like biblical curses they're forcing upon a baby.
Shove a fresh, bloody corpse on the literal infant child's arm for an hour.
Like, how does that not fuck him up?
I hate there's someone in the room like, we've got to make sure that this is remembered.
Because what if it works?
What if it works?
What if he's the best king ever?
I mean, science is.
We're going to do this to all of them.
Science is beautiful and it's never gone wrong.
Amazing.
Oh, God.
That's brutal.
He's the prince of Prussia.
So this is like the best doctor you can get at the time in the country.
Germany at this point is renowned as having some of the best doctors on the world.
So this is like the height of medical science.
What is happening?
Everyone else.
Honestly, I would rather die at 24 than have that be my medical regimen.
I would have rather have died years ago.
It's terrible.
Now, perhaps the most damaging treatment came at the direct orders of Queen Victoria.
And I'm going to quote now from John Vanderkist's biography.
Queen Victoria is a piece of shit, by the way, just as a heads up.
I did the monster.
I went to England over the summer, Brag, and we did the Buckingham Palace tour because I just wanted to see what it was like.
And the, oh, the revisionism on, like, there's not, there's no mention of Wilhelm.
There's no mention of, you know, it's just too messy.
They're like, she was really nice.
She hated when her husband died.
Thanks for the $40.
Oh, brilliant.
Yeah.
Well, here's a little bit more about Queen Victoria.
Hit it.
The princess, we're talking about Kaiser Wilhelm's mom, doted on babies.
And within a few days of his birth, she had started breastfeeding him to the revulsion of her mother-in-law.
Knowing Queen Victoria's views on the subject were at one with hers, she, the mother-in-law, wrote to the queen asking for her approval and putting it into this odious habit.
Much to the young mother's disappointment, her baby was promptly handed over to a wet nurse whose milk irritated his bowels and caused regular stomach upsets.
So the Queen of Prussia and Queen Victoria both hate breastfeeding because they think it's a gross commoner thing to do.
And so they make somebody whose milk makes Kaiser Wilhelm sick breastfeed the baby.
You know what?
My mom did the same thing, except with formula.
So, you know, my mom was just like, um, ew, stay away from me.
Here's some nestle, here's some nestle chemicals.
Good luck with your life.
Now, years later, his grandmother, the Empress Augusta, his other grandmother, would lie to Kaiser Wilhelm and tell him that his mother had refused to breastfeed him because she found his arm disgusting.
Oh, but his mom was nice.
Oh, that's his mom was nice.
She's just a bitch who hates his mom.
And is like, like I said, how does this kid not grow up fucked up?
Like, I don't like women on, I don't like woman-on-woman conflict.
It's not fair.
We don't need it.
It makes me upset.
Although my grandma did that, though, to my mom.
Yeah, it's less damaging when the babies that are getting manipulated by the fucked up people aren't growing up to be the emperors of Germany.
Yeah, oh, it's not, I mean, just regular fucked up people are the best.
Yeah, we do enough damage as it is.
Yeah.
Don't give anyone any power.
Nobody turns out great.
No, everyone's a disaster.
Like every now and then, every now and then, you get a Danny DeVito.
But most of us don't turn out.
You're obsessed with Danny DeVito.
I love Danny.
What about Billy Zane?
I don't know anything about Billy Zane.
Is he nice?
He's nice.
Good.
Good for Billy Zane.
Everyone is.
Well, let's replace Congress with Danny DeVito and Billy Zayn.
Billy Zane.
You know what?
The only two white men we can support at this point.
Yeah.
Now, in 1860, when the prince was one year old, his doctors began giving him daily electromagnetic therapy, applying constant galvanic current to his neck for hours every day to attempt to stimulate blood flow in his arm.
Electrocuting the infant Kaiser for hours a day did not work either.
No kidding.
God, it's just like your child has a disability.
We're four pages in and we haven't stopped talking about the fucked up ways they damaged this kid trying to heal his arm.
We feel so.
God, it is hard not to feel for him.
You like, that's a lot to deal with.
Hell, your family's electrocuting you because they find you to be gross.
That's a nightmare.
That's a cross to bear.
It certainly is.
On January 2nd, 1861, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV died, and Prince Wilhelm's grandfather became Kaiser Wilhelm I.
He was 63 at the time.
Two years later, in 1863, when the prince who would become the Kaiser that we're talking about, I know this is confusing.
I'm going to call, like when I say King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he's also a Kaiser Wilhelm.
I'm only going to call the Kaiser Wilhelm from World War I that we're talking about this episode, the Kaiser, for the sake of like making this make sense.
Sure.
So when the future Kaiser was four, his doctors presented him with a terrifying and barbaric machine designed to help him treat another one of his ailments.
See, four years after birth, Wilhelm had developed torticolis, caused by the healthy muscles on the right side of his neck, pulling his head downwards in that direction.
Now, this would obviously be way too visible an ailment to possibly let the king of Prussia have, the future king of Prussia have.
So to treat this, his doctors prescribed him what his mother called a head stretching machine.
That sounds safe.
Sounds safe.
He had to wear an hour a day every day.
And in a letter to Queen Victoria, the prince's mother described it thusly.
A belt around his waist to the back of which an iron bar is affixed.
The bar leads up the back to something which looks exactly like a horse's bridle.
The head is then fixed in this and positioned as desired by means of a screw, which adjusts the iron bar.
Ah, why?
This is.
Oh, I feel sad.
I'm sad, Robert.
This sucks.
Now, the young prince eventually went through facial surgery to correct this, which alleviated the problem at the cost of some permanent disfigurement.
He was also subject to an arm stretching machine, which was used on him for years and was similar to the neck stretching machine.
These are medieval torture devices.
This is not helpful.
Yeah.
The thing that actually did help his arm to grow somewhat was a course of regular gymnastics, which worked.
Go figure.
Just actual exercise.
Yes, that one did seem to help.
