After The German Revolution
After the outbreak of the German Revolution in 1918, both Emperor William II and the Crown Prince signed the document of abdication. The former Crown Prince went into exile on the island of Wieringen, in the Netherlands. In 1923, he returned to Germany after giving assurances that he would no longer engage in politics. The former Crown Prince held some political ambitions and was reportedly interested in the idea of running for Reichspräsident as the right-wing candidate opposed to Paul von Hindenburg in 1932, until his father forbade him from acting on the idea.
The former Crown Prince supported Hitler for some time, hoping and announcing in public that this man would do for Germany what Mussolini had done for Italy and make an end to all Bolshevist and Marxist influence. He had connections with some organisations connected with the Nazi Party and allowed himself to be used by the Nazi government in various symbolic actions.
After the murder of his friend, the former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, in the Night of the Long Knives (1934), he retreated from all political activities. Most of his efforts from 1919 to 1934 had been directed to making a return of the Hohenzollerns to the throne a viable option, and he had assumed that Hitler would give this idea his support.
William lived as a private citizen on his family's estates throughout World War II. Upon his father's death in 1941, he succeeded him as head of the House of Hohenzollern, the former German imperial dynasty. In 1951, the former Crown Prince died of a heart attack in Hechingen, in the ancestral lands of his family in Swabia, as the family's estates in Brandenburg had been occupied by the Soviet Union. William and his wife are buried at Hohenzollern Castle.
Read more about this topic: William, German Crown Prince
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