Behind the Bastards - Part One: Kaiser Wilhelm: The Saddest Warlord In History

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

In Episode 97, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Kaiser Wilhelm.FOOTNOTES: Kaiser Wilhelm HOW KAISER WILHELM II CHANGED EUROPE FOREVER The Kaiser and the First World War What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire? Kaiser Wilhelm Ii: A Concise Life Kaiser Wilhelm II: Germany's Last Emperor  The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's doing an episode of 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 two cold brews deep. Ooh, two cold brews 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, 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, in terms of person, in terms of facial hair,

and 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. 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, I think this is one of the first subjects that I actually like know a fair amount about.

I took a, I took a, in high school for some reason, my last two years of high school, I only learned about World War One. That's great. I love World War One. I mean, I'm, I stand, we stand. We have no chance to stand World War One. Oh, the Psalm, so good. The trench, I love, we like acted out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It was a blast.

Oh, one of my favorite assassinations. So long. 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.

You know. I mean, I'll pick Terminator 2 over Terminator 1. I'll pick Aliens over Alien, but I'm going to pick World War 1 over World War 2 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 who haven't known. I don't even know what Cheetah Girls is. I know you don't, Rob. 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, speaking of your marrow.

You don't know who the Cheetah Girls are? 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. I know, but I'm just always waiting for... Are they like 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 Raven Simone, two of the girls.

Oh, shit. Yeah, 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. I think when it comes to... You're talking about the fashion in World War I and how good it was. Sure.

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. That is my dream. Imagine that, yeah, World War III will be waged in Juicy Couture, head to toe, like form-fitting track suits. Yeah. Comfortable waistbands by God. Yeah, it's gonna be great. I think those Royal Tenant Bombs track suits miss. I want Paris Hilton, like the ones that have rhinestones on them.

And I'll tell you who's on what side. Yeah, but the color of the rhinestones, yeah, it'll be a great war. I think that this is actually gonna be the best World War yet. I feel like we have a real chance to make it. This is why I think two colors. Before we start another World War, we should learn about one of the guys who is most behind. Who is most behind the first World War. Yes.

Now, what I think is interesting about the Kaiser is that like 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 thrust upon them by the circumstances of their family and the time they live in. Sure. It 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 head first 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 gonna suck? And that's the story of Kaiser Wilhelm. Oh, that's a good.

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 like 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. 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, like why are there 500 Hollywood agents named Scott and that are all the same man? Oh, that's nominative determinism. That's because if you're born Scott, you get fast-tracked into CAA.

You got it. There's a lot of, you know, the Scots and the Mikes, and you know, we love them, but 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 Radzowyl of Poland, but she wasn't noble enough for a Hohenzoller 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. Great. 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, okay, so Wilhelm, the previous Wilhelm. His brother, yeah, his dad dies.

His brother's name Wilhelm, right? Yeah, he sure does. He 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 name? I don't know. I don't know how they told each other a part.

It sucks so much. I'm getting nervous. 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 Tsar. But they're not the end game, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, Prince Friedrich, 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, like, 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 princes. He's a prince? Yeah, he's a crown prince at this point, 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. Ooh. This is actually one of the nice things Leopold did, because the goal of it was basically, 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. 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. Oh, it was. 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. Yeah. 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.

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. Miss Innocent. That's another Pope. Yeah. 99% Angel, 1% Devil. Yet another Pope, a lot of Popes that you had shirts based off.

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 is 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 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 bed rest 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. No. Yeah, that's how they described it. That is absolutely savage take on that infant. Yeah, yeah, really roasting the baby Kaiser. His survival was considered close to miraculous. And I'm going to quote next from the book Kaiser Wilhelm, the second 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, Williams left arm was six inches shorter than the right. He reminds me of Nemo. Who?

Robert from find Nemo, the one that gets found. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, he is he is. And like Nemo, he grows up to spark a war that kills 17 million people. That is what happens. Pixar 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.

