The Kaiser's Heirs, Hitler's Helpers, and the Cost of a Pretty Family Tree

Germany abolished its monarchy in 1918. More than a century later, the descendants of its last emperor were still fighting over royal property, defending their family history, and facing questions about their ancestors' support for Adolf Hitler.

UsefulCharts offers a considerably more comfortable introduction.

In Who Would Be the Monarchs of Germany Today?, published on May 26, 2023, Matt Baker traces the descendants of Germany's former ruling families to identify who might occupy their thrones if the monarchies still existed.

The family trees are informative. The history attached to them is less dependable.

Baker identifies Georg Friedrich of Hohenzollern as Germany's hypothetical Kaiser. He explains the succession through Georg Friedrich's grandfather, Louis Ferdinand, whom he describes as having opposed the Nazis.

That description is the video's most consequential weakness.

Historical research published years before the episode complicates it substantially. Louis Ferdinand expressed enthusiasm for Hitler's new regime, maintained relationships with prominent American supporters of Nazism, and later helped construct a more favorable account of his political past.

Meanwhile, the modern Hohenzollern family's financial claims had turned the question of Nazi collaboration into a matter of considerable legal importance.

The story is not simply about who would wear an imaginary crown. It concerns what happened when a former ruling dynasty attempted to recover assets while historians examined its relationship with the dictatorship that destroyed Germany's democracy.

The Prince Who Supposedly Opposed Hitler

Louis Ferdinand of Prussia occupies an important place in Baker's genealogy.

His father, the former Crown Prince Wilhelm, had been the expected successor to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Louis Ferdinand eventually became head of the Hohenzollern family, and his descendants lead to Georg Friedrich.

Baker presents Louis Ferdinand as the branch's anti-Nazi figure.

But historian Karina Urbach uncovered a different early history.

In her 2020 research paper, Useful Idiots: The Hohenzollerns and Hitler, published in Historical Research, Urbach examined correspondence preserved in the archives of Henry Ford, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and American journalist Poultney Bigelow.

The letters established that Louis Ferdinand's early relationship with National Socialism was considerably more accommodating than his later public image suggested.

In August 1933, months after Hitler became chancellor, Louis Ferdinand wrote to President Roosevelt about developments in Germany.

He described the changes with enthusiasm, comparing Germany's transformation to Roosevelt's New Deal and expressing satisfaction with Hitler's appearance before the Reichstag.

This was not the language of an unequivocal opponent of the new regime.

Urbach also documented Louis Ferdinand's relationship with Henry Ford, whose antisemitic publications had influenced leading National Socialists.

Ford employed the young prince and became an important personal connection. Louis Ferdinand met Hitler in 1933 and carried a message of admiration from Hitler to Ford.

American newspapers subsequently alleged that the prince had helped channel Ford money to the Nazi Party. Urbach explicitly noted that this allegation remained unproven.

That distinction matters. The documented relationships and favorable statements warrant scrutiny without adding an unsubstantiated accusation of financing Hitler.

Louis Ferdinand's later political associations were more complicated.

He knew people involved in opposition to Hitler, and his name was considered in discussions about a possible post-Hitler political arrangement. But he did not participate in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt.

Historian Martin Sabrow, writing for Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education, likewise distinguishes Louis Ferdinand's claims about his opposition from demonstrable participation in resistance activities.

According to Sabrow's account, Louis Ferdinand consulted his father about becoming involved with opposition circles in 1943. His father advised him to stay away, and he followed that advice.

This does not establish that Louis Ferdinand remained a committed Nazi supporter throughout his life.

It establishes something Baker's description conceals: the supposed anti-Nazi prince had a record of early accommodation and sympathy that cannot be erased by his later associations.

And that record had already been investigated before the video appeared.

Hitler's Crown Prince Was Not an Innocent Bystander

Louis Ferdinand was not the only Hohenzollern whose political history deserves attention.

His father, former Crown Prince Wilhelm, was central to the family's attempts to regain political standing after Germany became a republic.

In 1932, Wilhelm publicly endorsed Hitler in the presidential election against Paul von Hindenburg.

He also attempted to persuade Germany's defense minister to lift restrictions on the Nazi paramilitary organizations, the SA and SS.

After Hitler became chancellor, Wilhelm participated in the Day of Potsdam on March 21, 1933.

The ceremony was carefully designed to associate Hitler's government with the prestige of Prussia's old military and political establishment.

The former crown prince's presence was useful precisely because of his ancestry.

