CZM Rewind: Part One: Kaiser Wilhelm: The Saddest Warlord In History

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to talk about Kaiser Wilhelm, the devastatingly cringy Mama's boy who came to rule an empire despite lacking even a single relevant skill.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey, motherfucky's and motherfuck ats. Wow, that's not how I
should introduce this anyway. Hello everybody, Robert here, and this
is our last week of what you might call him
rerun episodes. We are still on vacation here at cool Zone,
having a great time. Actually not on vacation. We were

(00:25):
on vacation, but this is the week where I have
to write so that we can catch up and have
episodes for you all in the new year. But you know,
because I have one more week of blessed relative freedom,
here's another fucking rerun. Enjoy it. I love you what

(00:45):
doing an episode 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 help me today
is one of the best people in all of history.
Jamie Lot. How you doing, Jamie.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
I'm good. I'm having a lovely day. I'm too cold.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Bruce Deep ooh too, Cole, Bruce Deep. Are you feeling
optimistic and and and positive about the world.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
I'm feeling like who we talk about today is gonna
might end up actually being a pretty good guy.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's a good guy.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
That's how I go into every Bastards episode. Now, I'm
just like, you know what, this guy's gonna end up
being pretty nice.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
I think I might change my opinion on this fella.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
I think that I'm going to really have some arguments
in his name.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
You 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.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
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, in terms just in every
this is a brutal one for me, strictly on a
facial hair level.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
You're not a fan of his Walris mustache, Listen.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
I respect someone who makes a choice.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Right, he made a choice. You have to give him that.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
I will hand it to him. Much like Robert Pattinson
in the Lighthouse, he is making a choice. Choices don't
always work out. This is actually I think this is
one of the first subjects that I actually like. No
affair 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.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
That's great, it was. I love World War One.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
I mean, I'm I stand and we stand.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
You have no choice to stand. Oh the so good.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
The trench I love there. We like acted out the
assassination and of Archduke friends Ferdinand.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
It was a black one of my favorite assassinations. Of
the assassinations.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
The fashion, the fashion, the fashion, the trench helmets that
didn't stop bullets.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
I love them, you know what, you love it. It's
also good.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
An underrated World War I amo, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, no, way better than the sequel.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
In my opinion, I totally agree sequel is over hyped.
We get it, you know.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
I mean, I'll pick Terminator two over Terminator one. I'll
pick Aliens over alien But I'm going to pick World
War One over World War Two every day of the.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
We're going to pick the Cheeta Girls two over Cheatah
Girls one. And that's a controversial opinion.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
For those cheating girls.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
I know you don't wrong. 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. Wells are wait, no,
we can't stark the show until you know who the
cheat girls are. You don't know who the Cheata girls.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Are, but of course I don't.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
I know, But I'm just always waiting for 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 it's like Raven Simone.
Two of the girls, shit, yeah right, she's the alpha,
and then two girls from three l W which you

(04:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Oh I do love tracksuits. I am a big tracksuit fan.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
I love people in matching track suits. They wore like
complimentary pastel track suits. And then the second one they
go to Barcelona.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
I think when it comes to like you're talking about
the fashion in World War One and how good it was,
I hope when we have our next World War that
it's basically the same as World War one, but we're
all wearing tracksuits, like that's that is my dream.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Imagine the Yeah, World War three will be waged in
juicy couture head to toe like form fitting track suits.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yes, comfortable waistbands by god.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah. I don't want those royal ten in bombs track
suits missing.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
I want like all those goddamn belts and.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Like the yeah, the ones that have like rhinestones on
them and that till you don't know who's on what side.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, yeah, but the color of the rhinestones. Yeah, it'll
be a great war.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah. I think that this is actually going to be
the best World war yet.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
I feel like we have a real chance to make
it so. But 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, Now,
one I think it's 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

(05:59):
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,
which doesn't like make them mitigate the evils they perpetrated
or remove their agency entirely, but I think it makes

(06:20):
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?

Speaker 1 (06:33):
How could you? Yeah? How could you have learned? Who
would you have learned how to be a good person from?

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Exactly? Like how was this not gonna suck? And that's
the story of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Oh that's a good that'll be the name of the biopic.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, how could this have not sucked? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (06:51):
Okay, cool? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Kaiser Wilhelm was born of the hollenz All Learned 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 but talking about his father's
birth on October eighteenth eighteen thirty one. Now this is
long before Germany was a thing. Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of
Prussia was born in Potsdam. His father was also named Wilhelm.

(07:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Wait is the numbering out of order?

Speaker 2 (07:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
The god I don't like when rich people try to
bamboozle me.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, they don't 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 like couldn't
be trusted to learn a new king's name. But I
know it's something dumber and more arrogant than that.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
It's still it's still like I don't know, like, why
are there five hundred Hollywood agents named Scott and that
are all the same man?

Speaker 2 (08:05):
You know, it's Oh, that's that's nominative determinism. That's because
if you're born Scott, you get fast tracked into Cia.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
You got it. There's a lot of you know, the
Scotts and the Mics, and you know we love them,
but do we can we tell them apart?

