Kaiser Wilhelm II — a lost war toppled the last German emperor

Wilhelm II reigned as German Emperor and King of Prussia for just over thirty years, from his accession in June 1888 to his abdication in November 1918; his fall came not by execution or coup but by military defeat, when the collapse of Germany’s war effort in the First World War triggered a revolution that swept away the monarchy in a matter of days. On 9 November 1918 his chancellor announced the abdication without waiting for the Kaiser’s consent; the next day Wilhelm crossed into the neutral Netherlands, where he lived in exile until his death in 1941. His departure ended the Hohenzollern dynasty’s centuries of rule and the German Empire that had existed only since 1871.

Wilhelm fell because the war he had helped bring about and could not win destroyed the prestige on which his throne rested. He was an intelligent but erratic and insecure monarch — vain, impulsive, given to bombastic speeches and military display, his self-image bound up with the army and navy that defined imperial Germany. He had dismissed the architect of German unity, Otto von Bismarck, in 1890, and pursued an aggressive, unpredictable foreign policy that isolated Germany and drove a naval arms race with Britain.

When the July Crisis of 1914 escalated after the assassination at Sarajevo, Wilhelm’s government issued Austria-Hungary the “blank cheque” of unconditional support that helped turn a Balkan quarrel into a continental war. Once that war began, however, the Kaiser steadily lost real authority. By the later years of the conflict, effective power had passed to the military command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and Wilhelm — nominally supreme warlord — was sidelined, “out of sight and neglected,” a figurehead presiding over a war machine he no longer controlled.

The end came with defeat. As the German armies broke in the autumn of 1918, sailors mutinied at Kiel, revolution spread across the cities, and the war could not be ended while the Kaiser remained. At the army’s headquarters in Spa, General Wilhelm Groener told Wilhelm to his face that the army would march home in good order under its commanders but would not fight for his throne. The monarchy was declared finished; Wilhelm fled abroad, and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin.