This video provides a comprehensive historical overview of the House of Hohenzollern, tracing their rise from minor counts in Swabia to becoming the rulers of Prussia and later the German Empire. It highlights their transformation of Brandenburg from an unpromising "sandbox" into a formidable military state, driven by a need for security and a unique set of "Prussian virtues" like discipline and duty. The narrative emphasizes key figures such as Frederick William the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, detailing their policies and the impact of historical events like the Thirty Years' War. The video concludes by discussing the eventual decline of the Hohenzollern dynasty and its legacy in shaping German history and identity.
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[music] History is often written in gold ink, scented with the perfumes of Versailles or the incense of the Vatican. We are taught to look at the past through the stained glass windows of cathedrals or the gilded frames of the Louvre. But there is another kind of history. A history written in gray, the color of gunmetal, of uniforms, and of the relentless, unforgiving sky over the northern European plains. If you look at a map of Europe in the 17th century, you will see a chaotic [music] patchwork quilt, a fractured mosaic known as the Holy Roman Empire. To the west, the Bourbons of France are drinking wine and perfecting the art of absolute monarchy. To the south, the Habsburgs of Austria are dancing to waltzes and marrying their cousins to secure half the globe. And then there is a stain in the northeast, [music] a barren, sandy, yeah, swampy flat land that God seemed to have forgotten during the creation. This is Brandenburgg. It has no gold mines. It has no defensible mountains. It has no fertile vineyards. It is widely derided as the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a place where, as the old joke goes, you have to sow potatoes just to have something to throw at the invading armies. Yet, from this unpromising dust bowl, emerged a force that would shatter the spine of Europe. The French philosopher Voltater, a man who possessed a tongue sharper than most guillotines, once made a distinct observation about this anomaly. He said that where some states possess an army, the Prussian army possesses a state. This was not a compliment. It was a diagnosis. We are talking about the house of Hoenzan. They were not the romantic heroes of a fairy tale. They were the cold calculating accountants of death. Starting as minor accounts from the swirl of Swayabia, they climbed the ladder of power, not by divine right, but by realizing a terrifying truth. In a world of wolves, you do not need to be the lion. You just need to be the porcupine made of steel. This is the story of how a family of obsessive neurotics, abusive fathers, and brilliant sociopaths turned a sandbox into a military machine. This is the chronicle of the dynasty of blood and iron. To understand the soul of a dynasty, one must first inspect the dirt beneath their boots. The story of the Hoenzins is at its core a story of migration from paradise to purgatory. Their name Hoenzan literally translates to high watchtower originating from the sundrenched rolling hills of Suabia in southern Germany. It was a land of wine, song and relative comfort perched high above the chaos of the plains. But fate with its twisted sense of humor had other plans. In the early 15th century, a branch of the family packed their bags and moved north, accepting the Margraviate of Brandenburgg. They traded their mountain views for a flat, desolate expanse that military strategists would later describe as a nightmare. Brandenburgg is not a country designed for survival. It has no natural frontiers. There are no majestic Alps to shield it from the south, no wide rin river to protect it from the west, and certainly no English channel to isolate it from the rest of the world. It is a geographical doormat. The land itself seemed to reject civilization. It was a vast swampy plain of sandy soil, so nutrient poor that it earned the region its nickname, the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire. While France was blessed with fertile fields that practically grew baguettes on their own, a Brandenburgg farmer had to fight the earth for every single turnip. This geography of emptiness created a psychology of paranoia. When you live in a house with no walls, no doors, and no locks, you do not sleep soundly. You learn to sleep with one eye open and a dagger under your pillow. For the Hoen Solins, the flat horizon was not a beautiful vista. It was a threat. Every cloud of dust in the distance could be a Swedish army, a Russian horde, or an Austrian battalion coming to burn the harvest. Thus, the geography dictated the destiny. If the land could not protect the state, the state had to become the