It's so, I'm like, I mean, these doctors have to have at least the foresight to give the arm stretching machine a confusing name.
So you don't notice it's an arm stretching machine.
Yeah, I mean, I've only heard it referred to as the arm stretching machine, but it probably had a fun German nickname.
A Dr. Seuss sounding thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, in spite of all this horror, Wilhelm's early childhood was considered, he remembered it at least, as fairly pleasant.
His mother and father were both doting parents, which was unusual in Prussian families of that era.
He was the baby of the global royal family, and for a time, Queen Victoria's favorite grandchild.
Starting in 1863, he began to regularly visit his aunts and uncles and cousins in Great Britain.
John Vanderkist describes him as a spirited child.
Quote, on his way to St. George's Chapel, Windsor, he threw his aunt Beatrice's muff out the carriage window.
Beatrice was only five years old at the time and in no position to exercise any authority over him.
Queen Victoria's youngest child, she was and always remained her mother's baby, a name her nephew soon picked up.
When she told him petulantly that he must address her as an aunt, he snapped back, aunt baby then.
Bored during the long marriage service, while most of his relations were shedding emotional tears, he pulled his dirk, which is a knife, from his stocking and threw it noisily across the chapel floor.
When his young uncles, Arthur and Leopold, remonstrated with him, he bit them in the legs.
What a sweet kid.
I mean, I gotta love that he bites King Leopold of Belgium, the slaughterer of the Congo, in the leg for yelling at him for throwing a knife during a wedding, which is awesome.
That actually does sound like what you would have done.
Yes, that sounds little knife thrower, we might have bonded over knife throwing.
I love throwing knives.
Anytime I get really drunk, I'm going to throw knives.
I, you know, I know that to be true.
Yeah.
It's true.
I think I also had a shirt that said Aunt Baby in middle school.
Aunt Baby.
Because a lot of these phrases are bringing back some memories.
Aunt Baby, that's actually a sick burn for...
That is a sick burn.
He was not witless.
Yeah.
That's quick.
Yeah.
That's quick.
For like a four-year-old, too.
Not bad.
To be like, fuck you, Aunt Baby.
Fuck you, Aunt Baby.
I can't.
I have no punch-ups.
That's great.
Hell yeah, kid.
Now, in 1864, the prince's father, who was the crown prince, fought in the Prusso-Danish War and returned home a war hero.
The future Kaiser's father would again win laurels in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, which is what led to the establishment of the German Empire.
Some of the prince's earliest strong memories, the future Kaiser's strong memories, were his father sending back captured battle flags and glorious reports of conquest from the front lines.
So he grows up like with some of his earliest memories being his dad being a legitimate war hero.
Like he was really close to the front, obviously not in as much danger as an infantryman, but he was like participating in battles and leading troops in combat and stuff.
Okay.
So as he grew into an adolescent, the young prince gradually overcame many of his physical limitations.
He learned how to swim and row and was quite good at it.
His grandmother, Queen Victoria, was ever on the watch for signs of pride from her first grandchild.
She told the crown princess to bring him up simply, plainly, and not with that terrible Prussian pride and ambition which grieved dear papa so much and which he always said would stand in the way of Prussia taking that lead in Germany, which he ever wished her to do.
If only the Germans were more British.
If only the Germans were more were more humble like us, all we did was conquer a quarter of the world's land surface.
Unlike these arrogant Germans.
The notoriously chill and tolerant British.
Yeah.
Yes, yeah.
Now, the prince's parents seem to have listened to this advice.
Starting in mid-1866, when the future Kaiser was seven and starting school, George Hinz Peter was chosen to be his tutor.
Now, Hinz Peter was a Calvinist, which means he believed that only a predetermined elect few ever got into heaven, and the vast majority of humanity was destined for hell no matter what they did.
As you might expect, he was a gigantic dick.
He also looked exactly like the dude who played Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones.
Like, Sophie looks up his picture, like, exactly like him.
It's really weird.
Nice.
Now, Hinz Peter's educational program involved 12-hour days of mixed study and exercise.
It was, in his words, based exclusively on a stern sense of duty and the idea of service.
The character was to be fortified by perpetual renunciation, the life of the prince to be molded on the lines of old Prussian simplicity, its ideal being the harsh discipline of the Spartans.
Now, it's here I should say a few words about Prussia.
Prussia no longer exists as a state or as a political entity in any way.
Prussia's disillusion was one of the British requirements for the end of World War II.
Prior to that, Prussia was the most powerful German state and the source for all of our modern stereotypes of Germany and Germans as disciplined, stern, humorless, and militaristic.
The Prussian military was one of the chief military forces in Europe for centuries and became world famous for their discipline and skill.
During the U.S. Revolutionary War, a Prussian nobleman, Baron von Steuben, built the entire American military from scratch.
The core of our military's organization to this day is still based along Prussian lines.
So it makes sense that the young prince would be raised in a strict militaristic Spartan way.
Okay.
But while Prussian discipline made for an effective military, it also made for profoundly damaged young men, which is why we got World War I and II.
Yeah.
Hinz Peter declared that the growing Wilhelm could never ever receive any kind of praise, approval, or encouragement for any reason.
He was ordered to eat dry bread for breakfast.
When he and his siblings hosted their cousins, they were required to give them cakes and cookies without eating any sweets for themselves.
No matter how well...
Yeah, this guy's, this is so fucked up.
This is like calculated shit.
Yeah.
No matter how well Prince Wilhelm performed, George Hinz Peter never gave him so much as a kind word.
The impossible was expected of the pupil in order to force him to meet the nearest degree of perfection.
Dry Bread for Breakfast00:07:01
Naturally, the impossible goal could never be achieved.
Logically, therefore, the praise which registers approval was also excluded.
God.
Yeah, just withhold love from your child and see what happens.
That's such a, oh, God, why did I feel like sometimes parents, I mean, again, this is just like every bad parenting technique turned up to an 11 for no reason.
