The Bizarre Life Of Victoria's Disabled Grandson | Crippled Kaiser | Real Royalty

[Music] when the first world war broke out in 1914 a royal family turned on itself germany's leader kaiser wilhelm ii was queen victoria's grandson as a child he had loved playing in the gardens and palaces of the british royal family but now he was taking up arms against his own mother's country behind this very public clash lies a story of private pain now revealed by a long hidden cache of royal letters it read like a gothic horror story it really did and it got worse the further i got into it at its center a terrified little boy with a secret disability thought shameful at the time royalty gave money to hospitals to support disabled children they did not have one in their midst a child subjected to gruesome torture in the name of science and troubled by dark incestuous desires then you took off your gloves and laid your hand gently on my lips for me to kiss it it's a story only being pieced together now and one that reveals how a poisoned family relationship helped shape the future of a continent in 1914 the german emperor kaiser wilhelm led his country into a war that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions and the devastation of europe just like adolf hitler 25 years later he was seen in britain as a power hungry madman in league with the devil but hidden away in a majestic castle near frankfurt is a remarkable collection of private letters discovered by british historian john rawl royal correspondence that tells a very different and tragic story about wilhelm this is a really magical place for me i spent in all four months here i couldn't believe my eyes i was writing a biography of the kaiser here with the letters from his mother to him from him to his mother day for day for day i could reconstruct the early life of kaiser wilhelm ii and every single detail of his birth of his earliest childhood in the first few days of life were recorded here the story that emerged from the letters were such a horrific horror story that it was almost impossible to read those letters and it was almost impossible for me to write to write them up [Music] over 50 years before the first world war britain and germany were not foes they were family in 1858 queen victoria's eldest daughter also called victoria but known as vicky married the dashing prince friedrich of prussia in doing so she fulfilled the dreams of her german father prince albert and strengthened the bonds between two great european powers descendants of this royal union still flourish in germany today we have here the empress as a young woman as when she came to prussia for the first time crown princess victoria she was a very intelligent woman and she was very ambitious and she was a dominant character i'm sure she was also that it was many people reproached her or objected that she was domineering her husband after just three months of marriage in berlin and still only 17 years old vicki became pregnant the child that embodied the union between the british and german royal families was on its way but this was a time of high infant mortality rates and queen victoria made every effort to ensure the child's birth would not end in tragedy queen victoria sent sir james clark a scottish doctor who had brought the new wonder chloroform chloroform is seen as a way of alleviating the pain of childbirth and because queen victoria had suggested she used it and had used in it of course in her own childbirth that vicky thought obviously that was a good idea vicky was given two-thirds of a bottle of chloroform which is a lot of chloroform so she would have been insensible and therefore probably not able to help with the birth as the insensible vicky went into labor it was discovered that the baby was in breach position coming out feet first rather than head first now sir james clark and his german counterpart professor edward martin found themselves in a perilous and potentially deadly situation this is a teaching a training model for midwives from the 1920s so uh it's a bit older it looks a bit scruffy yes but it's a and it's a museum's piece but it's ideal to just explain the conditions in the year 1859 and the problem was they found out that the baby was in the womb in the birth channel bottom first and then they were alarmed and they brought in edward martin and he really found this very situation if he'd had more time and if it hadn't been a royal birth he would have recommended a caesarean operation to release the baby but at that time 1859 it was impossible to do a caesarean operation without killing the mother and there's no way you could put a knife to queen victoria's eldest daughter so that was not an option obviously now the problem was to get out the legs but also the arms and he did not know where the arm was positioned in the womb so he had to do a maneuver with his hand reaching in bringing out the feet first then the the decisive uh thing was to reach through the birth channel get the arm and somehow pull here so there was a lot of tension exerted on the left shoulder in the in the left region uh where the nerves come out from the spinal column so the pressure was a lot at the shoulder and that caused the damage as vicky struggled to recover from the traumatic birth her baby lay motionless in the room everyone in attendance was convinced it was dead until finally it came to life and