On the mainstream conservatives – Nicholas Stargardt in TLS:

‘Of the two Hohenzollern brothers, Prince August Wilhelm was definitely worse. A convinced Nazi who joined the party in 1930, he was present when the Storm Troopers tortured their political opponents in an improvised facility in 1933, and later made the trip to inspect the Dachau concentration camp. His older brother, Crown Prince Wilhelm, did not go that far. But he did turn up at all the right moments in 1933. Before Hitler had been chancellor for a week, he got his first public chance.
On February 5, 1933, the joint funeral of a police sergeant and the leader of a particularly brutal SA squad was held. The two men had been killed in Charlottenburg on the night of January 30. In a show of strength, 4,000 Storm Troopers, with police, floodlights and machineguns in support, had paraded through the district. The funeral was held with great pomp in Berlin Cathedral, the policeman’s coffin draped in the old flag of the German Empire, the Storm Trooper’s with the swastika. Crown Prince Wilhelm, dressed in Nazi uniform, laid a wreath on each coffin. Up to 500,000 people braved the rain to pay their respects as the funeral cortege moved slowly down the roads leading from the cathedral to the Invaliden cemetery, three kilometres away. Wilhelm did not join them, but he was much photographed by reporters both inside the cathedral, where he sat in the front row next to Hitler, and outside in conversation with Hermann Göring at the top of the steps. The press coverage was not just a national and provincial affair. It was discussed at length in the New York Times, under the title “Strange things happen in Germany”.
Stephan Malinowski’s lucid, considered and impeccably researched book delivers the definitive account of the Hohenzollerns during the Weimar and Nazi years, and of the controversy the family have stirred up in the past decade. Six weeks after the funeral in Berlin, the crown prince joined Hitler, Field Marshal August von Mackensen and President Hindenburg at the Day of Potsdam, in which the Nazis choreographed the merger of their new upstart regime with the old monarchical elites. To complete the symbolic ambiguities, Hitler wore tails, while the Crown Prince put on his Nazi uniform. An empty chair was placed for the former Kaiser, who was not invited to return from his exile in the Netherlands. No doubt the crown prince revelled in the publicity – having met Joseph Goebbels for the first time at the funeral in February, he flung himself upon him – and imagined how important he might become once again. Nor were his actions an aberration. Having thought of running to be president of Germany himself, he had publicly endorsed Hitler in his run-off election against the incumbent, Field Marshal Hindenburg, in 1932. When Hitler lost, Wilhelm still endorsed the Nazis in the Reichstag elections that autumn, the last held before Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor. Disappointed he may have been that the monarchy was not restored, but the former crown prince supported the Nazi regime to the end. In September 1946, a French journalist asked him what he thought Hitler’s greatest mistake had been. Wilhelm’s answer was striking: not reaching agreement with France to defeat Britain in 1940. Even after the final destruction of the Third Reich, he clearly counted himself among those who would think in terms of “lost victories” rather than inevitable defeat. He was certainly not about to draw any lessons from the evidence of crimes against humanity that had been accumulating for the previous ten months at the Nuremberg trial.’

(…)

‘All this might just serve as a farcical coda to the earlier tragedy, except for an ugly historical and political fact. The quest to rewrite the role of Crown Prince Wilhelm and his children in Nazi Germany has meant airbrushing out their implacable hostility to the Weimar Republic and relentless efforts to bury the democratic institutions that had compensated them so generously. Forget all the tendentious claims that they were “really” working for the German resistance, or that they would have been less virulently antisemitic if only the circumstances had been more “normal”. What actually mattered, Malinowski insists, is that Hitler attained power in 1933 only because of the support of German conservatives. On their own, the Nazis did not have the votes to secure a majority in the Reichstag. Nor did they control the key institutions of state. Their backstairs machinations with Franz von Papen and Hindenburg depended on securing the back of leading conservatives. Wilhelm may not have been a serious political figure in terms of his acumen, but he could and did give the Nazis something they needed: respectability and the symbolic blessing of the old regime. He may have been duped into believing that his would ever be more than a bit part, but endorsing Hitler and wearing Nazi uniform in public did matter. He provided the signal that it was perfectly respectable for other conservatives and monarchists to ally with the Nazis. It was this alliance that gave Hitler power again.’

Read the article here.

The mainstream conservatives – do they still exist? – may succumb rather banal temptations once again. Power and money, money and power, champagne in between.