The Kaiser Sparks a Family Feud

A certain German family is just one of 800,000 who are seeking compensation for property seized by the Russians and East Germans after World War II. But the members of this particular family are descendants of Kaiser Wilhelm, and historians are divided on whether the Kaiser’s son Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia, “significantly advance[d]” the Nazi cause. At stake is $21 million worth of land, artwork, and palaces.

“The search for an answer has opened ancient wounds, sparked more than 100 lawsuits, divided German politics, and pitted some of the leading experts on the period against one another,” wrote Oliver Moody in The Times of London. The current head of the royal dynasty, Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, recently showed the newspaper a private memoir written by Wilhelm, his great-grandfather, “confident that it speaks for itself as the self-portrait of a man who always maintained a certain distance from Hitler and the Nazis.”