let out a cry in a letter to queen victoria vicki's german mother-in-law augusta described the scene and how the baby's cry prompted a joyous response it's alive and it's a prince but while the baby was alive the royal celebrations were premature nobody realized that anything had gone particularly wrong for the first three days but then the nursemaid came to tell vicky look there's a strange crease between the the arm and the shoulder in the front which we can't really account for and by the way the arm isn't really moving it seems to be um pressed to the baby's side the pressure put on wilhelm's shoulder had resulted in a permanently paralyzed left arm for a royal child at the time this was more than a physical setback we think about 19th century attitudes toward masculinity and towards being a man it was about being independent and being strong and disabled people were perceived as not being independent and strong royalty gave money to hospitals to support disabled children they did not have one in their midst a massive tragedy for the poor mother her great role had been to produce a male hair she produced the male heir and it was damaged in her words it was crippled in a letter to queen victoria vicki wrote the idea of his remaining a [ __ ] haunts me [Music] for vicky a cure had to be found and nothing was going to stand in her way [Music] the condition now known as herb's palsy is very rare today but one person also affected at birth is paralympic swimming champion rachel latham i was amazed when i found out that somebody in the royal family had herb's palsy especially when you think that hardly anybody has it and then i found out the story about wilhelm and i thought i can't believe he actually went through the same problem that i did i have nerve damage all down my left arm which means i can't lift my left arm above there and i can't straighten it further than that i can kind of push it out and i could like pull it above my head but on its own it doesn't have the muscle power and strength and as you can see my left arm is quite a lot shorter than my right because the muscles aren't as strong and the bones aren't as strong it hasn't grown the same as my right hand and you can see that my left hand is actually quite a bit smaller than my right [Music] after wilhelm's birth it took the doctors three days to discover that something was wrong and medical science had not advanced sufficiently for them to fully understand the problem [Music] they did not know then that this all came from a damage of the nervous plexus up here and this noble area was torn or twisted and they did not know the connection between the damage of the nerves and then the the muscular consequences but driven on by wilhelm's english mother vicky the doctors were determined to find the cure and documented their efforts to do so in this private royal archive in germany the first thing i saw here were all these tables where the physiotherapist is measuring the length of the left arm and the bones in the left arm and the muscles in the left arm as against the the bones and the muscles in the right arm the first ten years of wilhelm's life were dominated by bizarre medical procedures designed to cure his disability procedures that served only to traumatize the future leader of germany they started when wilhelm was six months old with the idea of slaughtering a hair in his presence twice a week and tying the flesh of the hair still warm onto his left arm in the hope that the vitality of this wild animal would transfer itself into the the limb for years on end wilhelm had this incredibly medieval barbaric treatment [Music] i imagine it probably would have been quite terrifying to a young boy having a dead animal wrapped around the top of his arm but what is interesting about german medicine is in the 19th century it becomes very deregulated and there's a lot of alternative therapies this is the reason why animal therapy was used on wilhelm in addition to the so-called animal baths the doctors resorted to another treatment as the baby will helm tried to explore his surroundings in the royal palace he tied his good arm behind his back thinking that it would force him into using his left arm but if you don't have the muscle power and the strength in it in the first place then it's not going to work it doesn't matter how much you force it [Music] to be in his situation makes me feel quite upset he would have been trying so hard to achieve something that is pretty much physically impossible he would have mentally been putting himself under so much pressure to achieve and constantly failing [Music] it read like a gothic horror story it really did and it got worse the further i got into it the the suffering that is being inflicted on him with the best intentions that's the dilemma that all these people who are doing this terrible thing to him are actually trying to make him fit for purpose fit to be a great king especially his mother of course who's tormented by the notion that as she says he's a [ __ ] and all the time this is the other tragedy the doctors don't understand what the cause of the disability is [Music] as she oversaw the doctor's treatment of her son vicky wavered between hope and helplessness in letters to her mother queen victoria she revealed in detail the child's ordeals he gets so fretful and cross and violent and passionate that it makes me quite nervous sometimes