What were Wilhelm II's views on jews, really?

by Velteau

On one hand he is appalled by Kristallnacht and how it divided his once great German nation of artists and intellectuals by promoting a kakistocratic system. But on the other, when Germany occupies the Netherlands, he fully embraces the Christian values of the Nazi party and condemns the liberalism of Britain, saying that it has been dominated by "Freemasonry and Juda".

Is this shift due to his deteriorating health and age? Or had he always had a distrust of jews, defending their skills but not their persons?

NMW

There is debate on this subject given that his public and private positions often seem to be at odds, but I can provide at least one notable example of his thoughts on this subject from only a year after the end of WWI.

By way of providing background for other readers: the Kaiser notably abandoned the throne near the war's end, choosing to flee with some of his family and retainers to the Netherlands, where he would live in increasing poverty for the rest of his life. The whole history of that flight and the response of the Imperial German hierarchy to it has become suffused with what is known as the Dolchstoßlegende, or "stab-in-the-back-myth" -- a highly suspect reading of the war's final year or so that blamed the German people's waning morale and failure to support their Emperor and his army for Germany's defeat. Particular blame was attached to those who had helped foment the Revolution that attended Germany's final collapse, with republican and socialist blocs successfully establishing a new civil government and making the Kaiser's abdication desirable in the first place. You can find out a great deal more about this mythic reading of the war's end here -- and I will hasten to add that the venue itself, The International Encyclopedia of the First World War, is a dynamic and ever-expanding project run by many of the top scholars in the field. Their work in providing overviews of important topics for the layman during these years of centenary has been exemplary, and keeps growing outward.

There is no doubt that these events played a critical role in the collapse of imperial control over Germany, but there is also considerable and necessary debate about the degrees to which these uprisings and even mutinies -- as in the case of the fleet at Kiel in the face of a suicidal attack order against the British Royal Navy -- were reactive rather than proactive. It also badly undercuts the authority of the German army and its staff, about which I am regrettably able to say little more at the moment.

Anyway, the Kaiser and his attendants left during the last days of the war, and the Treaty of Versailles was concluded about seven months later in June of 1919. There had been serious debate over whether or not the Kaiser could or should be apprehended for his "crimes" (I offset this in quotation marks to acknowledge widespread debate) and subjected to possibly capital punishment; in the end, he never was.

All of this left him in what might charitably called a bitter frame of mind, and it is within this context that we must consider the following:

There is a particularly damning letter from him to Field Marshal August von Mackensen from only a year after Wilhelm's abdication -- dated to December 2nd, 1919, to be exact. Here I quote from extracts translated in John Röhl's The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge; 1994):

"The deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have done unto themselves. Egged on and misled by the tribe of Judah whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!" He called for a "regular international all-worlds pogrom à la Russe" as "the best cure." "Jews and Mosquitoes" were "a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or other," he proclaimed, and added, again in his own hand: "I believe the best would be gas."

The ominous quality of these extracts is hard to ignore.

In any event, for a wider view on all of this, I would recommend checking out this helpfully-transcribed segment of Röhl's book detailing the Kaiser's relationship with Jews and Judaism throughout his career. It is not entirely comprehensive, but it gives a great deal more than I can provide here. Not all of it is as bad as the above, but not all of it is better, either. I've focused on the quoted passage because it looks to an earlier context than the one you initially provided, and because it dovetails so horribly with eventual historical events.

Interestingly enough, the Kaiser's Memoirs (1922) have virtually nothing to say about the Jews or Judaism at all. He has one brief mention of a German Jewish journalist who he feels wronged someone and eventually suffered for it, but otherwise has little else to say beyond suggesting that much of the Old Testament should only be taken as Jewish-historical documentation rather than wholly divinely inspired. The Memoirs themselves are well worth reading apart from this or any particular issue, however -- they're absolutely fascinating.