It's amazing how many different bad types of parenting he receives from really everyone but his parents, but his parents.
Don't stop this.
Yeah.
God, that's so brutal.
Yeah, they're like, oh, watch your cousin eat a piece of.
I feel like that happens to kids sometimes as punishment.
You know, you're like, oh, look, everyone's going to get birthday cake, but you, whatever, you shit on the floor.
So you got to eat a cracker.
I'm not going to be able to do that.
Some of those people grow up to be shitty managers at a Sonic, but since they don't have the German military, they don't inherit the German military, so it's not a huge problem.
There's a version of Wilhelm had he been from, you know, like from a normal class of person where he would have just been a perfectly happy manager of a LIDS that didn't talk to his family that much.
No, no, and he would have denied his employees lunch breaks for shitty reasons.
Like just because he's got some hurt in his heart.
Yeah, the damage would have been contained.
Right.
Right.
Not that we condone this behavior from Lids managers.
We don't.
But I prefer people like Wilhelm become Lids managers than Imperial German army managers.
Okay, okay, I'm listening.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, every Wednesday and Saturday, Hins Peter and Wilhelm would visit museums and art galleries.
They would also visit factories, foundries, workshops, farms, and the like.
The goal was to show the would-be Kaiser what life was like for the manual laborers who actually built his country.
To Hinz Peter's credit, he also wanted the royal family to gain an understanding of social inequality and the suffering of workers.
Wilhelm was required to remove his hat and deliver a thankful speech at every place of business they visited after their tour.
So Hinz Peter did a lot of the job of raising Wilhelm, and that had positive and negative echoes, as we'll see.
One of his big demands was that the prince develop and express an opinion of every single person he met.
This was part of Hinz Peter's plan to get the young man to express his views at all times so that he would not be dominated by his advisors in the future.
This one would wind up backfiring on the entire planet.
No.
Now, as he grew into a young boy, Queen Victoria noticed some unpleasant changes taking over her darling grandson.
He is inclined to be selfish, domineering, and proud, but I must say they are not his own faults, as they have been hitherto more encouraged than checked.
Hinz Peter taught Wilhelm to ride a horse by letting him fall off of it repeatedly, ignoring the prince's tears and forcing him back on the horse for weeks until he got good at riding one-handed, and he was said to be an excellent horseman.
Nice.
So he learns how to one-handed ride a horse.
It's almost like they should have just let him learn how to do things with one hand the entire time.
Rather than the torture machines?
Rather than the evil torture machines.
Yeah, Jamie, your anti-torturing babies agenda has been clear for quite some time, and I think you might be biased on this.
Thank you.
You know what?
It's true.
And people have been calling me out a lot.
They're like, no, but what if we did torture the babies?
How will you know until you've tried it?
How will you know until you've tried it?
Right.
And that's fair.
I haven't tried it yet.
Yeah.
Well, puppies, kittens, sure, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, who are they going to tell?
Exactly.
What are they going to do?
Nothing, because they can't speak English.
I'm about to get a kitten.
So, you know, it's going to be a good thing.
There is a specific type of torture that you have to do to young kittens if you want them to be affectionate, which is that you pick from a very young age.
Do you know what the cat gun is?
The cat gun?
It's when you hold your cat like a gun with its back legs as the handle and its front legs like a foregrip and you pretend it's a little machine gun.
If you do that from the time that they're what, if you do that when they're a kitten, then they grow up just knowing that people are going to pick them up and fuck with them and they're fine with it.
I just really cuddly.
You know, you hold it with anything that you hold with two hands.
You're like, you know, like a machine gun.
Well, you pretend it's a machine gun.
You pretend it's...
Yeah, it just feels natural and right.
I'm bringing you to the hospital, Robert.
It's how you raise a baby kitten, and then they grow up being very affectionate because they just know that people pick them up and do weird things to them, and it's fine.
That's nice.
I almost dressed my dog up like a gun for Halloween, but I didn't want it to be interpreted as political, so I changed it to a knife.
Your radical pro-knife agenda has also been clear for some time.
I have been in favor of knives.
Look someone in the eye.
I just want eye contact.
Now, when Wilhelm was 10 in 1869, he was awarded the Order of the Black Eagle, a Prussian chivalric award that was supposed to be very prestigious, but kind of loses its luster to me when awarded to children.
He received fucking hundreds of awards and orders and knighthoods and dukedoms over the course of his life.
We're going to ignore basically all of them, although his biographies always note whenever he was given a new one.
He was also inducted into the first infantry regiment of the guards and made a German officer when he was 10 years old.
So, yeah, he's in the military from a very young age.
And he's continually gifted more military units and made honorary member and commander of different military regiments in the Prussian army over the course of his childhood.
This is like getting micro-machines was for me.
Right, right.
They become, they're nice to have, but eventually they become meaningless.
Yeah.
And he loves.
He loves these.
Yeah.
He loves his little military units made up of real men.
In 1870, France and Prussia went to war.
Prussia won and Germany was born.
From here on out, the Kaisers, the kings of Prussia, were kings of the entire German Empire.
Now, there were like 22 other kings in Germany, but the Kaisers were like the chief kings of all of them.
So that's the story as we go in to our second ad break.
Still, I think we're all kind of on the future Kaiser side at this point.
I like that, Robert, you choose moments to go to ad breaks where I feel I'm at the peak of I'm on the edge of my seat and my hand is on my wallet as well.
Yeah.
That could have gone another way, but it went wallet.
Yeah, you have a weird habit with that wallet of holding it out before ad breaks.
Yeah, my hands are trembling.
I'm helpless in the face of capitalism.
I need the products.
I need the services.
Pull out your credit cards, everybody.
Ignore what the actual products are and just immediately buy them without a thought.
Don't even put in the discount code.
Don't even put in the discount.