but the procedures continued for most of his childhood wilhelm's withered left arm was subjected to electro therapy treatment electric shocks intended to jolt the limb back to life but which merely provoked a nervous reaction in the young boy galvinism or electrotherapy turned up quite high pulsing electricity it's very painful these were traditional treatments that would often work obviously but wilhelm had a disability and the impact of his injury was on his nerves not on his muscles from a young age wilhelm also had difficulty with his posture and to keep his head straight when he posed for a portrait a hidden member of the royal household even gave the prince a helping hand and as wilhelm grew older he was subjected to an even more grotesque attempt to deal with and cure the problem when he was three and a half to four years old they noticed that more and more his head was moving to the right and the chin was being pulled over towards the left [Music] and the treatment they came up with for that was to invent a machine which consisted of a metal rod going up his back with a belt around his waist and a kind of halter like a horse's halter going around his face and all this was designed um to enable a screw to be used at the back of his head which gradually pulled his head in the upright position like that they did this for two years vicky wrote in detail to her mother about this head stretching device and even added her own diagram but she also pleaded that the treatment be kept secret from the rest of the british royal family please don't tell the brothers and sisters about wilhelm's machine wilhelm we know from his later reports found these pseudo treatments deeply invasive and i think all the hope invested which then got dashed may well have activated a real sense of depression a real sense of hopelessness and in fact a real sense of rage when a child had a physical disability at that time physicians if they couldn't cure the physical disability they were not particularly interested in the emotional development of the child treatment of disabled children did not have their emotional development at the center of it it wasn't until wilhelm was 12 years old that the many and agonizing attempts to cure his disability were abandoned but while his arm could not be fixed it could not be accepted either wilhelm's deformity was seen as an embarrassment and to remain hidden from public view because wilhelm grows up in a period where photography is common wilhelm is very much more in the public eye and people were interested they wanted to see their so the people that surrounded him from an early age spent a lot of time practicing camouflage throughout his childhood photographs taken of william were taken so that his arm would not be shown to the public it was a bad thing that he should be visible as as a crippled child they use guns hats helmets the accoutrements of a king trying to camouflage his disability within this concept of manliness [Music] he would cover one hand with the other hand he would also have specially constructed clothing so nobody could tell that his left arm was shorter than his right arm [Music] but for vicky disguise didn't solve the problem for her wilhelm's disability put a gulf between them as she confessed in another painful and emotional letter to her mother it spoils all the pleasure and pride i should have in him [Music] in noble and royal families the arrival of a crippled child in those days was considered a slight stain on you and i think once she had more children she started settling her love on those children rather than on this first child her rejection of wilhelm is partly to do with the fact she had such a huge number of children anyway and he was angry at her and it wasn't unusual for women to reject disabled children years later the founder of psychoanalysis sigmund freud studied the troubled relationship between wilhelm and vicky in reaching his conclusion that her response to his disability had been more devastating than the disability itself freud observed how vicky withdrew her love for the child on account of his infirmity freud observed that with many handicapped children parents will often compensate for the child's physical handicap by showering them with an abundance of love but the biographical data revealed that this was not the case with wilhelm and his parents and that the main cause of his belligerence at least as far as freud was concerned was not the arm but the impact of the arm on the mother's sense that she had produced damaged goods it was this withdrawal of love that helped shape the obsessive relationship between wilhelm and vicky so obsessive that it was to lead to secret letters between them letters in which wilhelm revealed his desire for forbidden love [Music] during his traumatic birth in 1859 wilhelm the future kaiser of germany suffered permanent paralysis of his left arm it was a disability that led to a deeply troubled childhood and contrasting feelings towards his mother vicky and grandmother queen victoria he really attributed a lot of the blame a lot of the responsibility for what he called the martyrdom of his childhood to his mother and found in his grandmother what we might think of as a good object she represented the goodness and his own mother victoria represented the badness there was a real split with his love for queen victoria wilhelm relished his long