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After the Kaiserin died he married Princess Hermine of Reuss, who persistently plotted to restore his family to power. Wilhelm kept out of her intrigues, knowing that for himself there would be no return. Five of his six sons joined the Nazis (the sixth committed suicide), but the end of the monarchy had meant the end of monarchism in Germany. To the Nazis his "betrayal" of Germany had been little less than that of the Republic that signed the Versailles Treaty. When the German Army marched through The Netherlands it skirted Doom by special orders; a guard of honor appeared at his gate; but that was all. The Master of Doom went on reading war dispatches, sticking little pins in maps—with God knows what emotions.
Two weeks ago he fell ill of an intestinal ailment. His sons hurried to Doom. But the old man rallied and most of the family started back to Germany, leaving only his daughter, the Duchess of Brunswick, his favorite grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand, and Hermine, who had been there always. One afternoon last week he twitched in his sleep. A clot of blood entered his lungs. "I am sinking," he said to his wife, and a few hours later he was dead. Adolf Hitler ordered him a Field Marshal's funeral, but the soil he was buried in was not German.
For the exile who died at 82 the world had little bitterness to spare. That was reserved for the man who was succeeding where Wilhelm had failed; who, the world feared, would succeed beyond Wilhelm's greatest dreams. But Wilhelm had also dreamed greatly. In closing that famed suppressed interview, late at night when darkness had come at last to the fjord of Bergen, the Kaiser had raised his head, squared his shoulders, and with a ring in his voice had cried:
The future belongs to the White Race, never fear! It belongs to the Anglo-Teuton, the man who came from Northern Europe . . . the home of the German. . . . We are the only people who can save it. There is no power in any other civilization or any other religion that can save humanity ; and the future—belongs—to—us."
The echo returned a generation later.