Yeah. Nemo did become, yeah, like a brutal general. He's actually, people blame global warming for the whole 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 there. Horrible. You get the feeling that they're just cutting away just before something terrible happens.

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. 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.

That's really difficult. He spent his life hiding it out. Yeah, that's fucking hard. Yeah, that sucks. 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 like extend the length of his hand a little bit to make it look more normal. I've decided I forgive him.

No, 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. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, he grows up with a bit of a thing. I mean, I 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. Yes, you absolutely would have. Any furious 12 year old that feels out of place, if they had the, it just no 12 year old to 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. Wouldn't I, I know, I was a gigantic walking rectangle for most of my formative years.

What if someone could have suffered for that? Yeah, exactly. Okay. 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 gosh. 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 inbraiding. There's no proof of this. Yeah. 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 you 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?

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 it is very deeply loved and has, you know, kind of your best case scenario for parents in this period of time. You're like, sure he was a preached birth, but at least he wasn't a girl child. We would have hated that. 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. 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, like even today, like my friends who get married have expressed preference is like, oh, I hope it's a boy. I hope it's a girl for whatever, whatever thing they want to do with the kid. Like I don't get the feeling that like she was being shitty by saying that what 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 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 family. They're all people.

Yeah. As far as that situation goes, I guess that's one of the better ways it could shake out. Yeah. 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 in his in archives. Right. 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 it. Right. Yeah, when you know that much about a kid's miserable childhood one way or another. Yeah, exactly. That's tough.

Yeah. Nemo, that's why they made Finding Nemo to empathize with a monster. They're like, well, he lost his mother young. He got kidnapped by the ocean and he had a difficult friend. So we should forgive him for his sins. Yeah. For his rabid anti-Semitism. I mean, I can't say it enough.

It's really impossible to over-emphasize. 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 grandma at the baptism. Well, that's nice. Yeah, in general, the future Kaiser had a very British upbringing. His nurse, Mrs. Hobbes, was English. His chief doctor, Sir Benjamin Brody, was also British.

He's the most British ass names I've ever heard. Yeah, very British. Mrs. Hobbes. Yeah, this kid is half British. You have to remember that because like his mom is an English princess. His grandmother is the fucking literal Queen Victoria. And he has, he's raised, but like he grew up without, he spoke English perfectly with almost no accent. You can listen to speeches by this guy in English and it, you can barely notice the accent.

So Posh, 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 like 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 belligerence 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? 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? 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. And love each other. Yeah, yeah, we're like, there's those, like the letters between Wilhelm and the Tsar, they're so bizarre. It's just, yeah. You know what's not bizarre, Jamie?

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Oh, what a nice product or service I was just described. It was nice. Now let's get back to talking about Prince Wilhelm's misshapen arm. Good. 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 Charité 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. No. The wild animal's warmth and vigor would be transferred to the arm. No. They stuck him arm deep in a dead animal. No. You knew he was a baby.

You're just like, how would this grow up to be a good person? This is like biblical curses. They're foisting upon a baby. Shove a fresh bloody corpse on the literal infant child's arm for an hour. And it's also well documented. 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 beautiful. We're going to do this to all of them. Science is beautiful and it's never gone wrong. Amazing. God, that's so brutal. He's the prince of Prussia. So this is like the best doctor you can get at the time. And 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? Does everyone else? Honestly, I would rather die at 24 than have that be my medical regimen. I would have rather have died years ago. That'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 went to England over the summer, Bragg, and we did the Buckingham Palace tour. Because I just wanted to see what it was like. And the revisionism, 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. 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 in 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, you stay away from me. Here's some Nestle.

Here's some Nestle chemicals. Good luck with your life. 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 sucks. His mom was nice.

She's just a bitch who hates his mom. And like I said, how does this kid not grow up fucked up? I don't like women on women conflict. It's not fair. We don't need it. It makes me upset. I, although it, my grandma did that though to my mom. Yeah.