Speaker 2 (08:21):
No, now, So Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, who is the dad
of the Prince Friedrich Wilhelm will be talking about this episode,
entered the world second in line to the throne of
Prussia after his brother, the Crown Prince, who was also
named Friedrich Wilhelm. His parents had a typically loveless royal marriage.
His father was in love with Princess Elise Radziwill of Poland,

(08:43):
but she wasn't noble enough for a hohenz Allern 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
did not make for the happiest of home lives. In
June eighteen forty, King Friedrich Wilhelm the Third died after

(09:06):
forty three 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.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Okay, so Wilhelm, the previous Wilhelm.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
His brother, Yeah the he his dad does his 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.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
How does that work when it's dinner time? You just
shall want I don't know. I don't know how they
told each other apart. It sucks so much getting it, Like.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah. I hope that there were some really disturbing nicknames
in the mix. It seems like the only way that
this would work.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, I don't know. So when he was eighteen, a
very right wing general named Leopold von Gerloch 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

(10:20):
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,
like they don't need to just make 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.

(10:43):
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,
the Kaiser's dad's actually a pretty chill dude.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
He's not like the other Kaiser's or prince.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
He's he's a prince. He's yeah, he's the crown prince
at this point, the 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 shipload of his youth in England due to a

(11:21):
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, I have all
these If these royal families start fucking and marrying a bunch,
then they clearly will never fight in a war.

Speaker 1 (11:40):
Wow, 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.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
While there, for a while there. If he 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.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Now, in eighteen fifty five, Prince Wilhelm was
invited to Britain without his parents to stay with Queen
Victoria and her family and proposed 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,

(12:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
So.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
By the summer of eighteen fifty eight, 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

(13:01):
that things would be fine, but the Princess's midwife, Miss Innocent,
knew it a single look that the pregnancy would not
end well.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
Miss Innocent yeah, named.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
After Pope Innocent.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
I think, oh, that's what I feel like. I had
a shirt this so that in junior high different meaning
I had miss Innocent, miss independent after the Kelly Clarkson song. Yeah,
miss that was.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
That's another pope.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Yeah angel one percent devil.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
That yet another pope. A lot of popes that you
had shareds based off. He was the He was of
the popes, one of the top, I mean.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
Pretty close to being a complete angel.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
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 breech berth. At that time, in Central Europe,
about ninety eight percent of babies born in breach were stillborn,
so almost all of the babies born this way died.

(14:02):
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 a live 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 did They

(14:22):
didn't sever it, but like ripped the muscles and shit. Ugh,
So he has his arm as fucked up from the
jump now. The princess was confined to bed rests 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

(14:44):
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 show. Yeah, that's never described it.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
That is absolutely savage take on that infant.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, yeah, really roasting the baby Kaiser.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Jeez.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
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 doctor 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

(15:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
He reminds me of Nemo, who Robert from finding Nemo
the one that gets found.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Oh oh yeah, yeah, yeah he is. He is, And
like Nemo, he grows up to spark a war that
kills seventeen million people. That is Whatsar hasn't gotten to
that movie yet, but that's how the story goes.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
Well, they're all about revisionist history over there. It's a disaster.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
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 yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
It's And also like the Kaiser, super anti Semitic didn't
come up in the movie Lunch, but really really really
far off.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
If you get the feeling that they're just cutting away
just before something terrible happens.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah, in every scene in that movie, he has a
copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion tucked
beneath his good fin.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah, you know again.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
I love fun fat, I love movie trivia.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Uh So, the young Kaiser's hand looked normal when he
grew up, but it is the actual arm in hand
itself were too weak to hold anything much heavier than
a piece of paper. He spent his life hiding it out. Yeah,
it's that's fucking hard. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at
pictures of him, he's always hiding his left arm out
of sight in a coat pocket or like like kind

(17:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
I've decided I forgive him.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Now we're cool.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, Now, as Vanderkiss'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 camer 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

(17:45):
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
winses as he made jibes about the male fist. Okay, yeah,

(18:08):
he can getting a bit of a thing.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
He's getting a bit. Yeah, I mean, I guess you
have to. It begs the question like, if I had
power influence as a twelve year old with a backbras,
would I have oppressed other people? I don't know, yes,
I feel.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Like probably alteah.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Any any furious twelve year old that feels out of
place if they had the it just no twelve year
old to have the ability to He's the rare one.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah. If I had absolute power at the age of twelve,
when I was like like an insecure, fat kid who
didn't know how to be social, I would have killed millions, millions.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
What wouldn't I? I know, like I was a gigantic
walking rectangle for most of my formative years. What if?
What if someone could have suffered for that?

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah? Exactly? Yeah, 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,

(19:14):
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 inbrading. There's no proof of this,

(19:38):
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 to 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

(19:59):
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. Oh, and like one of the German
generals who's around when the Kaiser's like a little kid,

(20:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
I mean, and being I feel like especially for like
young Oh god, just an emasculated twelve year old. Is
there anything with more more potential for danger?

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah? No, 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

(21:07):
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 could is very deeply loved and has
you know kind of your best case scenario for parents
in this period of time?