Well, no, do, because then we get, then it helps us.
Oh, sorry, Robert.
It's good for the show.
Wallet Trembling at Ad Breaks00:03:23
Yes, I do.
Here they go.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
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Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
Writing Mom Wanting to Fuck You00:15:29
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We're back.
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So after 1871, the Franco-Prussian War happens.
And the prince's mother, the crown princess, who was British and not Prussian, was very concerned about all of the war focus in her son's childhood.
Again, she wanted relations between Britain and Prussia to be good, and she knew there was always a chance that there would be war between them.
So she was very concerned, like everyone in Europe, about Prussia militarism.
And she didn't want her son to, say, grow into a man whose ambition helped Europe plunge into a war that kills 17 million people.
She didn't want that to happen.
A for effort, I guess.
A for effort.
At least it occurred to her that it might happen.
Ooh, this could be a problem.
So she sent the future Kaiser off to Germany in January of 1871 to remove him from Prussia in these negative military influences for a while.
Now, that month, she wrote to Queen Victoria about her son's pleasant, amiable ways.
She admitted that he was not possessed of brilliant qualities nor any strength of character or talents, but he is a dear boy, and I hope and trust he will grow up into a good and useful man.
I've described a lot of my boyfriends that way, I think.
I'm just like, he looks like shit.
He can't seem to stay clean for some reason, but you know, he's nice.
I don't know.
I hope he'll grow up and be useful.
I hope he'll one day grow up.
I'm trying to raise him as best I can.
I, of course, yeah.
So, you know, I get it.
I get it.
Yeah.
Now, the prince loved his, yeah.
And I, you know, at some point, you know, the Kaiser read these letters his mom wrote about him to his grandma, which has to have done some damage.
Yeah.
That sucks.
If you like, that's like going into your mom's text and finding out how disappointed she actually is.
You're like, oh, yikes.
Okay.
Now, the prince loved his time in England.
He spent a lot of it making butter and cheese at the royal dairy and looking over Britain's incredible collection of old wooden ships.
Normal things.
He really liked England.
He was set for most of his life.
He said that he would be happier as an English country gentleman than as the king of Prussia.
It was probably true.
I was like, that tracks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We all wish that had been the case, Wilhelm.
Honey, you and I both, baby.
In 1874, 15-year-old Prince Wilhelm started classes at Castle Polytechnic, a public school.
Now, this was hugely controversial among, and by public school, I mean in like the sense of only rich, non-noble kids got to go there.
Not in the sense of everybody from all walks of life went there, but they weren't royals.
They weren't like aristocrats.
It wasn't like exclusive enough.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this was very controversial among his family, many of whom were horrified of the idea of a noble child competing against commoners for grades.
But Hence Peter thought it would be good for the prince, he knew was not all of that bright, to be humiliated by getting bested by his social inferiors.
For some reason, I do not grasp, he thought that this would push the prince to develop a sense of superiority over common people.
Like, it's one of those things where at the start, where he's like, oh, you want him to realize that like he's not the smartest person in the room.
Okay, this could actually be really healthy.
Oh, no, you want him to get a sense of superiority of people over learning that they're better at school than him.
How did this track to you, Hence Peter?
I get it.
It tracks to me because it's just, I feel like that's like a way for Wilhelm to realize exactly how powerful he is.
He's like, oh, I'm dumb as rocks, and it doesn't fucking matter.
I'm still, if I don't like how much smarter someone is than me, I'll just have them fucking killed.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah, that may, that may have been kind of the reasoning there.
I don't like that I get it, but I think I get it.
Yeah.
Now, at school, Wilhelm started his days at 5 a.m. and didn't end them until 9 p.m.
So this is a brutal school schedule.
He was a decent student.
He got okay grades, but he was not exceptional.
His best friend at Castle was Siegfried Sommer, a Jew and top of the class.
Now, this is noteworthy because, as we'll cover, the prince grew into probably Germany's second most anti-Semitic leader of all time.
Oh, wait, who's number one?
I'm kidding.
Okay, so now he's not number one at anything.
He's number two.
And I will say this.
In fairness to the Kaiser, there is a big gap between two and one in most anti-Semitic German leader contests.
There's a sizable gap between the two.
This is JoJo Rabbit.
Yeah.
I can't wait to see that.
Have you seen that?
Is it good?
Yeah, I saw it the other day.
I liked it.
It looks good.
I just haven't had a chance to get down to the theater.
It's fun.
It's a romp.
Jamie says it's a romp.
Check it out, people.
Tycho Watiti plays Hitler.
I'm so easily bothered by child actors, and they got a good one.
No, I hate most children.
They're okay.
Well, let's take us to the next level.
It's good, though.
I liked it.
Yeah.
Now is probably the right time to talk about the prince's bizarre feelings towards his mother.
Now, Freud would tell us that it's not unusual for young boys to have a childish sort of infatuation with their mother.
But even by Freudian standards, Wilhelm was fucking odd.
I mean, it sounds like she was the only person that was nice to him.
Yeah, I'm still going to say this is.
I'm just going to read this quote from the biography Kaiser Wilhelm A Concise Life.
And you can tell me what you can analyze this, Dennis.
Okay.
This is a long one, Jamie, and there's a lot to unpack here.
Is it horny?
Let me just read the quote and we'll discuss it.
Okay.
Quote, in the winter of 1874 or 75, Wilhelm began a series of letters to his mother, in English naturally, recounting a recurring dream he was having.
Letters that are remarkable not only for their evidently incestuous character, but also for their fetishistic emphasis on her gloved left hand, a poignant cry for unconditional acceptance and love, if ever there was one.
I have got a little secret which is for you alone, viz.
A peculiar dream, he wrote to Vicki, his mom, on March 1875, shortly after her visit to Castle for his 16th birthday.
I dreamt last night that I was walking with you and another lady, and walking you were discussing who had the finest hands, whereupon the lady produced a most ungrateful hand, declaring that it was the prettiest and turned us her back.