And like it's, it's less damaging when the babies that are getting like manipulated by the fucked up people aren't growing up to be the Empress of Germany. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's, 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 well. You're obsessed with Danny DeVito. I love Danny DeVito. What about Billy Zane?

I don't know anything about Billy Zane. Is he nice? He's nice. Good. Good for Billy Zane. Everyone. Well, let's replace Congress with Danny DeVito and Billy Zane. You know what?

The only two white men we can support at this point. Yeah. 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. 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. That certainly is.

On January 2, 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. It's okay. 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 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 torticolus 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 to me. He had to wear it 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? Can't we? 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. The thing that actually did help his arm to grow somewhat was a course of regular gymnastics, which seems to have helped a lot. Holistic stuff worked?

Go figure. Just actual exercise? Yes. Go figure. That one didn't seem to help. 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. That's step one.

I only heard it referred to as the arm stretching machine, but it probably had a fun German nickname. A Dr. Seuss sounding thing, 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 Vanderkis 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 wasn't 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. Little knife thrower, real knife thrower. We might have bonded over knife throwing. I love throwing knives. Of course you do.

Anytime I get really drunk, I'm gonna throw knives. I know that to be true. Yeah. It's great. I think I also had a shirt that said, aunt baby in middle school. There's 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, aunt baby, 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 Prusho 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 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 in 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, in 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. Yes. Yes. 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 Hinspeter

was chosen to be his tutor. Now, Hinspeter 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 if Sophie looks up his picture, like exactly like him. It's really weird.

Nice. Now, Hinspeter'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, sterned, 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 Stuben, 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. 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. Hinspeter 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, yeah. No matter how well Prince Wilhelm performed, George Hinspeter 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. 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, God, why did, I feel like sometimes parents, I mean, again, you know, and 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. He's got so many sets of, 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. And some of those people grow up to be shitty managers at a Sonic, but since they don't have the German mill, 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. Yeah. Just cause 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, 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, hence 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 hence 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 hence 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 hence 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. Hence 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.

He was said to be an excellent horseman, 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. Now, Jamie, your anti-torturing babies agenda has been clear for quite some time and I think you might be biased on this. Like, 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, this podcast. Puppy use kittens? Sure. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. 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 fine. 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 at, 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 like that. And then they're really cuddly.

You know, you hold it with anything that you hold with two hands, you know, like a machine gun. Well, you pretended 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. 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. Yeah. They're nice to have, but eventually they become meaningless. Yeah. Pollypockets. He loves these. Yeah.

Well, there's fun. He loves his little military units. Sure. Made up of real men. In 1870, France and Prussia went to war. Prussia I in Germany was born from here on out of 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. Yeah. That could have gone another way, but it went wallet.

You know. Yeah. You have a weird habit with that wallet of holding it out before ad breaks. Yeah. And I'm glad. My hand's 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 needs something.

It's good for the show. Fine. Yes, I do. Here they go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. So after 1871, Franco-Prussian war happens.

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 killed 17 million people. She didn't want that to happen.

A for effort, I guess. At least it occurred to her that it might happen. 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, yeah, he looks like shit. He like can't seem to stay clean for some reason, but you know, he's nice. I don't know. He's fine. I hope he grew up into 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 bar's low. 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. That sucks. 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. Yeah. He really, 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. Yeah. We all wish that had been the case. 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 together, 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. Okay. It was 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 we're like, oh, you want him to realize that like he's not the smartest person in the room. Okay. This could actually be really heavily.

You need to get a sense of superiority of people over learning that they're better at school than him. How did this track to you? 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 rock 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 him fucking

killed. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. That may have been kind of the reasoning there. I don't like that. 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, 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 in 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?

Okay, so he's number two, he's not number one of anything. He's number two and in fairness, I will say this, in fairness to the Kaiser, there is a big gap between two and one in most anti-Semitic German leader, the contest. That's fair. Like there's a sizable gap between the two. Where is his JoJo rabbit? Yeah. I can't wait to see that.

