Over recent years, a rather unusual controversy has made waves in Germany. At its centre is Prince Georg Friedrich, head of the house of Hohenzollern, the family that supplied Prussia’s kings from 1701 and ruled Germany until Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War. 

The revolution of November 1918 saw the abolition of the German monarchy altogether, yet the treatment of royals and aristocrats was not as radical as in the French Revolution of 1789 or its Russian counterpart of 1917. The Weimar Republic allowed the Hohenzollerns to keep most of their considerable assets. Their fortunes changed in 1945, however, when the Red Army conquered the eastern half of Germany and seized their lands, castles and possessions. Following the end of the Cold War, the German parliament decided to offer compensation to individuals and families affected by Soviet expropriations, with one important qualification: families that had actively supported the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 and Hitler’s dictatorship would be disqualified. The former German royal family was one of many that filed claims, in their case for land and property worth hundreds of millions of euros. The success or otherwise of the claim hinged on the actions of Prince Georg’s great-grandfather and eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, and the question of whether he assisted Hitler’s rise to power.

Because of the financial, political and symbolic implications of the case, it quickly made waves in Germany and beyond. The Bundestag convened a commission of historical and legal experts and conducted several public hearings. Meanwhile, the Hohenzollerns’ lawyers sued newspapers and historians critical of the family’s role in the 1930s