summer holidays at osborne house her residence on the isle of wight here he enjoyed not only the company of his grandmother but also the lifestyle of the british royal family he felt himself more british than the british themselves and i think it was quite difficult for him to to to explain it to the public that he he had such sympathy for for the british he loved coming over here sailing at cows and he loved winning this was very important to him and he liked the idea of wearing his guilt and going to balmoral and you know all the side of life that was british life which he felt he understood and he felt that from his birthright he had access to both but as a result of his difficult upbringing back in germany wilhelm had grown up to be a complicated and volatile youth and one that continued to disappoint his mother vicky in her letters especially to her own mother vicky makes no secret of her disappointment both with the absence of talent and in his character as it develops her answer was to make up for his deformity through education education and his youth i think it was a catastrophe uh what they did with this with this poor child i mean but probably they didn't know it better i mean what should they have done at that time the screw not just the back of his head but the screw of education was also tightened and tightened and tightened um when wilhelm was confirmed at the age of 16 he was sent to again very typically for vicky to a normal grammar school it was at that grammar school that in 1875 young wilhelm wrote in english an extraordinary series of letters to his mother letters stored away in the archive of vicky's great-grandson prince reiner of hesse but discovered by the british historian john rawl when i first opened those those files and saw wilhelm's letters for his mother those erotic letters that he wrote to her when he was in castle and poros vicky doesn't quite know honda how to handle it she actually does pretty well she tried to put it in a more normal motherly context and take it out of this a little for her a bit awkward situation [Music] this little book here very delicate book contains the letters that wilhelm wrote to his mother from the age of about nine to the age of 16 and wilhelm gets a kind of crush on his mum and he starts writing to her about this dream he keeps having i have been dreaming about your dear soft warm hands i'm awaiting with impatience the time when i can sit near you and kiss them but pray keep your promise you gave me always to give me alone the soft inside of your hand to kiss but of course you keep this as a secret for yourself since then i have again dreamt about you this time i was alone with you in your library when you stretched forth your arms and pulled me down and then you took off your gloves and laid your hand gently on my lips for me to kiss it and you know that dream i told you about i wrote to you about well i had it again last night and it comes again i jumped last night that i was walking with you and another lady you were discussing who had the finest hands whereupon the lady produced a most ungraceful hand declaring that it was the prettiest i broke a parasol but you put your dear arm round my waist pulled your glove off your dear left hand and showed me your dear beautiful hand which are instantly covered with kisses i wish you would do the same when i'm at berlin alone with you in the evening wilhelm is devoting his sexual energies to his mother and in particular to part of his mother's body her very very beautiful hands so i think he's using his mother as a way of testing out these burgeoning erotic feelings in a way that almost borders on the incestuous goodbye dear mama i kiss your dear underlined twice two exclamation marks white underlined twice to exclamation marks and ever your loving and respectful son william looking at the whole relationship from beginning to end this is the last desperate attempt for him to understand him please understand me the way i am yeah don't always have this ambition for me and reject me because i can't live up to your expectations he's really opening his heart to her and saying you know take me as i am he uses these letters to try to pull his mother back and establish some more intimate contact with her now what is very tragic about this is that when vicky receives these letters she responds to them almost like a 19th century victorian school mistress and rather than responding to the content she corrects his grammar and i think that must have crushed him shortly after this strange correspondence there's a break in their relationship and she is infuriated by the fact that she writes him 20-page letters about politics and music and architecture and painting and so on and he doesn't even bother to reply having failed to get the loving response he craved wilhelm reverted to his old feelings of antipathy towards his mother and towards her country feelings that were exacerbated in 1888 when a british doctor attempted to treat his father the kaiser friedrich for throat cancer wilhelm is supposed to have said i hate the english so much an english doctor crippled my arm and an english doctor is killing my father his mother vicky records this in a letter to queen victoria do you know what wilhelm is saying these days he's saying an english doctor crippled my arm and an english doctor is killing my father [Music] friedrich succumbed to his cancer in