Have you seen that? Is it good? Not 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. Teyka Wattiti plays Hitler. I'm so easily bothered by like child actors and they got a good one. No, I hate most children. They're okay. Well, let's take it to the next level. It's good though.

I liked it. 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's 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. 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. Quote, in the winter of 1874-75, 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, this is 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 around 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 right 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 mama. 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 around the rooms with me. No, no, no, okay, so that's odd, right, that's, that's peculiar, he's just like writing his

mom being like, I want to fuck you, is that okay, I want to fuck, I want to fuck your hand. Well, I think, well, that's like very telling, right, that he's like fixated on hands and arms, that makes sense because everyone in his life is obsessed about, so of course the hand becomes this like erotic fixation, left, a left hand fetish, if you will, oh, that's just like, baby boy, put it in your journal and then light it on fire, do not send it to mama. Burn that fucker.

Yeah. Why send that to mama. And wait, so wait, so there was, 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 mentioned 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 from it. 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. Oh, it's getting back, and he's like 14 or 15, he's like, he's like a little horny teenage boy. He's horny for mama. Oh my god. 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 weeks to go. He's like your left hand is a pussy, like that's his energy. Okay, sorry, keep going.

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 mom's hands. He wants to touch mommy's hands.

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.

Okay. She says, you know, at first she's like, okay, yeah, you can kiss my hands and then she tries to like move the letters along to something more normal and 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 and not really addressing. About how he wants to fuck her head, like if you're going to fuck my hands, say it right. Yeah.

Oh my. I would hopefully 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. Some boundaries. Yeah. And 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. Got it. Well, okay. As long as it's all a woman's fault. As long as it's all a woman's fault. As long as it's all a woman's fault.

I mean, you can't blame her. She's like, what do you do? What do you do? No, what do you do if your son won't shut up about wanting to kiss your hand? Like that. Yeah. God. What a predicament.

That's. What a predicament. Yeah. 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 something 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 grew up with the German army as his inheritance. So it became an issue. You just have too much to lash out with. Yeah. You can't just like take your mom's car.

Like God, I think that so far the villain of this story is power. I know it'll be Wilhelm eventually. Yeah, exactly. But right now it's power. But 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 like not damaged the world. He would have been a perfectly like, you know, an 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. He 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. Sure. 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. Yeah. Good. Good.

Yeah. His poor, I'm just like feeling for his mom of just like, my son's obsessed with me and he won't stop mutilating animals. 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. It's a game of thrones. Yeah.

It's fucked up, but it's like, 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. It's, yeah. Like there was a clear solution to that and it was taken to an extent. It's 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 van Bismarck was worried that Ella was too closely related to Kaiser Wilhelm. So he didn't let that relationship come to pass. So Kaiser saw this as Ella rejecting him. And he wrote to Hins 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 Augustenburg. She was a low rent princess, basically the Safeway select equivalent of a Holland's All-Earn, the family of the Kaisers, but Bismarck liked that 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 Hawthorne's All-Earn line, which was plagued by inbreeding and illness. Yeah.

That's not great to get that. I don't love that description of her, but I. Not super into that. Okay, but good to know. Yeah. When the marriage was announced, Hins Peter was ecstatic that his dearly beloved problem child was going to marry someone who understands him and sympathizes with him and his weaknesses. Hins 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. And one of the weird notes is that like, I think we can all look at how Hins Peter had him raised as like profoundly abusive. But Kaiser Wilhelm loved Hins 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, you know what, yeah. Yeah.

It's fucked up, man. This kid, like, how does, there's no way this guy ends up healthy, you know? And again, it's like if you're just in a regular person with daddy issues, you're just one of the many. But daddy issues with power. Yeah. 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 Vanderkis, 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 slightly, I mean, obviously we're in a terrible version of democracy, but like at least some 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 mood 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. It would literally make it impossible to have. The Russian Empire at this point is one-sixth of the world's land mass.

