For the first part of the week the white-whiskered old man at Doorn did pretty much as he had done every day for the past 21 years—worked a little on his memoirs, walked a little in his park, chopped a little wood. To Friederick Wilhelm Victor Albert von Hohenzollern, once by the Grace of God Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, 1914 was a long way off. And the years since that morning in 1918 when they had hustled him out of Germany had been quiet years. No longer did people hate him. No longer did people want to see him hung. And no longer was there noise of guns over Europe.
When one day over his radio he heard that his Fatherland had marched into Poland and, two days later, that England & France had gone to war against Germany, the 80-year-old man was awakened out of his life-end siesta. He called his wife Hermine and entourage into his modest living room and led them in prayer. Then he went upstairs, knelt by the bed where his first wife, Empress Augusta-Victoria had died 18 years before, and prayed again, alone. After that the old man seemed to take a new lease on life. Downstairs, in the great hall, he spread before him a map of Poland and, as once again he heard the boom of cannon on the Western front, he began sticking little colored pins along the battlefronts of 1939.
Persona grata with the Nazi regime, no exile, Wilhelm's oldest son, Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor August Ernst, now 57, was discovered living quietly in Potsdam, near Berlin. Almost forgotten last week was the deep hatred which citizens of the Allies held for the Crown Prince, almost forgotten such famed cartoons as the one the Chicago Herald printed in World War I (see cut). Caption: "Drink up, and let's go."
New York City's Hitler-hating Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia broadcast that he would allow no protest rallies before foreign consulates, urged against provocations at public meetings, warned: "The battles will be fought on the fields of Europe. They cannot be fought or settled in the streets of New York."