june 1888 after a reign of just 99 days now wilhelm was to succeed him as the kaiser of the newly unified germany but wilhelm was just 29 years of age a young man still traumatized by his upbringing and considered ill-equipped to lead one of the most powerful states in europe being the commander-in-chief in a militarily dominated culture like germany was without any doubt so that was very very i mean for for him it was very difficult and his shorter arm influences psychological development to a great extent and much of his appearance in in public goes back to this to this handicap disabled people were considered particularly vulnerable at that time so if a disabled person is representing the nation that may imply outwardly and socially to people that their nation is weakened in some way the kaiser could not ride a horse properly it was an awful moment for him once in tangiers when he was given a wild arab horse and he had to ride through the streets of the city and he was in terror of what was going to happen if that horse threw him the horses had to be especially groomed to be tolerant of this rather poor rider who had a very poor sense of balance as kaiser wilhelm swiftly marginalized vicky at his court and she retreated to her new and english-styled castle outside frankfurt and from here she watched wilhelm's actions with increasing alarm vicky realized what wilhelm's mission was he was about to build a navy the purpose of which would be to rest the supremacy of the seas from great britain the kaiser came to the conclusion that you know a great empire always had a navy to match and this idea that its trading interests required a big navy was very dear to the kaiser since young william was visiting his grandmother so often in in great britain and and he saw the wonderful battleships of the english navy he himself wanted to have the same beautiful ships as his cousins have but to my mind this this was a kind of high level toy for him more or less while tensions between britain and germany had escalated they were also tempered by wilhelm's love for his english grandmother queen victoria but europe was to face an increasingly uncertain future when in january 1901 alarming news from britain reached wilhelm wilhelm received a telegram from queen victoria's doctor in osborne house saying your majesty i think you should know that the queen is in her final days the kaiser dropped everything and took the train to britain where he sat there with his uncle and his cousins and watched over her while she slept and eventually it was in the course of one of his own duties of looking after his grandmother that she died as he says in her in his arms [Music] i think history um has decided to bury it as a sort of unpleasant thing that that we shouldn't really bring up the idea that uh that that queen victoria should have died in the arms of the wicked german kaiser at victoria's funeral wilhelm was joined by king edward vii two men united in grief but two men whose countries were destined to go to war i think if queen victoria had lived another 13 years and witnessed what her grandchildren got up to she would have been heartbroken since childhood wilhelm had adored his grandmother and the pastimes of the british royal family but now that victoria was gone tensions between britain and germany were set to escalate germany feels that britain is sitting on their aspirations sitting on their desire to create their own fleet sitting on their desires to have a colonial empire wilhelm is already planning this 20-year program which is going to turn britain irrevocably against germany in particular the navy is being built up a fleet of battleships which will be stationed under one command namely wilhelm's command in the north sea permanently it was an increasingly dangerous situation and one that deeply worried wilhelm's english mother vicky she feared for the future of britain and germany the two countries she had wanted to bring closer together we have here another portrait of the empress the way she looked when she lived here but in august 1901 just seven months after the death of her mother queen victoria vicki was on her own deathbed she could not come to the funeral of her mother in january 1901 she was already in in bed her letters from that time show a growing concern over the political development in germany and and the errors of her son to see my own son embarked on a course which threatens ruin and destruction vicki makes one last effort to persuade wilhelm to fulfill her mission she says look you're going to be offered an alliance with england together britain and germany can preserve world peace what does wilhelm do he writes to the tsar of russia and says huh the english are about to offer me fantastic terms what can you offer me which is even better so that i can perhaps make an alliance with you instead he actually throws it away when vicky died so soon after the loss of his beloved grandmother wilhelm's ties with britain were severed abruptly and as europe edged ever closer to crisis germany found itself with a dangerously volatile leader wilhelm would have carried an inferiority complex i mean he wasn't loved by his mum as much as say his brothers and sisters he'd had this very harsh upbringing this manifested itself in what seemed like superiority complex so he would have been impatient with people bombastic and wouldn't have you know been able to