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Oh yeah, like, sure he was a preached birth, but
at least he wasn't a girl child. We would have
hated that.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
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 air Like they had daughters, and she treated the
daughters well like they like they weren't like, didn't hate
their daughters.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, Well, 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.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Well that's good for her her because then people stop giving.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Her shit exactly. I think that's a big part of
why she feels that way. It's also you know, like
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 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, which

(22:21):
you do when you hear about the czar. Well, no, yeah,
there it's weird, Like the czar their first kid was
a girl, and like his bizar, 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

(22:43):
enjoy having a child, and we'll we'll have the son later.
So I don't know, you get a mix of reactions
from the royal fans far.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
As Yeah, as far as that situation goes, I guess
that's one of the better ways it could shake.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
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 and

(23:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Care when you know that much about a kid's miserable
childhood one way.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, exactly, that's tough.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yeah, Nemo, that's why they made finding meme.

Speaker 2 (23:39):
That's why they made finding names.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
With a monster there. He lost his mother young, he
got he got kidnapped by the ocean, and he had
a he had a difficult fin. So we should forgive
him for his sins.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, for his rabbit anti Semitism.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
I mean, I can't say it enough.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
It's really impossible to owe emphasize. So Prince Wilhelm was
baptized on March fifth, eighteen fifty nine. Queen Victoria was
unable to attend and was represented by Lord Ragland, 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 like represents his grandmamma at the at

(24:20):
the at the baptism.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
Well that's nice.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah. In general, the future Kaiser had a very British upbringing.
His nurse, Missus Hobbs, was English. His chief doctor, Sir
Benjamin Brodie, was also British.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
The most British as names I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, very 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 by like he grew up without it.
He spoke English perfectly with almost no accent. You can
listen to speeches by this guy in English and yeah,

(24:56):
you can barely notice the accent. So posh. Yeah, it's
impossible to overstate how intermarried and intermingled. The royal families
that helped launch World War One 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 one hundred
and seventieth in line for the British throne. Over in Russia,

(25:20):
the tsar's wife was a German princess, and the Czar
and the Kaiser were cousins. All of the monarchs in
charge of the primary belligerence in World War One shared
grandparents and aunts and were cousins and had grown up together.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Those are my favorite letters I wish I haven't like
it's been like almost ten years now, but like the
reading through the letters between cousins where they're like, are
we gonna start a war, like.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Are we gonna are we going to get all these
people killed? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (25:46):
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?

Speaker 2 (25:55):
How much do we like four to six million of
our young men, Like.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
Just do you feel able to just it's so bizarre
knowing that their cousins that like, for the most part,
know each other, like, it's just very weird.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, and love each other.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Yeah, yeah, we'd where like there's those like the letters
between Wilhelm and this and the are they're so bizarre.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
Patron I love a product and I love a service.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Well here's both.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Okay, we're back. Oh what a nice product or service? Though?
Is just described?

Speaker 2 (26:46):
It was nice. Now let's get back to talking about
Prince Wilhelm's misshapen arm.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
But his plot Finn won't swim right.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, his damaged arm was a matter of serious concern
for the 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.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Oh my god, he is a back brace for his arm.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Oh we were getting to the back brace. Oh yeah, yeah,
Now the infant prints 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 Kaiservillhelm
the Second A Concise Life by John Roll. Okay, When
the infant was six months old, Professor Bernhard von Langenbeck

(27:38):
of the Charite Hospital in Berlin prescribed animal baths twice
a week. Wilhelm's left arm was inserted into the body
of a freshly slaughtered hair for half an hour and
the hope that the wild animal's warmth and vigor would
be transferred to the arm. No, this stuck him arm
deep in a dead animal. No, why it was a baby.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
You're just like, how is how would this grow up
to be a good person? This is like biblical curses.
They're fosting upon a.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
Baby, shove a fresh bloody corpse on the literal infant
child's arm for an hour. How does that not talk
about it?

Speaker 1 (28:15):
I hate there's someone in the room like, We've got
to make sure that this is remembered, because what if
it works?

Speaker 2 (28:21):
What if it works? If he's the best king ever?

Speaker 1 (28:23):
I mean science, We're going to do about science and
the utal and does it's never gone wrong?

Speaker 2 (28:29):
Amazing?

Speaker 1 (28:30):
Oh god, that's again brutal.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
He's the Prince of Pruscius. 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. That's really like
the height of medical science.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
What is it? Does everyone else? You know? Honestly, I
would rather die at twenty four than have that be
my medical regimen. I would rather have died years ago.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
It's terrible. Now. Perhaps the most damaging treatment came at
the direct orders of Queen Victoria. And I'm gonna quote
now from John Vanderkist's biography, Queen Victoria's a piece of shit,
by the way, Just as it heads up.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
I did the I went to England over the summer
brag and we did the Buckingham Palace tour because I
just didn't. I just wanted to see what it was like.
And the oh, the revisionism aunt like, there's no mention
of Wilhelm. There's no mention of you know, it's just

(29:28):
too messy. They're like, she was really nice, she hated
when her husband died. Thanks for the forty dollars.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yeah, yeah, Well here's a little bit more about Queen Victoria.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Hit it.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
The princess we're talking about Kaiservillhelm's mom doated 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 it won
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 comply handed over to a wet nurse whose milk

(30:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
You know what, My mom did the same thing, except
with formula. So you know, my mom was just like,
I'm you stay away from me. Here's some NESI, here's
some nessli chemicals. Good luck with your life now.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
Oh, but his mom was nice.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Oh that's his mom was nice. She's just a bitch
who hates his mom and is like he's like I said,
how does this kid not grow up fucked up?