I, in my rage, broke her parasol, but you put your dear arm round my waist, led me aside, pulled your gloved hand off your dear left hand, which I so often kissed at Castle, and showed me your dear, beautiful hand, which I instantly covered with kisses.
Wilhelm hoped that his dream would become reality.
I wish that you would do the same when I am at Berlin, alone with you in the evening.
And he continued, craving reassurance.
Pray write to me what you think about this dream.
It is quite true as I have written it.
You say I always think of you, my dear mamma.
I sometimes dream of you.
I am so glad that soon we will sit together in your dear library and sit together.
But this dream is alone for you to know, he insisted.
Several days later, the dream recurred.
I am very glad that you liked my little secret about your dear hands.
Since then I have again dreamt about you.
This time I was alone with you in your library when you stretched forth your arms and pulled me down to your chair so that my head rested on your left arm.
Then you took off your gloves and laid your hands gently on my lips for me to kiss it, asking me at the same time if I remembered dreaming about you.
I instantly seized your hand and kissed.
Then you gave me a warm embrace, putting your right arm around my shoulder and neck and got up and walked round the rooms with me.
No, no, no.
So that's odd, right?
That's peculiar.
He's just like writing his mom being like, I want to fuck you.
Is that okay?
I want to fuck your hand.
Well, that's well, I think, well, that's like very telling, right?
That he's like fixated on hands and arms.
That makes sense because that's what everyone his life is obsessed about.
Yep.
So, of course, the hand becomes this like erotic fixation, left, a left-hand fetish, if you will.
Yeah.
Oh, that's just like, baby boy, put it in your journal and then light it on fire.
Do not send it to me.
Burn that fucker.
Yeah.
Why send it to mama?
And wait, so wait, so we, there was, uh, he sent a letter and then presumably got a reply that was like, oh, yeah.
Tell me more.
Yeah, we're going to get into that a little bit.
Now, I've read a few biographies of Wilhelm, and most of them mention this weird fixation, but they kind of breeze past it.
Like, they'll note it was weird, but they don't go into that much detail.
Rolf's book is the one I found that really does the best job of highlighting how fucking peculiar this all was.
And I'm going to continue quoting.
Yeah, I mean, the hand fixation is very telling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He could hardly wait for his dream to be fulfilled.
In eight days, he wrote, we will go to Berlin, and then what I dream about we will do in reality when we are alone in your rooms without any witnesses.
No.
This is the second secret.
And he's like 14 or 15.
Yeah, he's like a little horny teenage boy.
Oh, I don't know.
Okay, sorry, keep going.
This is the second secret for you.
Pray write to me what you think about it and promise to do so really as you did in my dream to me, for I do so love you.
The correspondence continued in this vein for several months.
In May 1875, he urged his mother again to keep your promise you gave me at Berlin.
Always give me alone the soft inside of your hand to kiss, but of course you keep this as a secret for yourself.
With less than four to him.
Yeah, he's this definitely.
He's like, your left hand is a pussy.
Like, that's his energy.
Okay.
Sorry, keep going.
Wow.
With less than four weeks to go before the holidays, he wrote thanking her for her most recent letter.
How glad I was to see the promise written down that I could kiss your hands as much as I liked.
Be sure of it, I shall do it.
Shortly before their reunion, Wilhelm could hardly contain his excitement, calculating that it was now only days or 84 hours or in 5,040 minutes or in 302,400 seconds before he would be able to embrace his mother again in Potsdam and kiss her sweet, beautiful hands.
Yeah.
Hands, Robert.
Yeah.
The man likes his mommy's hands.
The man loves his mommy's hands.
To touch mommy's hand.
Well, here's my question.
What is she replying to this?
Because it doesn't sound like she's saying, please stop talking about fucking my hands.
I think we can forgive the crown princess for not knowing how to respond to her teenage son's sexual obsession with her hands.
I'm just trying to get a feel for like, is she weirded out by it, but doesn't know how to handle the situation?
Or is she like, this is cool?
She's weirded out.
She sucks.
You know, at first she's like, okay, yeah, you can kiss my hands.
And she tries to like move the letters along to something more normal.
Like, how is she?
She tried to humor him.
And then she tried politely ignoring it.
She would return his letters to him with like the spelling corrected and stuff, correcting his grammar and stuff, but not really.
I think about how he wants to fuck her hand.
Like, if you're going to fuck my hands, say it right.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We can safely say she felt very strange about it.
And eventually she did what she thought was the responsible thing and pushed her son away just a little bit to try and like get some distance.
Boundaries, yeah.
He found this deeply painful.
This led to a start of a split between mother and son, which many like people who like write about the Kaiser have seen as the seeds of the split between Germany and Britain as the future Kaiser began to push back against the British side of his ancestry since his mother was British.
So this may be a significant repercussion.
As long as it's all important.
I mean, you can't blame her.
She's in like, what do you do?
What do you do?
What do you do if your son was shut up about wanting to kiss your hand?
Like, that's a predicament.
What a predicament.
And then you think back of like, well, maybe if everyone wasn't complaining about this kid's hands his whole life, he wouldn't have this weird, horny hand thing.
And again.
This is why you shouldn't have kings or leaders with any kind of significant amount of power like this because like they grow up with so like this weird hand thing is something that like you know Wilhelm couldn't help that he felt that way.
It was like he was like this was going to happen.
His mom kind of drawing away from him wasn't unreasonable.
Him having really complicated feelings about England as a result of this wasn't unreasonable.
But he's power with the German army as his inheritance.
So it became an issue.
You just have too much to lash out with.
You can't just like take your mom's car.
Yeah.
God, I think that so far the villain of this story is power.
I know it'll be exactly.
But right now it's still mostly power, even though like there are points at which he does make choices that make him into a villain.
The primary villain is still power.