protection. They could not rely on mountains of granite. So they decided to build mountains of men. The harshness of the terrain stripped away any frivolity or softness from the national character. In the sandbox, there is no room for the weak. You either become hard or you become history. So how does a family of minor nobles survive in a sandbox surrounded by giants? They didn't just adapt, they mutated. The Hoenzins realized early on that they could not afford the luxury of chaos. In France, a little corruption was considered style. In Austria, bureaucratic inefficiency was a cultural tradition. But in Brandenburgg, a mistake meant extinction. Thus, they invented a new religion. It wasn't Protestantism, though they were devout. Their true god was discipline. They cultivated what became known as the Prussian virtues. Punctuality, frugality, self-denial, and a sense of duty so rigid it could crack a diamond. They turned their entire society into a secular monastery where the prayers were replaced by drill commands and the abbots were drill sergeants. It was an evolutionary climb that defied gravity. They started as mere counts, scraped their way up to Margaravves, bribed and negotiated to become electors, and finally through sheer force of will, crowned themselves kings and eventually Kaisers of a unified Germany. It was the geopolitical equivalent of a caterpillar dreaming of becoming a tank and actually pulling it off. But this obsession with order didn't come from nowhere. It wasn't a genetic quirk. It was a scar tissue formed over a deep festering wound. Before they became the masters of war, they were its most pitiful victims. To understand why the Hoenzins eventually set the world on fire, we must first look at the moment they were burned to ash. The clock is ticking back to 1618. And the storm is coming and the sandbox is about to turn [music] into a graveyard. History books often sterilize war. They speak of flank maneuvers, peace treaties, and royal decrees. But if you want to understand the trauma that created the Prussian soul, you must look at the 30 Years War not as a chess match, but as a 30-year long home invasion. Imagine waking up every morning for three decades, not knowing if today was the day a Swedish dragoon would burn your house down or if an Austrian mercenary would steal your cattle. For the people of Brandenburgg, this was not a hypothetical scenario. It was Tuesday. The 30 Years War, which raged from 1618 to 1648, was the apocalypse of Central Europe. It started as a religious dispute, Catholics versus Protestants, but it quickly devolved into a meaningless, grinding slaughter for dominance, and stuck right in the middle of this meat grinder was Brandenburgg. The land was defenseless. It had no army to speak of, just a few ceremonial guards who looked good in parades, but would faint at the sight of blood. As a result, Brandenburgg became the highway of European armies. When the Swedish king Gustavas Adulus, the lion of the north, decided to march south, he walked through Brandenburg. When the Holy Roman Emperor's forces marched north to stop him, they walked through Brandenburgg. They didn't just walk, they ate, they raped, they burned. The devastation was biblical. In some regions of Brandenburgg, over 60% of the population disappeared. They didn't just die in battle. They died of starvation, of plague, and of despair. The fields layow because anyone who tried to plant seeds was cut down. There are records from the time describing villages baking bread made of sawdust and dirt. In the once bustling streets of Berlin, the population collapsed from 12,000 to 6,000. The city was so desolate that packs of wolves, literal four-legged wolves, began to hunt in the suburbs, prowling through the empty market squares, looking for easy prey. And where was the ruler of this hellscape? Where was the elector who was sworn to protect his people? Enter elector George William. If there were a hall of fame for incompetent rulers, George William would have his own wing. He was a man of spectacular indecision. In a time that demanded a wolf, Brandenburgg was led by a sheep. George Williams strategy for the war was neutrality. But in the 17th century, neutrality without an army to back it up was not a policy. It was a suicide note. He tried to please everyone. He married his sister to the king of Sweden, but he swore loyalty to the Catholic emperor in Vienna. He was the man who tried to stay neutral in a bar fight by standing exactly in the middle of the room. Naturally, he got punched in the face by everyone. The Swedes saw him as a traitorous brother-in-law and ravaged his lands. The Imperial forces saw him as a heretic and ravaged his lands. When the going got tough, George William did the only thing he was good at. He ran away. He fled to the remote safer duchy of Prussia in the east, leaving his heartland of Brandenburgg