Churchill didn’t hate Wilhelm II. More than once he was the Kaiser’s guest in Germany before the First World War. Here he is smiling in Wilhelm’s company while observing Germany army manoeuvres in Bavaria in 1906:
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Churchill wrote rather sympathetically about the Kaiser in Great Contemporaries (1937), calling him “a very ordinary, vain, but on the whole well-meaning man” who had been ceaselessly flattered and made to believe he had been raised “far above ordinary mortals”.
In 1940, when the Germans invaded the Netherlands where Wilhelm had been living in exile since being overthrown, Churchill even offered him sanctuary in England.
Not long after Hitler came to power, Churchill told the Kaiser’s grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand, that as a monarchist he hoped the Prince would regain his throne: “We prefer the Hohenzollerns to the gangsters.”* Churchill hated Nazism, but for Hitler he only had contempt, once remarking: “If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
In 1940, Churchill offered Wilhelm II, who he had known personally before World War I, asylum in the UK in the event that he didn’t want to remain in the Netherlands when Germany inevitably invaded them. (He stayed and the Wehrmacht saw to it that a guard of honor was placed at Huis Doorn until his death in 1941.)
In 1944, Churchill is known to have written that if the British captured Hitler at the end of the war, he wanted an electric chair on Lend-Lease so he could execute Hitler in Trafalgar Square with it.