If he had just been a normal dude and like gotten some fucking therapy, I get the feeling, just knowing kind of everything about his life, I get the feeling with a competent therapist, he could have been a decent man who would have raised a relatively healthy family and not damaged the world.
He would have been a perfectly like, you know, inoffensive, like whatever guy.
He just would have been a guy.
I don't think he was inherently moved to commit acts of horrible evil.
But he did.
And yet.
Yeah.
Now, Wilhelm reached adulthood and did the normal things that Prussian kids did at that point.
He joined the military.
He went to military school.
He got command of his first military units.
Now, he was noted by everyone as having no real ability to focus on the finer points of strategy and tactics, but having a deep and abiding love of making men march around in fancy uniforms.
It became instantly apparent that the prince would not be the great warlord that his father was.
Now, on the 27th of March, 1879, Wilhelm's 11-year-old younger brother, Waldemar, died from diphtheria, along with one of his aunts.
Wilhelm had been jealous of the little boy, who was widely seen as his parents' favorite, but he was a dutiful mourner for his brother and held an all-night vigil at the coffin.
He described the family pain as deep and cruel beyond words, which is a reasonable way to react to the death of an 11-year-old.
Bismarck the Power Behind Throne00:14:49
Sure, yeah.
But a few months later, Wilhelm was back to acting like a dick to his mom.
His little brother had owned a cat, which his mom had adopted once he died, and she loved the animal, and it clearly gave her some comfort in the absence of her beloved boy.
While they were out vacationing, the housekeeper of one of their vacation homes shot the cat, cut off his nose, and hung it up against a tree.
He did this because it was his job to ensure the pheasant population of the property stayed healthy so the nobles could hunt.
Wilhelm's mother and sisters were horrified, but the prince defended the keeper, saying the cat murder had been laudable zeal in the pursuance of his duty.
So we're seeing as he grows into a young man, this guy has some emotional depth issues, some difficulty understanding why certain things are horrifying to other people.
Good.
Good.
I'm just like feeling for his mom of just like, oh, his son's obsessed with me and he won't stop mutilating animals.
What?
Yeah.
What do I do?
No, her son didn't do it.
The guy who killed the cat mutilated it to scare off other cats.
Oh, okay.
That's still not okay, but okay.
It's not okay.
It is pretty normal.
Like, you know, I have friends and family with farms.
And like, if you kill a coyote on your farm and you have livestock, it's not abnormal to like hang the corpse of the coyote up to scare off other coyotes to protect your cows and shit.
Like it's something that people do when they're trying to maintain a population of prey animals.
Very Game of Thrones.
Yeah, it's fucked up, but it's also like life in the rural world.
Although killing somebody's pet cat to protect a pheasant population, I would argue, is not the healthy way to deal with that.
Maybe keep the cat indoors.
Yeah, like there was a clear solution to that, and it was not like a pack of...
Yeah, it's not like a pack of wild wolves.
Like, there are other ways that this could have been handled.
The worst case scenario is that there were a couple more cats around.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Now, as a young adult, Wilhelm fell madly in love with his cousin, Ella.
But Otto van Bismarck was not a fan of the pairing.
Now, Bismarck is a guy we'll probably do an episode on at some point.
He's one of the most important people who's ever lived.
He was the actual mind behind the formation of the German Empire.
He engineered the Franco-Prussian War and is, again, probably the single man most responsible for making Germany a thing.
We did a whole unit on that motherfucker.
Yeah.
He's a very important, influential guy.
Yeah.
He's an influencer.
Yeah, he's a dick, but he's also very smart and very capable.
Yeah.
Like, he's not one of these powerful people who's also an idiot.
He knows what the fuck he's doing.
Now, the Kaiser, Prince Wilhelm's grandfather was the monarch of Germany, but Bismarck made a lot of the critical decisions.
He was kind of the, it's not fair to compare Prince Wilhelm's grandfather or father to George W. Bush, but Bismarck is kind of like a Dick Cheney type, you know, the power behind the throne.
Yeah.
And Otto von Bismarck was worried that Ella was too closely related to Kaiser Wilhelm.
So he didn't, you know, let that relationship come to pass.
So Kaiser saw this as Ella rejecting him.
And he wrote to Hinz Peter that he thought his fucked up arm had made him unlovable, which was a normal thing for him to feel considering that his grandmother had told him that his fucked up arm made him unlovable.
Now, thankfully, there was another princess waiting in the wings, Donna Augustenberg.
She was a low-rent princess, basically the Safeway Select equivalent of a Hollenzollern, the family of the Kaisers.
Okay, she was not.
Yeah, yeah, she's not like a high-level princess.
But Bismarck liked that she was not closely related to Wilhelm.
He called her a Holstein cow and thought that she would inject fresh blood into the Hohenzollern line.
Wow, I don't know.
She was plagued by inbreeding and illness.
Yeah.
That's not great.
I love that description of her, but I'm not super into that.
Okay, but good to know.
Now, when the marriage was announced, Hinz Peter was ecstatic that his dearly beloved problem child was going to marry someone who understands him and sympathizes with him and his weaknesses.
Hinz Peter was on record as saying that Wilhelm needed people around him who gave him unconditional love and admiration because he just couldn't exist without it.
Sure.
And one of the weird notes is that I think we can all look at how Hinz Peter had him raised as profoundly abusive.
But Kaiser Wilhelm loved Hinz Peter till the day he died and wrote him letters up until the older man's death, like almost on a daily basis.
He would write like desperately seemed to crave this man's affection and approval.
It's like devastating in a way.
Yeah, it's fucked up, man.
This kid, like, how does that, there's no way this guy ends up healthy, you know?
And again, it's like if you're just an irregular person with daddy issues, you're just one of the many.
Daddy issues with power.
People are going to die.
Real problem.
Yeah.
Now, this gets at one of the things I think is wildest about the very idea of a monarchy.
