A KAISER WITHOUT A KINGDOM
“WILHELM WAS PART OF A ROYAL CARTEL WHOSE INCESTUOUS NETWORK OF NEPOTISM AND INTERMARRIAGE HAD CONTROLLED THE FATE OF MILLIONS FOR CENTURIES”
At 5am on Sunday 10 November 1918, a convoy of nine Daimler touring cars raced through the Belgian countryside towards the Dutch border. Inside were officers loyal to the Imperial German Army and with them – in full military attire, complete with a chest full of medals he’d awarded himself – was the German monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II. The landscape around them was barren and broken, shattered by four-and-a-half years of war, the scale and destructiveness of which had never been witnessed before. More than four million men had been killed fighting over bleak stretches of land like that on which the cars now sped. Although the fighting was all but over, many of those who’d survived it – Germans included – would happily have lynched the man whose arrogance, aggression and insecurities had caused the conflict in the first place: the man known in Europe as Kaiser Bill.
Wilhelm was part of a royal cartel whose incestuous network of nepotism and intermarriage had controlled the fate of millions for centuries. But the old order was now crumbling and the maps were being redrawn. The Ottoman Empire, which had controlled Turkey and