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Like I don't like I don't like women on I
don't like women on woman conflict. It's not fair. We
don't need it. It makes me upset, although it might
did that though to my mama.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah, and 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 emperors of Germany.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, oh it's it's not. I mean, just regular fucked
up people are the best.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
We're obsessed with Danny DeVito.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
I love Danny.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
What about Billy Zayin.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
I don't know anything about Billy z an Is he nice?

Speaker 1 (31:40):
He's nice?

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Good? Good for Billy's aye?

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Everyone.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Let's replace Congress with Danny DeVito and Billy You.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Know what, the only two white men we can support
at this point.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah. Now. In eighteen sixty, when the Prince was one
year old, his doctors began giving him daily electromagnetic therapy,
applying constant galvanic current to his net 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.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
No kidding, God, it's just like your child has a disability.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
We're four pages in and we haven't stopped talking about
the fucked up ways they damaged this kid trying to
heal his arms.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
We feel so God, it is hard not to feel.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
For a you like that's a lot to deal with.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
Hell, your family's electrocuting you because they find you to
be gross. That's a nightmare.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
That's a cross to bear that it certainly is. On
January second, eighteen sixty one, King Friedrich Vilhelm the fourth
died and Princevillelm's grandfather became KAISERVILLELM the First. He was
sixty three at the time. Two years later, in eighteen
sixty three, when the Prince who would become the Kaiser
that we're talking about, I know this is confusing. I'm

(32:59):
going to call, like when I say King Frederick Wilhelm fourth,
he's also a Kaiser Wilhelm. I'm only gonna call the
Kaiservillehelm from World War One 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

(33:21):
see four years after birth, Wilhelm had developed torti collis,
caused by the healthy muscles on the right side of
his neck pulling his head downwards in that direction. Oh, 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.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
That sounds safe, sounds.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
He had to worry 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 is desired by means of a screw, which
is just the iron bar.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Ah. Why this is Oh, I feel I'm sad, Robert.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
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 next stretching machine.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
These are medieval torture devices. This is not helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
The thing that actually did help his arm to grow
somewhat was a course of regular gymnastics, which oh stuff worked,
figure just actual exercise. Yes, that one didn't seem to
help there.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
It's so I'm like, I mean, these these 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.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, I mean, I've only hearder referred to as the
arms stretching machine, but it probably had a fun German nickname.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
A doctor sue sounding thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
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 Imprussian families of that era. He was the baby
of the global royal family and for a time Queen
Victoria's favorite grandchild. Starting in eighteen sixty three, he began

(35:32):
to regularly visit his aunts and uncles and cousins in
Great Britain. John Vanderkiss describes him as a spirited child. Quote,
on his way to Saint 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 for her mother's baby, a name

(35:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
What a sweet kid.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
That actually does sound like what you would have done. Yes, I,
little knife thrower.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Have bonded over knife throwing. I love throwing knives. If
I anytime I get really drunk, I'm gonna throw knives.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
I you know, 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 or bring back some memories. Aunt baby,
that's actually a sick.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Burn, for that is a sick bird. He was. He
was not not witless. Quick Yeah, that's quick for like
a four year old too not bad to.

Speaker 1 (37:10):
Be like aunt bait. Fuck you on, baby, baby, I
can't I have no punch ups.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
That's great, hell yeah kid.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
Now.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
In eighteen sixty four, the Prince's father, who was the
Crown Prince, fought in the Prushio Danish War and returned
home a war hero. The future Kaiser's father would again
win laurels in the Franco Prussian War of eighteen seventy one,
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 where his father sending back captured battle flags

(37:40):
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 infantrymen, but he was like participating
in battles and leading troops in combat and stuff. Okay,
So as he grew into an lessent, the young Prince

(38:01):
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,

(38:22):
which he ever wished her to do.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
If only the Germans were more British.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
If only the Germans were were more humble like us.
All we did was conquer a quarter of the world's
land surface, unlike these arrogant Germans notoriously.

Speaker 1 (38:38):
Chill and tolerant British.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
Yeah yes, yeah, now. The Prince's parents seemed to have
listened to this advice. Starting in mid eighteen sixty six,
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 to heaven, and the vast majority

(39:01):
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 Taiwin Lanister
on Game of Thrones, Like if Sophie looks up his picture,
like exactly like him. It's really weird now. Hinspeter's educational
program involved twelve hour days of mixed study and exercise.
It was, in his words, based exclusively on a stern

(39:24):
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

(39:46):
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 US Revolutionary War, a Prussian nobleman,

(40:10):
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. Ok. But while Prussian discipline made for an
effective military, it also made for profoundly damaged young men,

(40:34):
which is why we got two 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