The Nazis were not merely displaying a retired aristocrat. They were presenting their dictatorship as a legitimate successor to an older German political tradition.

Wilhelm and other members of the former imperial family lent that performance its historical credibility.

His younger brother, August Wilhelm, went further, becoming an active Nazi and senior SA figure.

The family's interest in Hitler was not inexplicable.

Some Hohenzollerns hoped that cooperation with the dictatorship might eventually produce a restoration of the monarchy.

They looked toward Italy, where King Victor Emmanuel III had retained his throne under Mussolini's fascist government.

The arrangement offered an attractive possibility: recovering a crown without recovering democracy.

Unfortunately for the Hohenzollerns, Hitler had little intention of surrendering meaningful authority to a restored German emperor.

The project failed.

That failure did not undo the assistance already offered.

Historians Disagree About the Prince's Influence, Not His Willingness to Help

There is an important distinction between supporting Hitler and successfully contributing to his rise.

The Hohenzollern controversy exposed that distinction through competing historical assessments.

At a German parliamentary hearing on January 29, 2020, historians Peter Brandt, Stephan Malinowski, and Stefanie Middendorf argued that Crown Prince Wilhelm had substantially assisted National Socialism.

Historian Benjamin Hasselhorn considered the evidence insufficient for such a definitive conclusion.

Christopher Clark, the Cambridge historian commissioned to assess Wilhelm's conduct, reached another interpretation.

Clark acknowledged the crown prince's repeated support for Hitler but argued that Wilhelm lacked sufficient political influence to have made a substantial contribution to his rise.

In a published exchange with historian David Motadel, Clark described Wilhelm's willingness to help while maintaining that his actual political importance was limited.

That is a serious historical disagreement.

A failed opportunist can still be a collaborator. But identifying his intentions does not establish how much he changed the course of history.

The question becomes especially important when the meaning of substantial assistance determines whether a family qualifies for financial compensation.

And that is exactly what happened.

The Modern Royal Claim Was About Property, Not Just Titles

Baker explains that Georg Friedrich possesses no legally recognized royal authority.

He also observes that the Hohenzollerns retained considerable wealth after Germany abolished the monarchy.

Both points help explain the family's circumstances.

Neither captures the scale of its subsequent property disputes.

After World War II, Soviet occupation authorities confiscated substantial Hohenzollern possessions in eastern Germany.

Following German reunification, the family sought compensation and the return of disputed property.

The claims included artworks, historical objects, and former royal buildings.

A German law enacted in 1994 created a route to compensation for certain expropriations. But it excluded claims where the relevant former owner had substantially assisted the Nazi or East German communist system.

The political behavior of Crown Prince Wilhelm therefore became directly relevant to the family's financial interests.

According to Georg Friedrich's own account in March 2023, disputes concerning more than 10,000 cultural objects remained to be clarified, with approximately 4,000 affected by the question of his great-grandfather's conduct.

This was no longer an argument about an imaginary throne.

It was a dispute involving thousands of objects, important public collections, and the interpretation of twentieth-century German history.

There is an important qualification here: not every disputed ownership question depended on the Nazis.

Some disagreements arose from the division of royal and state property after the monarchy ended in 1918. The property settlement of 1925–26 had left ambiguities that survived for generations.

The distinction matters because resolving ownership under that earlier agreement was not equivalent to deciding whether the family qualified for compensation under the 1994 law.

Nevertheless, Nazi history had become an unavoidable part of the inheritance dispute.

And the family had taken that dispute well beyond negotiations with the government.

When Historians Challenged the Family, Lawyers Entered the Argument

During the property controversy, Georg Friedrich and his lawyers pursued numerous legal actions against journalists, researchers, publishers, and others who discussed the family's history.

The Association of Historians in Germany considered the situation serious enough to support a public documentation project.

Its purpose was to record the legal disputes and examine their implications for historical scholarship and public discussion.

The proceedings involved disputes over specific published statements, not simply a single lawsuit challenging an unfavorable historical judgment.

Some complaints concerned factual accuracy. Others became entangled with questions about public access to archives, proposed museum presentations, and the family's influence over its historical reputation.

The consequences were investigated.

In February 2024, researchers Uwe Krüger, Max Beuthner, and Connor Endt published a peer-reviewed study in Publizistik examining the effects of the Hohenzollern litigation.

They interviewed five journalists and five academics affected by the legal actions.

Their findings were revealing.

The legal proceedings did not stop research or reporting. Among historians, they sometimes encouraged further investigation.

But participants described financial uncertainty, stress, wasted time, and changes in how they expressed themselves publicly.