to burn. His most trusted adviser, the Catholic Count Schwarzenberg, effectively ran the country as a dictator, often working against the interests of his own master. It was a humiliating spectacle. The Hoen Zolan ruler was a refugee in his own realm, a monarch who had to ask permission from foreign generals just to travel through his own provinces. This era was the primal scene of the Hohenzan psyche. It taught them a lesson that would echo through the generations all the way to the trenches of World War I. They looked at the smoking ruins of their villages, at the corpses of their subjects, and they realized a cold, hard truth. Justice is an illusion. Rights are a fairy tale. In this world, the only thing that separates a king from a beggar is the number of cannons he commands. The humiliation of George William was the fertilizer for the militarism that followed. The German people learned to hate chaos more than they hated tyranny. They looked to the anarchy of the 30 years war and said never again. If the price of security is absolute obedience to a warlord, then so be it. By the time the peace of West failure was signed in 1648, Brandenburgg was a graveyard. But from this graveyard, a new kind of leader was about to emerge. A man who looked at his father's weakness with disgust and swore that he would turn this sandbox into a fortress. The age of the sheep was over. The age of the wolf was about to begin. In 1640, the incompetent George William finally did the most patriotic thing of his entire life. He died. His death left the throne to his 20-year-old son, Frederick William. If the father was a soft pillow, the son was a brickbat. History would come to know him as the great elector, but in those early days, he looked more like the captain of a sinking ship. Frederick William was a man carved from a different wood. He had spent his formative years not in the backward mud of Berlin, but in the vibrant, wealthy and hyperodern Dutch Republic. There, among the canals of Amsterdam and the universities of Leiden, he learned a lesson that would define his dynasty. He saw a tiny nation of merchants holding off the mighty Spanish Empire. He realized that power did not come from the size of your land. It came from the efficiency of your administration and the depth of your wallet. He returned to Brandenburgg to find a wasteland. The capital, Berlin, was a ghost town of rubble and stray dogs. His army consisted of a few thousand undisiplined mercenaries who were more likely to rob him than salute him. His borders were occupied by Swedes who treated him like a tenant in his own house. Most men would have despaed. Frederick William got to work. He possessed a cold, calculating intellect that was devoid of sentimentality. He looked at the chaos and realized that the old feudal system where a king had to beg his nobles for troops every time a war started was obsolete. It was like trying to put out a fire by negotiating the price of water while your house burns. He decided that Brandenburgg needed something radical. Something that didn't really exist in Germany at the time, a standing army. Not a temporary force raised for a summer campaign, but a permanent machine of professional killers paid on time, unformed, and loyal only to him. But armies are expensive and Brandenburgg was broke. To build this force, Frederick William had to become a master of geopolitical poker. He had no chips, so he bluffed. During the closing years of the 30 Years War and the subsequent conflicts in the Baltic, he played the great powers against each other. He allied with Sweden to fight Poland, then betrayed Sweden to ally with Poland, then betrayed them both to talk to the emperor. He was a weather vein that spun whichever way the gold was blowing. Critics called him untrustworthy. Frederick William called it survival. Through these machinations, he scraped together enough coins to maintain a small but highly disciplined force. It started with just a few thousand men. They weren't much to look at compared to the glittering legions of France, but they were his. They didn't dissolve when the harvest season came. They drilled. They marched. And for the first time in decades, the neighbors stopped laughing at the sandbox. The great elector had planted the seed. He understood that to be respected, one must be dangerous. He famously advised his successors, "Alliances are good, but forces of one's own are better." It was a simple maxim, but it would become the operating software of the Prussian state. Trust no one, build your walls high, and keep your powder dry. However, there was one massive obstacle standing in his way. The money to pay for this shiny new toy had to come from somewhere, and the local nobility, the Junkers, were not in the mood to open their purses. They liked their weak dukes. They liked their tax exemptions. A confrontation was brewing. The great