(40:55):
well yeah, this guy's this is so fucked up, This is.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
Like calculated shit, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, No matter how well Princevillehelm 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.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
God, yeah, just with a whole love from your child.
And see that's such a ugh God, why did I
feel like sometimes parents? I mean again, if this is
just like every bad parenting technique turned up to an
eleven for no reason.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Amazing, how many different bad types of parenting he receives
from really everyone but his parents. But he's got carried so.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
Many sets of stop us. Yeah, God, that's so brutal. Yeah,
they're like, oh, watch your cousin Edith Pieza. I feel
like that happens to kids sometimes as punishment, you know,
you're like, oh, look, everyone's gonna get birthday cake, but
you whatever, you shit on the floor, so you got
to eat a cracker.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
And some of those people grow up to be shitty
managers at a sonic. But since they don't have them,
they don't inherit the German military, so it's not a
huge problem.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
No, no, and he would have denied his employees lunch
breaks for shitty reasons because.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
He's got some hurt in his heart.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah, the damage would have been contained, right, right, Not.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
That we condone this behavior from Lydd's managers, we don't.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
But I prefer people like Wilhelm become Lydd's managers than
Imperial German Army managers.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Okay, okay, I'm listening.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah, yeah, Now, every Wednesday and Saturday, hens 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 what life was like
for the manual laborers who actually built his country. To
Hinspeter's credit, he also wanted the royal family to gain
an understanding of social inequality and the suffering of workers.

(43:10):
Wilhelm was required to remove his hat and deliver a
thankful speech at every place of business they visited after
their tour. So Hinspeter 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 Hinspeter's plan to
get the young man to express his views at all

(43:32):
times so that he would not be dominated by his
advisers 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

(43:53):
than checked. Hinspeter 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 writing one handed, and he
was said to be an excellent horseman. So he learns
how to one handed ride a horse.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
It's almost like they should have just let him learn
how to do things with one hand the entire.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Time, rather than the torture machines.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Rather than the evil torture machines.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Jamie, your anti torturing baby's agenda has been clear for
quite some time, and I think you might be biased
on this.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
Think 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?

Speaker 2 (44:32):
How will you know until you've tried it?

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Right? And that's fair. I haven't tried it yet.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yeah, well.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
Sure of course, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:41):
Well who are they going to tell exactly what are
they going to do? Because they can't speak English.

Speaker 1 (44:46):
I'm about to get a kitten, so you know it's
going to be there.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
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 mean from a very
young age? Do you know what the ca gun is?

Speaker 1 (45:01):
The cat gun?

Speaker 2 (45:02):
It's when you hold your cat like a gun, with
its back legs as the handle and its front legs
like a foe grip, 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. You know.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
You hold it with anything that you hold with two
and you're like, you know, like a machine guns, machine gun,
you pretend it's yeah, it just feels natural and right.
I'm bringing you to the hospital, Robert.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
It's it's how you raise a baby kitten, and then
they grow up being very affectionate. Yeah, because they just
know that people pick them up and do weird things
to them and it's fine, that's nice.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Your radical pro knife agenda has also been clear for
some time.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
I have been in favor of knives. Look someone in
the eye. Look, I just want icon.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Now. When Ilhelm was ten in eighteen sixty nine, 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 in 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

(46:24):
also inducted into the first Infantry Regiment of the Guards
and made a German officer when he was ten 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

(46:45):
Army over the course of his childhood. This is like
getting micromachines was for me right right.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Become They're nice to have, but eventually they become meaningless.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Yeah, he loves he loves these. Yeah, he loves his
military unit, sure, made up of real men. In eighteen
seventy France and Prussia went to war. Prussia one in
Germany was born from here on out, the Kaisers, the
Kings of Prussia, were kings of the entire German Empire.

(47:19):
Now there were like twenty two 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, LI think we're all
kind of on the future kaiser side at this point.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
I like that, Robert, you choose moments to go to
ad breaks where I feel I'm at the peak. I'm
on the edge of my seat and my hand is
on my wallet as well. Yeah, that could have done
another way, but it went wallet.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
You know, you have a weird habit with that wallet
of holding it out before ad breaks.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
Yeah, my hand's trembling. I'm helpless in the face of capitalism.
I need the products. I need the serve.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Pull out your credit cards, everybody, ignore what the actual
products are and just immediately buy them without a thought.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Don't even put in the discount, Cook.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
Don't even put in the discount. Well, no, do because
then we get Then it helps us.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Oh sorry, Robert, it's good for the show.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Fine, I do. Here they go, We're back.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
So, after eighteen seventy one Franco Prussian War happens, the
Prince's mother, the Crown Princess, who was you know, 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

(48:50):
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 seventeen million people. She
didn't want that to happen a for export, I guess
ay for effort.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
At least it occurred to her that it might happen.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
Oh, this could be a problem. So she sent the
future Kaiser off to Germany in January of eighteen seventy
one 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,

(49:28):
and I hope and trust he will grow up into
a good and useful man.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
I've described a lot of my boyfriends that way. I
think I'm just like 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. Grew I spill one day,
grow up. I'm trying to raise him as best I can,

(49:55):
of course. Yeah, so you know I get it. I
get it.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Yeah, now the bar Yeah, and you know, at some point,
you know, the Kaiser read these letters his mom wrote
about him to his grandmother, which has to have done
some damage.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
I was like that tracks yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Yeah, yeah, we all wish that had been the case.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Well, honey, you and the baby.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
In eighteen seventy four, fifteen 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 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.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
It wasn't like excluicy enough.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
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 hins 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

(51:31):
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
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, Peter?