Some became more reluctant to discuss the subject. Others adopted more defensive language.

The researchers identified signs of a chilling effect on public discussion, while acknowledging that their small interview sample limited wider conclusions.

A wealthy family is entitled to challenge demonstrably false statements.

That right does not make every legal intervention proportionate or desirable.

When historians investigating a dynasty's political past must also consider the costs of defending their published work in court, the controversy extends beyond reputation.

It becomes a question of whether private resources can make public historical scrutiny more difficult.

The study did not establish that every Hohenzollern legal complaint was abusive. It did establish that the proceedings imposed real burdens on some of the people examining the family's history.

That is a far more consequential exercise of modern power than the ceremonial titles occupying the UsefulCharts family tree.

The Family Abandoned Its Compensation Claims Before the Video Was Published

The chronology is particularly important.

On March 8, 2023, Georg Friedrich announced that the Hohenzollerns would withdraw their disputed compensation claims.

He said he wanted to clear the way for a less burdened historical debate.

He also acknowledged that Crown Prince Wilhelm had sought proximity to the Nazi regime, although he continued to dispute whether the historical evidence established substantial assistance within the meaning of the law.

Baker's video appeared on May 26, 2023.

The withdrawal was therefore public knowledge before the episode was released.

The video was not obliged to become a documentary about restitution law. Its stated purpose was to explain royal genealogy.

But it did make a positive historical claim about Louis Ferdinand's opposition to Nazism.

That claim deserved considerably more care, particularly when the conduct of the same family had been the subject of a major public controversy.

The withdrawal also changed the legal situation.

By abandoning the claims, the family avoided pursuing a judicial determination of the underlying statutory question.

It would be wrong to describe the withdrawal as proof that a court had found the Hohenzollerns guilty of substantially assisting Hitler.

No such conclusion followed from the withdrawal.

But it also did not clear their ancestors of the historical conduct documented by researchers.

The 2025 Settlement: What the Hohenzollerns Actually Received

The property dispute reached a major resolution two years after Baker's video.

In May 2025, Germany's federal government, Berlin, Brandenburg, and the House of Hohenzollern announced an agreement concerning disputed cultural property.

The settlement became effective on June 13, 2025.

Its central feature was the creation of the nonprofit Stiftung Hohenzollernscher Kunstbesitz, or Hohenzollern Art Foundation.

Disputed collections would be placed within the new foundation, while important artworks would remain available through public museums.

The foundation's supervisory body would have nine representatives: six appointed from the public sector and three by the Hohenzollern family.

Public institutions therefore retained a two-thirds majority.

The settlement resolved outstanding claims while preserving public access to significant collections.

But the agreement was not simply a declaration that everything already in public museums would remain there without further exchange.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation disclosed the material terms of its contribution.

It would transfer 1,685 objects into the new foundation.

Under the compensation arrangement, it would also surrender 2,999 individual objects, including 2,122 coins for which duplicate examples existed in its collection.

Other items included personal possessions and relatively minor decorative objects.

Three more important objects were covered by sale arrangements, while a nineteenth-century painting of Potsdam was included as a donation.

The institutions emphasized that the objects being relinquished were generally of lesser art-historical importance.

Crucially, ownership disputes concerning 19 particularly important artworks were resolved in favor of public ownership, including major works associated with sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow and painter Antoine Watteau.

The agreement also provided for important Hohenzollern archival material held at Hohenzollern Castle to enter the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage.

That provision deserves attention.

Access to historical records is essential when a family's public image has been shaped by competing accounts of its political activities.

The archives are potentially more important to Germany's understanding of its past than many of the decorative objects at the center of the negotiations.

This is where the settlement offers something beyond the distribution of property: an opportunity for historians to examine additional evidence concerning the dynasty.

The family did receive objects and a continuing institutional role, but it did not recover the disputed collections wholesale or regain control of the most important public artworks.

Nor did the settlement constitute a judicial declaration that Crown Prince Wilhelm had been innocent of assisting the Nazis.

It was a negotiated resolution of competing claims.

The result protected major public collections, ended costly disputes, and gave the former royal family a formal place in managing part of its historical inheritance.

That is the practical outcome of a controversy that an imaginary crown could never adequately represent.

The Real Problem With Royal Nostalgia

UsefulCharts is not a propaganda organization merely because it publishes an entertaining genealogy of European royalty.

And Baker's hypothetical succession charts do serve an educational purpose.

