Abdication of Wilhelm II

On the morning of 28 November 1918, at Count Bentinck’s castle at Amerongen in the Netherlands, the former Kaiser Wilhelm II signed a formal act of abdication. In it he renounced “for ever” his rights to the crown of Prussia and the rights to the imperial crown bound up with it. Nineteen days had passed since the announcement of his abdication by the Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden. That statement, however, had been a unilateral step by the chancellor, issued without the monarch’s consent, and had no legal force. Wilhelm II himself, who had fled to the Netherlands on 10 November, had not until then renounced the throne.

The document was short. “I hereby renounce for all time my rights to the crown of Prussia and the rights to the German imperial crown bound up with it,” wrote Wilhelm II. At the same time he released all officials of the Reich and of Prussia, and the officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the navy, the Prussian army and the contingents of the other federal states, from the oath they had sworn to him as Kaiser, King and Supreme War Lord. He expected that until the Reich was reorganised they would help “those holding actual power in Germany” to protect the German people from “the threatening dangers of anarchy, famine and foreign rule”. According to Wilhelm II himself, his aim was to stabilise the situation in the country. The act formally ended the rule of the Hohenzollerns, who had ruled Brandenburg for more than five hundred years and Prussia for three hundred.

That same afternoon Wilhelm’s wife, the Empress Augusta Victoria, arrived at Amerongen. The Canadian-Irish lawyer William Schabas suggests that the formal abdication was a condition set by the Dutch government before it allowed her into the country. From the outset the Dutch treated the former Kaiser as a private person, although the Allies demanded his internment and soon also his extradition and trial.

The other German monarchs had lost their thrones in the first days of the revolution, the last by 25 November. Not all of them, however, formally abdicated. King Ludwig III, the first to be overthrown, in Bavaria, released his officials and soldiers from their oath on 12 November but did not renounce the throne, while the Emperor of Austria, Karl I, renounced participation in affairs of state, avoiding the word “abdication”. On 1 December, on the Dutch island of Wieringen, a similar act was signed by Wilhelm’s son, the former Crown Prince Wilhelm. Wilhelm II hoped to the end of his life for a restoration of the monarchy. He died in the Netherlands in 1941, without ever setting foot in Germany again.