Speaker 1 (51:48):
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 is rock and it doesn't fucking matter. I'm still
finally like how much smarter someone is than me, I'll
just have him fucking killed.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Maybe, yeah, that may that may have been kind of
the reasoning there.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
I don't like that, I get it, but I think
I guess.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Yeah. Now, at school, Wilhelms started his days at five
am and didn't end them until nine pm. 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

(52:31):
most anti Semitic leader of all time. O.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
Wait, who's number one? I'm kidding Okay, Now, he's not
number one at anything.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
He's number two. And 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.
There's a sizable gap between the two.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
This is Jojo rap it.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Yeah, I can't wait to see that. And you say
that is it good?

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Yeah, I saw it the other day. I liked it.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
It looks good. I just haven't had a chance to
get down to the theater.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
It's fun, it's it's a romp.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Jamie says, it's a romp. Check it out, people, itsicha
plays Hitler.

Speaker 1 (53:17):
I'm so. I'm so easily bothered by like child actors.
And they got a good one.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
No, I hate most children.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
They're okay, well, let's take us to the next level.
It's good. It's good, though. I liked it.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
I mean, it's not that she's the only person that
was nice to him.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Yeah, I'm still gonna say this is I'm just gonna
read this quote from the biography Kaiser Wilhelm a concise life,
and you can tell me what you can help analy Okay,
This is a long one, Jamie, and there's a lot
to unpack here.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
Isn't it horny.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
I let me just read the quote and we'll discuss it, okay. Quote.
In the winter of eighteen seventy four or seventy five,
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 in love, if ever

(54:30):
there was one. I have got the little secret which
is for you alone, viz. A peculiar dream. He wrote
to Vicky, his mom, on March eighteen seventy five, shortly
after her visit to Castle for his sixteenth birthday. I
dreamt last night that I was walking with you in
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,

(54:53):
in my rage, broke her parasol. But you put your
dear arm around my waist, led me aside, pulled your
glove loved 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

(55:13):
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

(55:35):
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
chairs 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 remember dreaming about you
I instantly seized your hand and kissed. Then you gave

(55:56):
me a warm embrace, putting your right arm around my
shoulder and neck, and got up and walked round the
rooms with me.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
No, no, no, that's odd, right, So that's peculiar. He's
just like writing his mom being like, I want to
fuck you? Is that okay?

Speaker 2 (56:13):
I want to I want to fuck your hands.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
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 everyone like it's obsessed about. Of course, that
this man becomes this like erotic fixation left a left
hand fetish if.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
You will, Oh, that's just.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Like baby boy, put it in your journal and then
light it on fire.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
Do not send it, burn that fucker.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
Yeah, send to mama and wait so waits So we
there was h He sent a letter and then presumably
got a reply that was like, yeah, tell me more.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
Yeah, we're going to get into that a little bit.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
Now.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
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. Ralph's book is the
one I found that really does the best job of
highlighting how fucking peculiar this all was.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
I'm going to.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Continue quoting here.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
Yeah, I mean the hand fixation's very telling.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
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. He's
like fourteen or fifteen, he's yeah, he's like a little
horny teens.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
For mama, Oh, okay, kiss, sorry, keep eying.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
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 Correspondent's continued in
this vein for several months. In May eighteen seventy five,
he urged his mother again to keep your promise you
gave me at Berlin. Always give me a loan the
soft inside of your hand to kiss. But of course
you keep this as a secret for yourself.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
Over to him. Yeah, definitely, he's like, your left hand
is a pussy, like that's his energy. Okay, so yeah,
we keep going. Wow.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
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. Willhelm could hardly contain his excitement, calculating that
it was now only days or eighty four hours, or
in five forty minutes or in three hundred and two

(58:34):
four hundred seconds before he would be able to embrace
his mother again in Potsdam and kiss her sweet beautiful hands.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
Yeah hands, Robert, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
The man likes man loves his mom.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
To touch mommy's hand. I 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.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
I think we can forgive the Crown Princess for not
knowing how to respond to her teenage son's sexual obsession
with her hands.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Cool she's weirded out, she says. 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. She tried to, 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.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
How he wants to fuck herate, like, if you're gonna
suck my hands, say say it.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
Right, 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

(59:59):
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
site of his ancestry since his mother was British, so well,
it's significant repercussions. I mean, you can't blame her, she said,
like what do you do? What do you do you do?

