Move Over, Pharaoh

GERMANY Move Over, Pharaoh Germany's ex-Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm was well on the way to being sovietized last week. His 25,000-acre estate at Oels was in the hands of the Red Army; his duchies of Pomerania and Silesia were being claimed by the Warsaw Government of Poland (see above). It seemed only a question of time until all the $17,000,000 worth of Hohenzollern land in Germany would pass out of the family--perhaps, too, the rocky eyrie at Sigmaringen, from which the Hohenzollerns originally came, and which the Nazis, with creditable irony, had assigned to Marshal Henri Philippe Petain and other Vichyites as the seat of their "Government in Exile."

In better dynastic days the Hohenzollerns had had an astonishing appetite for real estate. "Come to think of it, I would like to have Windsor Castle for a summer resort," Kaiser Wilhelm II once casually remarked. His second son Eitel Friedrich chimed in: "And you will let me have the Isle of Man, won't you?" After the Kaiser had fled to Holland, where he sprinkled gold dust on the signature of his abdication in 1918, he was reduced to eating the bitter bread of exile in the curtailed magnificence of House Doorn. But his heart was still in Potsdam. Raged his wife, sickly Kaiserin Augusta-Victoria: "Liebknecht and his harlot, Rosa Luxemburg, camped three nights in the Imperial bedroom -- oh, the blasphemy of it"

Five years of exile were all that Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm could stand. After that, he scraped along with the German estates which the Weimar Republic considerately left to him. Berliners got to know him as a fop who drove a racy red roadster to the capital's better hot spots and was unpleasantly wolfish at his own parties. His four sons went various ways : Louis Ferdinand worked for a while in Henry Ford's plant in Detroit, then married a Russian refugee Romanov princess, ended up as a prisoner of the Allies. The eldest son, Wilhelm, lost favor when he married a commoner. He was killed in Belgium in World War II. Air-minded Hubertus joined Hitler's Luftwaffe, rose to a captaincy, was at last reports still flying. Debonair Friedrich, the youngest son, was caught in London at the war's outbreak, interned in Canada, not to his regret.

World Wars I & II had been the greatest upsetters of thrones in history. But while Otto of Austria, Peter of Yugoslavia, George of Greece might hope (however mistakenly) one day to resume their royal careers, the Hohenzollerns could scarcely even cherish illusions. As a ruling dynasty they seemed to be as safely mummified as Egypt's XXII Dynasty.

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