elector was about to make a deal with the devil that would shackle the German soul for centuries. In 1653, the great elector found himself in a staring contest with the only people in Brandenburgg who actually had money, the Junkers. The Junkers were the landed nobility of Prussia. Imagine a class of men who loved hunting bo, hating the French, and whipping their peasants, not necessarily in that order. They were conservative, stubborn, and deeply suspicious of any central authority that might ask them to open their wallets. They held the power of the purse in the land tag, the provincial diet, and for centuries, they had kept the electors on a short leash. Frederick William needed money to feed his growing army. The Junkers wanted to keep their money, and more importantly, they wanted total control over the human cattle that worked their fields. So, in a smoke-filled room, metaphorically speaking, though, given the hygiene of the 17th century, it was probably filled with worse things, a deal was struck. Historians call it the recess of 165. I prefer to call it the Great Prussian sellout. The terms were brutally simple. Frederick Williams said to the Junkers, "I will confirm your absolute power over the peasantry. You can tax them, judge them, beat them, and bind them to the land as surfs. I will not intervene. In exchange, you will grant me the funds to build my army, and you will stop complaining about my political power." It was a brilliant, cynical master stroke. In most of Western Europe, kings were allying with the rising middle class to crush the power of the nobility. In Prussia, there was no middle class, just sand and turnips. So, the elector allied with the nobility to crush the people. The consequences were horrific for the common man. The Brandenburgg peasantry sank into gutsair shaft, a polite German word for hereditary slavery. A peasant could not marry, move, or learn a trade without his junker's permission. The Junker was the judge, the jury, and the police officer on his estate. The king had effectively sold the liberty of 90% of his population to buy himself a regiment of musketeers. But the deal went deeper. To collect the taxes and manage the logistics for his new army, Frederick William created a new institution, the General War Commissar. It sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi novel, and it functioned like one. This agency didn't just buy gunpowder and boots. It slowly began to devour the entire state. It took over tax collection, then economic policy, then immigration. In Prussia, the government didn't create the army. The army created the government. The civil servants were not there to build roads or schools for the public good. They were there to ensure the military machine was oiled and fed. The Junkers, initially suspicious, soon realized that this military state was the perfect playground for their sons. They traded their political independence for officer commissions. The deal evolved. The Junker gave his sons to the army to lead. The peasant gave his sons to the army to die. And the king sat at the top holding the baton. Thus the unique social structure of Prussia was cemented. It was a society rigid as a corpse. At the top a warlord, below him a cast of officer aristocrats. At the bottom a mass of obedient surfs. Liberty was not just absent. It was structurally impossible. The great elector had built a state that was in essence a giant barracks. He had secured his borders. Yes, but he had done so by turning his entire country into a prison. And the warden was about to get a lot more ambitious. By 1675, the great elector had his army, but Europe still treated him like a child playing with toy soldiers. That changed on a foggy morning in June at a place called Fairbellin. The Swedish army, the terrifying undefeated boogeymen of the north, the same force that had ravaged Germany for decades, invaded Brandenburgg again. They expected the usual routine, burn a few villages, steal the livestock, and wait for the elector to beg for mercy. But this time, the script had changed. Frederick William didn't beg. He marched in a display of logistical speed that would become a Prussian trademark. He moved his army 250 km in 2 weeks, appearing out of the mist like a vengeful ghost. At the battle of Fairbellin, the Sandbox army did the impossible. They smashed the Swedes. Militarily, it was a minor skirmish. Psychologically, it was an earthquake. The news rippled through the courts of Paris, Vienna, and London. The sandbox has teeth. The invincible Swedes had been beaten by the potato farmers. It was the moment Brandenburgg graduated from a victim to a predator. When Frederick William died in 1688, he didn't leave behind a happy nation. He left behind a sullen, overtaxed, and terrified population. But he left them alive. He took a patchwork of ruined provinces and welded them into a single