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Someone shut up about wanting to kiss your hand like that. Yeah, God,
what it's predicament.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
That's what a predicament.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
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 like this weird hand
thing is something that like, you know, Wilhelm couldn't help,
but he felt that way. It was where like he
was like, this was going to happen. His mom kind
of drawing away from him wasn't unreasonable, having really complicated

(01:01:01):
feelings about England as a result of this wasn't unreasonable.
But power, with the German Army as his inheritance, so
it became an issue.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
You just have too much to lash out with. You
can't just like take your mom's car, Like, yeah, god,
I think that so far, the villain of this story
is power.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
I know it'll be exactly but right now, 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

(01:01:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
He would have been a perfectly like, you know, in
in offense of like whatever, guy. He just would have
been a guy.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
I don't think he was. He inherently moved to commit
acts of horrible evil, but he did. And yet yeah, 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

(01:02:20):
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 twenty
seventh of March eighteen seventy nine, Wilhelm's eleven year old
younger brother Waldemar died from diphtheria along with one of
his aunts. Wilhelm had been jealous of the little boy,

(01:02:41):
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 eleven
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

(01:03:01):
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.
Can 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

(01:03:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
Good now, good, Yeah, I'm just like feeling for his
mom of just like, oh, mom obsessed with me and
he won't stop mutilating animals.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
Yeah, what do I do it? Even though her son
didn't do it. The guy who killed the cat mutilated
it to scare off other cats.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
Oh okay, that's still not okay.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
Very game of Friends.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
It's yeah, like there was a clear solution to that,
and it was like a pack.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Of Yeah, it's not like a pack of wild wolves. Like,
there are other ways that this could have been handled.

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
The worst case scenario is that there were a couple
more cats around.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
Oh boy.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
Now, as a young adult, Wilhelm fell madly in love
with his cousin Ella, but Otto von Bismarck was not
a fan of the pairing. Now, Bismarck is a guy
will probably we 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

(01:05:10):
again probably the single man most responsible from making Germany
a thing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
We did a whole unit on that motherfucker.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Yeah, he's a very important, influential guy. Yeah, he's an
influence and yeah, as he's a dick, but he's also
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

(01:05:37):
a lot of the critical decisions. He was kind of
the 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 he didn't, you know, let

(01:06:00):
that relationship come to pass. So Kaiser saw this as
Ella rejecting him, and he wrote to Hinspeter 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 rint princess,

(01:06:23):
basically the Safeway Select equivalent of a Hollands Aalern the
family of the Kaisers. She was 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 hahens Allern line illness.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
That's description of her. But I'm not super into that, okay,
but good to know now.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
When the marriage was announced, Hinspeter was a static that
his dearly beloved problem child was going to marry someone
who understands him and sympathizes with him in his weaknesses.
Kins 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

(01:07:16):
of the weird notes is that, like, I think we
can all look at how heins 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 seem to crave this man's
affection and approval. It's like devastating, Yeah, yeah, it's fucked

(01:07:41):
up man, this kid, Like how does that? There's no
way this guy ends up healthy, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
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 who people are gonna die?

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
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 Vanderkiss,
the main biographers who were sources for this episode, did.
It's obvious that one hundred percent of the people who
knew Willhelm when he was young knew ahead of time
that he was going to be a terrible Kaiser. The

(01:08:18):
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,

(01:08:38):
but he's gonna.

Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
But he's boy, that'll suck. When that inevitably happened.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
It's a shame. There's no other possible thing we can
have than a monarchy.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
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 some things aren't inevitable from that far away.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
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 whis yeah
to make matters worse, She despised the British, which helped

(01:09:27):
push Prince Wilhelm further away from his mother. She was
against liberal politics and the growing mood towards democratization and
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

(01:09:50):
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 eighty percent

(01:10:12):
of Europe would be on one side Germany side if
a war broke out, which would essentially make it impossible
to have. Nobody's going to go to war with you,
Like the Russian Empire at this point is one sixth
of the world's land mass, 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.

(01:10:32):
Nobody would make a decision that stupid and azaes and
they're all cuzos. 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' strategy, like, well, as long as we're in

(01:10:53):
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 and like a mass scale. Now there are
some very persistent rumors that Wilhelm was homosexual. It seems
more accurate to say that he might have been bisexual. Okay,

(01:11:15):
he fell in love with a guy named Yulenberg, 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 Ulenberg was the
first to open the gates of the garden of romance
to the young man who had been forced into the

(01:11:36):
part of hard bitten Prussian prints and was now taking
leave of an adolescence poor alike and love and the
dreams of youth.

Speaker 1 (01:11:42):
God, so 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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
Oh yeah, he's disabled bi sexual abuse victim.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Yeah, that he and his boyfriend should just move away.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Yeah. Oh if only they'd gotten a house in Paris
or something together. Oh so nice that 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 well, No,

(01:12:25):
because Hitler was shitty at it, like Willhelm. 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. It
could have been really talented.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
What if this was the point where you found out
that I actually thought Hitler's art was really good, that
he like, oh yeah, like yeah, no, Hitler is a
terrible artist.

