Royals were in an anomalous position within National Socialist ideology. On one hand, the NSDAP's leadership cult and various Party organs like the SS celebrated those individuals who managed to bend history to their will. Propaganda and other materials cast figures like Frederick the Great or Bismarck as proto-National Socialists and often drew explicit parallels between these noble precedents and contemporary NSDAP leaders like Hitler. The SS in particular aimed at creating a modern neo-feudal aristocracy among its members in which SS men would be the elite of the new era. Conversely, the NSDAP's concept of the Volksgemeinschaft was that of a undivided German community united by race. This vision of German society argued that the Party would create a classless society not riven by social divisions and cleavages. Such leveling populism was one of the major selling points of the NSDAP in the terminal years of the Weimar Republic as Hitler positioned himself at the head of a Volkspartei, a political party that drew from all across the socioeconomic spectrum. These two tendencies of National Socialism meant that royals had a position within the Third Reich, but one that had to be mediated through the Party.

Despite Hitler and the NSDAP's reputation as crude rabble-rousers, a number of Germany's nobility did join the Party and the larger movement. Nobles were disproportionately more likely to join the NSDAP than other occupational groups and their numbers included Prince August Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm II's fourth son. Catholic nobles like the Wittelsbach family were far more reluctant to join the Party and some of the noble-led religious circles featured prominently in the anemic wartime resistance to the Third Reich. Most of Germany's nobles though switched their allegiances from traditional conservative causes and circles and acclimated to the 1933 regime quite well. National Socialism's elitism certainly found resonance among a number of nobles as was the promise that the new political order would protect their estates and even allow them to be expanded. East Elbian estate owners found the National Socialism's ideals of a strict hierarchy and the visions of social harmony of the Volksgemeinschaft meshed well with older discourses on noblesse oblige and the idealized social relations of the peasant and his bread lord. Moreover, the antisemitism and völkisch nationalism of the NSDAP was something that was not unknown in various noble-dominated social milieus of the Kaiserreich and Weimar such as the German fraternity system. There was much in the NSDAP's platform and ethos that appealed to this social group.

The NSDAP itself also spent a good deal of time cultivating the nobility and winning them over to their cause. A number of the Party's leaders saw their access to the nobility and their social networks as a means to buy the Party a degree of respectability in the run-up to the Nazi seizure of power. At times this meant holding out the possibility that Hitler would restore the Hohenzollern monarchy, a prospect that briefly brought both the exiled Wilhelm II and his heir Crown Prince Wilhelm to speak of the NSDAP in rather neutral terms in the early 1930s. The Night of the Long Knives shocked the former Hohenzollern monarch and his presumptive heir, but the murder of former conservative allies like Kurt von Schleicher also signaled that the new state would not have a role for the former monarchy. Nonetheless, Party elite like Hermann Göring sought good relations with the German nobility and while a monarchical restoration was off the table after Hindenburg's death, it was clear that the the Party elite did seek to enfold German nobility into its ranks. Göring's parties and hunting expeditions often had a noble component in the entourage and his residence of Karinhall maintained a striking pretense to ape the nobility. As with many NSDAP elite, Göring had a parvenu cast about him and having the former elite assume a visible, if subordinate, position in these social networks was a way to buy status and legitimacy.

The nobles' engagement with the Third Reich proved to be a Faustian bargain. While the state guaranteed titled estates and valorized an elitist system, it had to be under the auspices of the NSDAP. The nobility possessed cultural capital that many of the largely-middle class NSDAP leadership desired, but even noble cultural refinement could not take the edges off the crude ideology of the NSDAP and its leadership. The wreckage of the war validated those nobles with the good sense to remain aloof or publicly disassociate themselves from the Nazis like the Wittelsbachs, but defeat marked a major turning point for Germany's nobility. The Soviet zone disestablished noble estates and held the Junkers landowners were class enemies of the peasantry and proletariat. Things went slightly better for the nobility in the Western zones, but there was added scrutiny towards nobles in denazification hearings. Some like the zu Guttenberg family were able to reestablish themselves within the FRG's conservative society but others noble families faded to irrelevance. The postwar FRG's leaders had some limited engagement with the nobility in the early postwar years but this was ephemeral and the nobility was ill-suited to navigate the social leveling and consumerist FRG. The noble world of socialites and high culture looked increasingly archaic and stuffy in this new Germany. It was only after reunification that marrying into noble families returned to being in vogue among the Republic's elite. As with the Nazi period, this engagement with the old nobility was more reflective of the allure of noble birth than any such real power the nobility possessed.

Sources

Baranowski, Shelley. Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.