Hitler and his cohorts largely detested the final German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, because they assigned him and the rest of the “November Criminals” large part of the blame for the outcome of the Great War. Kaiser Wilhelm lived until 1941 and expressed a range of opinions about Hitler and the NDSAP which ranged from enthusiasm to disgust. Hitler never reciprocated his predecessor’s more positive sentiments, and in fact nearly fired the Wehrmacht general who provided an honor guard for the Kaiser’s funeral. The Kaiser had maintained hopes following Hitler’s rise to power that the monarchy might be restored in Germany, but this was never part of Hitler’s agenda. The Führer’s contempt was generally kept out of the public sphere, however, as he aimed to enhance his own perceived legitimacy by associating his rule with that of final German emperor. To this end he even unsuccessfully attempted to bring Wilhelm’s body back to Germany for a state funeral.

Hitler never saw the National Socialist state as a direct continuation of the Holy Roman Empire. Rather- and not unlike his public relationship with the Kaiser- he sought to frame his ambitions within the narrative of inherent German greatness by associating his goals with past manifestations of German political identity. He was in effect telling his audience a new story, but deliberately ensuring that it rhymed with previous stories. National Socialist Germany was intended as neither a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire nor the Kaiser-era German Empire except in the broadest and most romanticized of terms. The term “Third Reich” (which, like “blitzkrieg”, was arguably more widely used by those outside of Hitler’s empire than by the Nazis themselves) translates both semantically and rhetorically as “Third Realm”, and in this sense Hitler’s goal was an entirely new form of German national identity- albeit one morally grounded in earlier forms. The Nazis were effectively selling the German people something radically different from the past but cloaking it in allusions and parallels intended to convey that it was really just a continuation of what the Mighty German Volk had always done (which wasn’t really the truth).