political unit through the heat of oppression. He left his successors a state that functioned like a loaded pistol, small, compact, and lethal. But a pistol is a dangerous inheritance. In the hands of a wise man, it provides security. In the hands of a madman, it causes tragedy. And as the coffin of the great elector was lowered into the crypt, the genetic lottery of the Hohan Zolins was about to spin the wheel and land on crazy. The foundation of iron was laid. Now [music] it was time for the blood. If you thought the great elector was intense, meet his grandson, Frederick William I. History calls him the soldier king. But if he were alive today, he would be the star of a reality TV show about extreme hoarders. When he ascended the throne in 1713, the first thing he did was not to hold a coronation ball. It was to cancel the subscription to newspapers, fire the court musicians, and sell the royal horses. He looked at the royal budget like a forensic accountant at a crime scene. His father, Frederick the cell, the first king in Prussia, had been a vain man who spent a fortune trying to imitate the French court at Versailles. Frederick William the First looked at all those wigs, silk stockings, and goldplated carriages and felt physically ill. He despised everything French. He despised luxury. He despised fun. He cut the expenses of the royal household by 75% overnight. He sold the crown jewels to buy gunpowder. He turned the royal gardens into a military drill square. While other European monarchs were sipping champagne and discussing opera, Frederick William I was sitting in his tobacco cabinet, smoking a claypipe, drinking beer, and reading infantry manuals. He was a man of violent simplicity. He walked the streets of Berlin with a heavy cane, and if he saw a citizen idling or looking too fancy, he would beat them. Literally. There are records of the king of Prussia chasing his own subjects down the street, screaming, "Love me, you scum. I want you to love me." while hitting them with a stick. It was a very abusive relationship between a monarch and his people. He hated laziness with a pathological fury. One day he saw a postman taking a nap. He hit him. Another day he saw apple women knitting in the market instead of selling. He overturned their baskets. He believed that the only purpose of a civilian was to work, pay taxes, and produce sons for the army. But this misliness had a purpose. He was stuffing the state mattress with cash. He created a budget surplus in a continent drowning in debt. He didn't build palaces. He built a war chest. And he used that money to indulge in his one singular bizarre fetish, giants. Every billionaire has a hobby. Some collect vintage cars, others collect impressionist paintings. Frederick William collected tall men. This was not a military strategy. It was a compulsion. He created a regiment officially known as the Grand Grenaders of Potdam, but the world knew them simply as the Potam Giants, Langanger Curls. The entry requirement was simple. You had to be over 6 ft 1.88 m tall. In the 18th century, when the average man was barely 5'5, these men were biological anomalies. The king loved them. He didn't just command them. He adored them. He claimed that a beautiful girl or a fine palace left him cold. But a tall soldier was the most beautiful thing in the world. He spent millions of dollars, money he saved by firing court musicians and selling royal horses to acquire these human specimens. He bought them like cattle. He traded blue and white porcelain vasees with the king of Poland for a batch of tall draons. He paid bounties to recruiters who scoured the villages of Europe measuring peasants. If a man was tall enough but refused to join, he was simply kidnapped. No one was safe. There is a story of a tall Austrian diplomat who was assaulted and gagged by Prussian recruiters in a carriage because they thought he would look great in a blue uniform. They had to apologize later, but the message was clear. If you are tall, run. It got darker. The king tried to breed them. He forced tall soldiers to marry tall peasant women, hoping to create a race of super soldiers. It was eugenics before the term existed. A grotesque human stud farm run by a monarch with a measuring tape. He pampered them. They were paid more than professors. They were given the best food, the best housing, and wore hats that were a foot tall to make them look even more terrifying. When he was depressed, he would have them march through his bedroom to cheer him up. They were his living toy soldiers. But here is the punchline of this dark joke. They never fought, not once. Frederick William. I was so terrified of losing his precious long guys that he refused to risk them in battle. They were the most expensive, intimidating, and useless military unit in history. They were effectively a boy band with musketss. He had built a war machine, but