Blue bloods and brownshirts

THE GERMAN ARISTOCRACY entered the twentieth century in several shapes and sizes. A whole slew of monarchs, grand dukes, mediatised princes and landgraves had survived Bismarck’s unification of the country. Prussian Protestant aristocrats remained loyal to a traditional code of honour and military service not found in their Bavarian Catholic counterparts. At the top, grands seigneurs — as this book defines them — had palaces, immense estates and a corresponding way of life, while at the bottom impoverished counts and barons might have little more than their titles.

Imperial Germany had come to an end in 1918 and Kaiser Wilhelm put it beyond repair by absconding to Holland. The Russian revolution and the summary execution of the Czar and his family seemed to some an advance notice of the Red Terror. Indeed, in an uprising from below, more than a thousand people fell victim to revolution