When you really look into the letters everyone around the future Kaiser was writing, as both Rolf and Vanderkist, the main biographers who were sources for this episode did, it's obvious that 100% of the people who knew Wilhelm when he was young knew ahead of time that he was going to be a terrible Kaiser.
The best anyone would say about him was that he could be sweet and charming, but nobody thought he was gifted in any intellectual capacity.
As he grew older, his family wrote increasingly about his startling arrogance, his inability to take advice or criticism, and his frequent tendency to snap into blind rages.
So everyone's like, oh, this guy shouldn't be king, but he's gonna.
But he's gonna boy, that'll suck when that inevitably happens.
It's a shame there's no other possible thing we can have than a monarchy.
Oh, well.
Too bad.
Jesus Christ.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
That is, I mean, that does make me slight.
I mean, obviously, we're in a terrible version of democracy, but like at least things aren't inevitable from that far away.
No, it's an iterative sort of thing.
Yeah.
Now, the prince's parents hoped that the marriage would have a soothing effect on his worst characteristics.
But unfortunately, his wife, Donna, was what one biographer describes as a reactionary bigot whose small-minded views only reinforced his own.
Oh, whoopsies.
Yeah, to make matters worse, she despised the British, which helped push Prince Wilhelm further away from his mother.
She was against liberal politics and the growing move towards democratization in Europe.
She treated the crown prince and princess, Wilhelm's parents, coldly and further pushed them away from him.
Wilhelm started referring to his family as the English colony and complained that his father treated him as if he were a dumb child.
Now, Otto von Bismarck also took advantage of the growing rift between Wilhelm and his parents.
While the crown prince wanted Germany to draw closer to England, Bismarck was deeply suspicious of the British.
He'd spent his entire life building an intricate series of alliances that he believed would render Germany essentially impossible to invade.
Under Bismarck's guidance, the German Empire had forged a strong defensive pact with Russia and Austria-Hungary.
This meant that roughly 80% of Europe would be on one side, Germany's side, if a war broke out, which would essentially make it impossible to have nobody's going to go to war with like the Russian Empire at this point is one-sixth of the world's landmass.
Right.
So, like, and Germany has, by all accounts, the best army in Europe.
So, nobody is going to war against that.
Like, it's just impossible.
Nobody would make a decision that stupid.
And they're all kuzzos.
And they're all kuzzos.
Yeah.
But Bismarck doesn't have much faith in royal diplomacy, which would prove to be wise.
He had faith in if we have essentially, this is the nuclear arms race of its day, is having an alliance that no one could dare to fight.
And so that was Bismarck's strategy.
Like, well, as long as we're in good with Russia, nobody will fuck with us, and that ensures peace in Europe.
And he's right.
As long as Russia is allied with Germany, there are no wars between European states on like a mass scale.
Right.
Now, there are some very persistent rumors that Wilhelm was homosexual.
It seems more accurate to say that he might have been bisexual.
Okay.
He fell in love with a guy named Uhlenberg, another noble who Wilhelm described as my bosom friend, the only one I have.
Now, it's very unlikely either boy ever consummated their attraction, but for years they were inseparable.
In his biography of Wilhelm, Emil Ludwig wrote that Uhlenberg was the first to open the gates of the garden of romance to the young man who had been forced into the heart of hard-bitten Prussian prince and was now taking leave of an adolescence poor alike in love and the dreams of youth.
God.
So it's really hard not to feel for this guy.
It's rough, man.
Yeah, he's got a lot of forces working against him.
It's, oh, it's not.
Oh.
Yeah, he's a disabled by sexual abuse victim.
They should just, yeah, he and his boyfriend should just move away.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, if only they'd gotten a house in Paris or something together.
So nice.
Painted pictures.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he was Wilhelm had like some aptitude for art.
He was described by someone as a gifted artist who never found his art.
So like he was good at a bunch of different things, but he never really found like this.
Well, no, because Hitler was shitty at it.
Like Wilhelm, you get the feeling if he'd like gotten some actual, if it had been made a real, like if people had made a point of really giving him some serious art training, he would have figured out what he was into and could have been really talented.
What if this was the point where you found out that I actually thought Hitler's art was really good and that he was a little bit more likely to be able to, oh, yeah, like, yeah, no, Hitler was a terrible artist.
Obviously, we all agree on that.
Jamie Loftus has a Hitler.
I mean, I'm not going to lie.
I would actually love to have an original Hitler.
Oh, my God.
Just for the talking about it.
Yeah, but I love haunted things.
You do love haunted things.
That's very absolutely.
Oh, my God.
But he was like, he was a better artist.
You know, I just.
He seems to have been good.
He just never quite found something that he was really into throwing his whole interests behind.
And obviously, he had to be the Kaiser, so there was a lot of other shit on his.
No time for painting when you're the Kaiser.
No time for painting when you're the Kaiser.
Some time for painting, but not enough.
Right.
Now, Bismarck saw Wilhelm as a pliant, moldable dummy.
He could direct in whichever direction he chose.
The key for Bismarck was to deepen the rift between the prince and his father.
In the mid-1880s, he went behind the crown prince's back and made the future Kaiser the chief envoy of the German Empire.
Now, this by all rights should have been his father's job, but Bismarck worried the Crown Prince's English sympathies would look bad to the Russians, since Russia and England had just fought a war over the Crimea.
So he pushed Wilhelm into the role.
Wilhelm's father complained that this was a terrible idea.
In view of the immaturity, as well as the inexperience of my eldest son, together with his tendency towards overbearingness and self-conceit, I cannot but frankly regard it as dangerous to allow him at present to take part in any foreign affairs.
Yeah.
Prince Wilhelm was a terrible diplomat.
His arrogance came off badly, and he had a nasty habit of insulting the world leaders he talked to.
He botched his first meeting with the Russian Tsar by basically giving him approval to conquer Constantinople.