He explains that today's German princely titles carry no official governing authority. He distinguishes the former German Empire from Austria and identifies disputed lines of succession, including Saxony's competing claimants.

Those are legitimate historical explanations.

The problem comes when the people in those charts become characters in a simplified moral history.

Louis Ferdinand is especially revealing.

His later image as a respectable, democratically inclined representative of the former dynasty existed alongside a much less comfortable early record.

The documentary evidence does not justify reducing his political career to straightforward opposition to Hitler.

In the same way, Crown Prince Wilhelm's willingness to help the Nazis cannot be dismissed merely because historians disagree about how effective that assistance proved.

And Georg Friedrich's modern position cannot be understood entirely through inheritance rules when his leadership of the family also involved major negotiations over public cultural property and legal disputes concerning historical criticism.

The descendants are not personally guilty of every act committed by their ancestors. Their legal claims must be judged under the relevant law, and their own actions separately assessed.

But a hereditary claim necessarily asks the public to take ancestry seriously.

That cannot mean treating inherited prestige as important while dismissing the political history attached to it as irrelevant.

The Verdict: A Family Tree Is Not an Alibi

Baker successfully explains who might inherit Germany's vanished thrones.

He is much less successful when he ventures into the political character of the people carrying those claims forward.

The description of Louis Ferdinand as an opponent of the Nazis is too simple for the historical evidence. More importantly, it gives viewers a reassuring account precisely where the family history requires greater scrutiny.

The Hohenzollerns' later property dispute demonstrates why this matters.

The family sought compensation, historians investigated its ancestors, lawyers challenged critics, and public institutions eventually negotiated a settlement involving thousands of cultural objects.

The major collections remained publicly accessible. The family received concessions and representation. The difficult historical questions were not settled by a court.

Germany does not need another Kaiser to make this history consequential.

The former imperial family spent decades demonstrating that a crown can disappear while inherited wealth, influence, and disputes over historical reputation remain very much alive.

UsefulCharts tells us who would inherit the throne. The more important question is what that inheritance actually carries.

References

1. Who Would Be the Monarchs of Germany Today? — UsefulCharts, Matt Baker, May 26, 2023.
   The original video establishes the genealogical claims and contains Baker's description of Louis Ferdinand as an opponent of the Nazis.

2. Useful Idiots: The Hohenzollerns and Hitler — Karina Urbach, Historical Research, Oxford University Press, August 18, 2020.
   Based on correspondence in American archives, this academic study documents the Hohenzollerns' international relationships, Louis Ferdinand's early enthusiasm for National Socialism, and the limitations of his later political self-portrait.

3. The Hohenzollerns and Democracy After 1918, Part I — Martin Sabrow, German Federal Agency for Civic Education, December 18, 2020.
   Examines the family's relationship with German democracy and distinguishes Louis Ferdinand's claimed resistance connections from documented participation in opposition activities.

4. The Role of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia in Historians' Assessments — German Bundestag, January 29, 2020.
   Records the opposing historical assessments presented to parliament concerning Crown Prince Wilhelm's contribution to National Socialism and the consequences for restitution law.

5. Helping Hitler: An Exchange — Christopher Clark, Racheli Edelman, and David Motadel, The New York Review of Books, April 9, 2020.
   Presents Clark's explanation that Crown Prince Wilhelm willingly supported Hitler but lacked sufficient influence to make a substantial political contribution, clarifying the central historical disagreement.

6. The Hohenzollern Lawsuits: A Documentation — Association of Historians in Germany, documentation project launched June 15, 2021.
   Establishes the scope and nature of legal disputes involving the Hohenzollern family, journalists, and academic researchers.

7. Agenda-Cutting durch SLAPPs? — Uwe Krüger, Max Beuthner, and Connor Endt, Publizistik, February 12, 2024.
   Provides peer-reviewed interview evidence that the family's legal actions imposed professional and psychological costs on some journalists and historians, while acknowledging the study's limited sample.

8. House of Hohenzollern Withdraws Claims — Tagesschau, ARD, March 8, 2023.
   Documents Georg Friedrich's decision to withdraw compensation claims and explains the disputed properties, financial demands, and legal significance of Nazi-era conduct.

9. SPK Board Approves Agreement With the House of Hohenzollern — Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, May 26, 2025.
   Supplies the settlement's specific object counts, transfers, foundation structure, and arrangements for important artworks and historical archives.

10. Hohenzollern Property Dispute Finally Settled — German Historical Museum, June 13, 2025.
    Confirms that the settlement became legally effective and explains the continuing public custody of the disputed cultural collections.