Speaker 2 (01:12:49):
Obviously, Jamie Loftus has a Hitler. I mean, I'm not
gonna lie I would actually love to have an original
Hitler just for talking about it. Yeah, but I love
haunted things.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
I do love Hanton thing. That's very absolutely Oh my god. Yea,
so he would but he was like he was a
better artist, you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
Know, I just he seems to have been good. He
just never quite like 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.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
On his same time for painting when you're the ki.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
No time for painting when you're the cut. Some time
for painting, but not enough right now. Bismarck saw Wilhelm
as a pliant, muldable 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 eighteen eighties, he went behind the Crown Prince's back
and made the future Kaiser the chief envoy of the
German Empire. Now this by all right should have been

(01:13:41):
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 over barness and self conceit, I

(01:14:01):
cannot but frankly regard it as dangerous tool how him
at present to take part in any foreign affairs. Woo Yeah. 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,

(01:14:23):
something the Czar didn't think he needed. Approve he didn't
need to get from an upstart boy who wasn't even
kaiser yet.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Yeah, God, what a dufus. Yeah. So the Prince's career
did not start with great promise, but at least he
was everyone knew, everyone knew was happening. Yeah, I will say,
though he enjoyed some fringe benefits of the gig as
envoid to Russia. According to Vanderkist's book quote, he relished
the attention paid to him as chief envoy of the

(01:14:52):
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 when he wrote in
the Tale 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.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
He doesn't understand when to like, not be horny over shit.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
You're over sharing, man, may he's horny on Maine all
the time. Jes b.

Speaker 1 (01:15:20):
Yeah, he's like, yeah, at least make a like a
fake account, don't.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
Yeah, Pola Mitt Romney write these under another name.

Speaker 1 (01:15:27):
He is being horny on the main it's so such
a bad look.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
Oh, I mean, like I'm fine with it, Like no judgment, bro,
but like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:36):
Don't judge it. Don't be horny on the main.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
Yeah, you are being horny in your official job as
international diplomat, which is probably inappropriate.

Speaker 1 (01:15:46):
That's the line. That's the line, Wilhelm.

Speaker 2 (01:15:50):
Now. Wil Helm also had mistresses, but he was no
better at managing them than he was at managing international diplomacy.
In eighteen eighty six, he arranged to have two of
his mistresses follow his train at a birth lynn 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 a should know now
that he was the wealthiest man in Germany.

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):
I yeah, I mean, I said, well, that's just dating
a rich guy.

Speaker 2 (01:16:16):
Yeah, yeah, like the going to be great.

Speaker 1 (01:16:19):
And then then it turns out that they're they're fucking
mean misers.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
Yeah left, yeah. Yeah. The women left in a rage,
and one of them stole one of the Prince's monogrammed
cuff links, so she displayed around town to prove that
she had with the prince. When the Kaiser realized this.

Speaker 1 (01:16:39):
Came I flew southwest for this, take this ship and
runs that day.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
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 foun now ensuing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):
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 conceited popularity seeker under Jewish influence. He
also loudly insulted Austria, his nation's closest ally, as rotten,

(01:17:20):
close to dissolution. God called the Austrian He called the
Austrian people useless, pansies and gormands, no longer fit for life.

Speaker 1 (01:17:29):
I hope that the sex worker has got like an
emotional support bonus. You know, it's like, that's not what
you well.

Speaker 2 (01:17:36):
He made one of them pregnant and she blackmailed him
and she got a shitload of money out of it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:44):
This guy's a loser. Take his stub there.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
Oh, word of all this got back to the Austrian
crown Prince, which sparked another international incident. This all voted
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

(01:18:10):
gets sick, which would prove to be throat cancer. So
none of this bodes well for the future of peace
in Europe.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Right, They're like, oh no, the fuck up is the
only one who will live. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
In eighteen eighty eight, 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 ninety
nine days, and he was very ill for all of them.
By the time he died on June fifteenth, eighteen eighty eight.
Now Crown Princevillehelm had already been taking on and botching
many of his dad's duties. That same day, Kaiservillehelm ascended

(01:18:43):
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 is over, Jamie.
You got some pluggables to plug.

Speaker 1 (01:18:55):
I got some pluggies. I'm releasing a podcast on Thanksgiving
call My Year in Mensa is about what the title
is about. It's Apelled my Ear and mensa, How I
got in and how I almost got bullied out.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:19:08):
And then you can listen to the Bechdel Cast every week. Uh.
You can follow me on Twitter at Jamie Lofts Help.
And that's what you can do. That's what you're able
to do. At this time.

Speaker 2 (01:19:20):
Now you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at
Bastard's pod. 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.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
Right, Yeah, I mean would make you a terrible kaiser.

Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
It would make me a terrible kaiser. And my whole
job is to become a very good kaiser.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
Yeah, your Fensta is horny as hell.

Speaker 2 (01:19:46):
Yes, Oh my god, it is nothing but thirst posting shameless.
I muted it now, Jamie, what is a Fensta?

Speaker 1 (01:20:02):
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 it's where you do your horn I
don't actually have one, which is what everyone who has
one says. But but it's like where you post, uh,
you know, you post you know the illusion on the
main right, You're like, I'm so happy, everything's great, and

(01:20:23):
then you post depression memes and thirst posts on the
fin staff. Oh that's where you're like your your your
you know, two extremes.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
I know, but unfortunately that is a spell. That means
it's in a book somewhere far away. So your thirst
posts are uh, they're they're documented somewhere. You shouldn't drop
blood on it. That that's that activates the curse.

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
Damn it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
I'll send you some more.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
If you want to activate a curse, buy some t
shirts from teapublic dot com. All of our shirts come cursed,
so that's good. The episode's over, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:21:18):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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