Something the Tsar didn't think he needed approval for he didn't need to get from an upstart boy who wasn't even Kaiser yet.
No.
Yeah.
God, what a doofus.
Yeah, so the prince's career did not start with great promise, but at least everyone knew was going to happen.
Yeah, everyone knew was happening.
Yeah.
I will say, though, he enjoyed some fringe benefits of the gig as envoy to Russia.
According to Vanderkist's book, quote, he relished the attention paid to him as chief envoy of the German Empire, and he was deeply impressed with the bearing of the young infantry recruits on parade at the Winter Palace.
Nevertheless, he betrayed rather more than he intended when he wrote in detail about the physical appearance of the soldiers, a very nice-looking lot, though the fact that hardly any of them had any hips made their white capes look as though they had been poured into their slim bodies.
He doesn't understand when to like not be horny.
You're over sharing, man.
He's horny on main.
He's horny on main all the time.
Just be, yeah, he's like, yeah, at least make a like a fake account.
Don't you?
Yeah, Pola Mitt Romney, write these under another name.
He is being horny on the main.
It's so such a bad look.
I mean, like, I'm fine with it.
Like, no judgment, bro.
But, like.
I'm judging.
Don't be horny on the main.
Yeah, you are being horny in your official job as international diplomat, which is probably inappropriate.
That's a line.
That's a line.
That's a line, Wilhelm.
Now, Wilhelm also had mistresses, but he was no better at managing them than he was at managing international diplomacy.
In 1886, he arranged to have two of his mistresses follow his train out of Berlin and meet him in a small village in Austria.
The women did so, but when they arrived, he refused to reimburse them for their travel costs.
And I should note now that he was the wealthiest man in Germany.
Yeah.
I mean, I said, well, that's just dating a rich guy, isn't it?
Yeah.
You're like, oh, this is going to be great.
And then it turns out that they're fucking mean.
Misers.
Misers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The women left in a rage, and one of them stole one of the prince's monogrammed cufflinks so she would display it around town to prove that she had a liaison with the prince.
When the Kaiser realized this.
Oh, she rules.
She's like, we fucking kicked me.
I flew southwest for this.
Takes this shit and runs that stage.
Now, when the Kaiser realized this, he begged them to come back and he offered to pay for their travel costs.
They returned and finally fought.
And now the ensuing threesome.
The ensuing threesome was so loud that it woke up other guests in the hotel.
People could actually hear them talking post-coitus.
A number of random Austrians heard the future Kaiser complaining to prostitutes about his parrots.
He called his dad a conceited popularity seeker under Jewish influence.
He also loudly insulted Austria, his nation's closest ally, as rotten, close to dissolution.
God.
He called the Austrian people useless pansies and gourmands no longer fit for life.
I hope that the sex workers got like an emotional support bonus.
You know, it's like, that's not what you, huh?
Well, he made one of them pregnant and she blackmailed him and she got a shitload of money out of it.
So that's good.
These women rule.
They're funny.
Thirst Posting as Future Kaiser00:06:04
They're just like, this guy's a loser.
Let's take his stuff.
Oh, man.
Brutal.
Word of all this got back to the Austrian crown prince, which sparked another international incident.
This all boded particularly ill for the future.
In the space of a year, the young prince had insulted both of his nation's chief military allies.
The emperor, his grandfather, was ill and near death.
And right as his grandfather starts dying, his father also gets sick, which would prove to be throat cancer.
So none of this bodes well for the future of peace in Europe.
Right.
They're like, oh no, the fuck up is the only one who will live.
Okay.
In 1888, the emperor died and the crown prince became Kaiser.
The crown prince, you know, the Kaiser's, the future Kaiser's dad.
He would only rule for 99 days and he was very ill for all of them.
By the time he died on June 15th, 1888, now Crown Prince Wilhelm had already been taking on and botching many of his dad's duties.
That same day, Kaiser Wilhelm ascended to the throne of the German Empire.
So in part two, we're going to talk about what happened once he was in charge.
All right.
It's time.
Long time is over.
Jamie, you got some pluggables to plug?
I got some pluggies.
I'm releasing a podcast on Thanksgiving called My Euromenza.
It's about what the title is about.
It's about my Euromenza.
How I got in and how I almost got bullied out.
And then you can listen to the Bechdel cast every week.
You can follow me on Twitter at JamieLoftisHelp.
And that's what you can do.
That's what you're able to do at this time.
Now, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at at BastardsPod.
You can find me personally on Twitter at IWriteOK, where I am not horny on Maine.
That's inappropriate, especially with all of the diplomacy I have to do with the Russian army.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that would make you a terrible Kaiser.
It would make me a terrible Kaiser.
And my whole job is to become a very good Kaiser.
Yeah, your Finsta is horny as hell.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
It's out of control.
It is nothing but thirst posting.
Really shameless, shameless, cancelable thirst.
I muted it.
Now, Jamie, what is a Finsta?
What's a I'm gonna jump off the balcony.
I cannot possibly explain to you what a Finsta is.
It's a fake Instagram.
That's where you do your horn.
I don't actually have one, which is what everyone who has one says.
But it's like where you post, you know, you post the illusion on the main, right?
You're like, I'm so happy, everything's great.
And then you post depression memes and thirst posts on the Finsta.
Oh.
That's where you're like, you're, you know, two extremes.
See, I write my thirst posts on a sheet of paper and then I cut my finger and block them out with blood.
And then I burn them in a bonfire at night in order to wipe away my shame in front of God and the heavens.
I know, but unfortunately, that is a spell that means it's in a book somewhere far away.
So your thirst posts are documented somewhere.
You shouldn't drop blood on it.
That activates the curse.
Damn it.
I'll send you some.
Well, damn it.
If you want to activate a curse, buy some t-shirts from TeePublic.com.
All of our shirts come cursed.
So that's good.
The episode's over.
Okay.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Ranchini.
My mind was blown.
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This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.