The Kaiser deeply mourned her passing, but he was not allowed to attend her funeral. When she died in 1921 thousands of people lined railway lines to watch the train carry her body through Germany to its resting place. By the time they fled to the Netherlands in 1918, their personal problems compounded the stress. Toward the end of the war Augusta’s health deteriorated. During WWI she threw herself into more charity work and became head of the German arm of the Red Cross, but was also there to side with the Kaiser and the military against the elected parliament in times when the war was going badly. However, her conservatism and anti-British bias helped push the country toward war.
As the nation headed to war, the Kaiser often consulted her. Therefore Augusta was a half-cousin to Wilhelm, the grandson of Queen Victoria by her eldest daughter Princess Victoria “Vicky”, who was born three months after Augusta in January 1859.Īugusta’s education was entrusted to a protestant minister, so she never developed a depth of political understanding, but was deeply conservative, which made her a good match for Wilhelm.Ī photograph of Augusta Victoria, circa 1910.Īlthough not politically well-informed, Augusta was Wilhelm’s confidante during political crises. Her father, Frederick VIII, was heir to the throne of the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, but the duchy was annexed in 1864 a year after Frederick’s accession and he lost all effective power.Īugusta’s mother was Princess Adelheid of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, the daughter of Princess Feodora of Leiningen, Queen Victoria’s half-sister (Victoria’s mother remarried after the death of her father Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent). Her birthplace was Dolzig Palace, Eastern Prussia (what is Poland today). Prince William of Prussia and Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, in June 1880, before they were married.īorn 160 years ago today, on October 22, 1858, she was named Augusta Victoria Friederike Louise Feodora Jenny. She died in April 1921 a broken woman, but in her ignominious death the new Republic of Germany afforded her an honour that would later be denied her husband, allowing her body to be buried on German soil in the Temple of Antiquities at Potsdam. The marriages of her sons Joachim and August Wilhelm were breaking down and she was unable to see her eldest son, the former Crown Prince Wilhelm, who was interned on the island of Wieringen in the north of the Netherlands.Īs things became worse - the Kaiser condemned during the peace talks at Versailles and the suicide of her youngest son Joachim in 1920 - her physical and mental health worsened. While she seemed to bear the humiliation of leaving her homeland with the customary royal stoicism, inside she and her family were crumbling. WHEN Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was forced to abdicate on November 9, 1918, two days before the Armistice, and board a train for the Netherlands, accompanying him was his faithful wife, the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria.
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