And Germany has, by all accounts, the best army in Europe. So nobody is going to war against that. It's just impossible. Nobody would make a decision that stupid. And they're all cussos. And they're all cussos. 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. He's 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 in 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. He fell in love with a guy named Julenberg, 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 Julenberg was the first to open the gates of the Garden of Romance to the young man who had been forced into the part

of hard-bitten Prussian Prince and was now taking leave of an adolescence poor alike and love and the dreams of youth. God. So, yeah. It's really hard not to feel for this guy. Like he's... 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 bisexual abuse victim. They should just... Yeah.

He and his boyfriend should just move away. Oh, God. Yeah. If only they'd gotten a house in Paris or something together. So nice. That... Painted pictures. Yeah.

That's... Yeah. And he was... Wilhelm had some aptitude for art. He was described by someone as a gifted artist who never found his art. So he was good at a bunch of different things, but he never really found... Like another German artist on it. Well, no, because Hitler was shitty at it.

Oh, yeah. Like Wilhelm, you get the feeling if he'd gotten some actual... If it had been made a real... 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 really good? That would be an awkward...

I was like, 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 just for the talking about it. Oh, my God.

No, they're so haunted. Oh, yeah. But I love haunted things. You do love haunted things. That's very true. Absolutely. Oh, my God. But he was like, he was a better artist.

You know, I just... Yeah. He seems to have been good. He just never quite like found something that he was really into throwing his whole interest behind. Obviously, he had to be the Kaiser, so there was a lot of other shit on his plate. 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 regarded as dangerous to allow him at present to take part in any foreign affairs. Whoo.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, good. 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 he was able to enjoy it.

Which 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. Oversh- you're oversharing, man. No one is- Yeah, he's horny on main.

He's horny on main all the time. Yeah. Just be, yeah, he's like, yeah, at least make a, like a fake account, don't, yeah, he's been horny. Maybe write these under another name. He is being horny on the main. It's so, it's such a bad look. Oh, who's gonna take you seriously?

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, yeah.

That's a line, yeah. That's a line, yeah. 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. I, yeah. I mean, I felt, well, that's just dating a rich guy as well. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, oh, this is gonna be great. And then it turns out that they're, they're fucking mean. Mizers.

Yeah. The women left. Yeah. Yeah. The women left in a rage and one of them stole one of the prince's monogrammed cuff links to display it around town to prove that she's had a liaison with the prince when the Kaiser realized this. Oh, she was.

She's like, you fucking gave me, I flew Southwest for this, and there she, you know, takes this shit and runs that thing. 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 fucked 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

parents. He called his dad a conceded 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. 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. Oh, these women rule. They're fine. They're just like, this guy's a loser. Fuck this guy. Take his stuff. They're, oh man, brutal.

Instead of all this got back to the Austrian crown prince, which sparked another international incident. Yes. This all boated 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. And 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 not going to go well. Fun time is over. Jamie, you got some pluggables to plug?

I got some pluggies. I'm releasing a podcast on Thanksgiving called My Year in Mensa. It's about what the title is about. It's about My Year in Mensa, how I got in and how I almost got bullied out. And then you can listen to the Bechtel 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 atbastardspod.

You can find me personally on Twitter at I write okay, where I am not horny on Maine. Because that's inappropriate, especially with all of the diplomacy I have to do with the Russian army. Right. Yeah. I mean, it 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 posting. No one find Robert's finsta.

I muted it. Now Jamie, what is a finsta? What's a... I'm going to jump off the balcony. I cannot possibly explain to you what a finsta is. It's a fake Instagram. It's where you do your horny. I don't actually have one, which is what everyone who has one says.

But it's like where you post the illusion on the Maine, 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 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 in 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, they're documented somewhere. You shouldn't drop blood on it. That activates the curse. Damn it. I'll send you some links. Well, damn it.

If you want to activate a curse, buy some t-shirts from tpublic.com. All of our shirts come cursed. That's good. The episode's over. Okay. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the

youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.