show a weaker or gentler side he failed the main task he was obliged to fulfill and that into my mind was to prevent the first world war there was one particular task in his life and in that moment he he didn't react in the in the appropriate manner so that's very i mean for me as a historian and a member of the family i think it's a very sad thing to to admit but it is like that when the great war began in july 1914 it was to become the world's first global conflict one that involved all the great economic powers of the time but it was also a war with an intense personal dimension this is a war among cousins it's completely shocking the fact that this branch of the family would mobilize its troops in order to attack this branch of the family one would have thought that the the fact that kaiser wilhelm had a very close personal relationship with king george v and likewise with the tsar nicholas ii of russia one would have thought that that would have made europe immune from this conflagration but despite the family ties the war raged on the battlefields of europe and the british royal family's german heritage became increasingly problematic not least their name sax coburg goater the british were in a sensitive position weren't they you know they were a german royal family so it becomes a slightly embarrassing position so eventually i think in 1917 the name is changed to windsor from sax cobalt by the time the war came to an end in november 1918 tens of millions of people were dead or missing europe was in ruins germany was defeated and for the victors one man was personally responsible public opinion would have always chosen one person to fix their hatred upon and that person clearly was the kaiser all guilt was placed on the head of the kaiser and there were calls to have him put on trial even calls for him to be hanged as well hang the kaiser was shouted through the streets of london i think wilhelm was forced to give up his throne and on the 10th of november 1918 just one day before the armistice was signed he crossed the border into the netherlands here he was to live the rest of his life in exile unrepentant seething with rage and unwilling to accept blame for the war we are at hausdoren this is a medieval castle in the vicinity of utrecht and this house was bought in 1919 by the last german emperor wilhelm ii and he came to live here after germany lost the first war and he had to flee in exile he was no longer allowed to speak about political matters and he was very frustrated about it and he felt betrayed by his own people and he fought his whole life against this image of him being a war criminal he still loved great britain and his britain relatives but there was some kind of love hate connection [Music] in this house you can still see this love-hate relationship because he owns a lot of portraits and pictures from his mother and his grandmother he kept his memories alive but it also troubled him a lot in his final years wilhelm remained adamant that the monarchy should be restored in germany bitter and frustrated he sought comfort from within his own family circle i was born in in february 1939 my parents were ordered by the kaiser to present the first great grandson so they traveled to from berlin to dawn to present the great grand sun to the kaiser there's a famous photograph i'm quite proud of being being there because that was the only time that kaiser received one of his great-grandchildren there i i think he was very proud uh proud of having uh of seeing the the family continued [Music] kaiser wilhelm ii died in june 1941 aged 82. according to his own instructions he was buried in this tomb in the netherlands never to return to germany in contrast to the kaiser's relatively modest tomb his mother vicky is buried beside her husband friedrich at this royal mausoleum outside berlin but while she remains a beloved part of the british royal family her life in germany had ended in failure looking back on the life of victoria there's no doubt that tragedy would be the right word to describe the kind of arc of her life she comes to germany with such high hopes of affecting good and history itself is very unkind to her in many respects it is sad to think that someone who was so prepared to do something for her adoptive country and to lead it into a wonderful future and that the opposite should should happen i mean that is really like a greek tragedy actually wilhelm the second life i would not really describe is a tragedy it's tragic in terms of his birth injury and the treatment that is meted out to him by the doctors but he goes bad at such an early stage he chooses all the wrong things and then the the pitiful role he plays during the first world war um i cannot find any admiration for wilhelm queen victoria's first grandchild was the boy who had been born to unite the royal families of britain and germany but he had become the man who tore them apart

Channel: Real Royalty

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Keywords: real royalty, real royalty channel, british royalty, royalty around the world, royal history, queen victoria, victorian, wilhelm ii, queen victorias daughters, prince albert, royal family, queen victoria life, queen victoria grandson, british monarchy, kaiser wilhelm ii, queen victoria controversy

Id: 8BWgm_pe4k0

Length: 45min 29sec (2729 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021