he treated it like a collectible figurine still in the box. Mint condition, never used. But while the father was playing with his giant dolls, he was simultaneously destroying something else, his own son. If Frederick William was the irresistible force of militarism, his son, the crown prince Frederick, future Frederick the Great, was the immovable object of sensitivity. It was a genetic mismatch of catastrophic proportions. The father was a beer swilling, Biblethumping boar who hated French art and manners. The son was a delicate boy who loved French poetry, played the flute, wore silk dressing gowns, and combed his hair for hours. To the king, Frederick wasn't just different, he was a personal insult. He called his son a fop, a flute player, and famously an effeminate wretch. The king's parenting style was simple, abuse. He beat Frederick in public. He dragged him by the hair. He forced him to inspect troops in the freezing rain. When he found Frederick reading Latin, he hit the tutor. He wanted to beat the softness out of the boy and hammer him into a soldier. By 1730, the 18-year-old prince couldn't take it anymore. He hatched a plan to flee to England with his best friend and likely lover Hans Herman Fonata. It was a desperate romantic escape plan. Unlike all romantic plans in Prussia, it failed miserably. They were caught. The king's rage was biblical. He didn't just see this as a teenage rebellion. He saw it as desertion from the army. Technically treason. He threw both young men into the dungeon of Kustrin Fortress. The king wanted to execute his own son. The crowned heads of Europe had to intervene, begging him not to commit filicide. So Frederick William the Thai came up with an alternative punishment. A punishment designed to shatter the boy's soul forever. November 6th, 1737 a.m. Frederick was woken up in his cell. Two guards held him and forced him to stand by the window. The grill of the window was at eye level with a scaffold in the courtyard. Below, standing on the execution block, was Cat. Frederick screamed. He begged. He reportedly yelled, "Pardon! Pardon! Save him!" Kata looked up at the window, bowed respectfully, and said, "I die for you with joy, Monsor." The sword fell. Frederick fainted. When he woke up, the body was still there. The king had ordered that Cutter's headless corpse remain on the pavement beneath Frederick's window for days. This was the breaking point. The sensitive flute playing boy died in that cell at Kustrin. Or rather, he learned to hide deep inside a fortress of ice. When Frederick emerged from prison, he was different. He was cold. He was cynical. He wore the uniform. He obeyed his father. He became the perfect Prussian machine. The father had succeeded. He had killed the boy and in his place a great king was born. But the scar of that morning would never heal. Frederick the Great would go on to conquer provinces and win wars. But he would live the rest of his life as a man who trusted no one, loved almost no one, and found solace only in the company of his greyhounds. The lesson was learned. In Prussia, love is a weakness. Only iron survives. In May 1740, the soldier king lay dying. His body, once swollen with beer and rage, was now ravaged by dropsy. Yet even as he stared into the abyss, Frederick William remained true to himself. He was managing the logistics of his own funeral. He gave precise instructions on which uniform to wear in the coffin and exactly how much money should be spent on the ceremony, specifically as little as possible. There is a terrifying anecdote from his final days. When a priest tried to comfort him by saying, "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return," the king reportedly interrupted him, shouting, "No, I will be buried in my full dress uniform." To the very end, he was a soldier first and a human being second. When he finally took his last breath on May 31st, 1740, the silence that fell over the palace was heavy with two things: relief and anxiety. The tyrant was gone, but look at what he left behind. He didn't leave behind a cultural capital. Berlin was still a provincial backwater compared to Paris or London, but in the basement of the royal palace, there were casks filled with 8 million thalers in silver. In a world where most kings were borrowing money to pay their laundry bills, the Prussian king had saved a fortune large enough to fund a major war for years without borrowing a single penny. And then there was the army. The old man had inherited a ragtag force of 30,000 men. He left behind a finely tuned machine of 80,000 soldiers. To put that in perspective, Prussia was the 10th largest country in Europe by population, but it had the fourth largest army. It was a statistical monstrosity. The entire state had been engineered for one purpose, to support this military colossus. The bureaucracy was efficient, the taxes were collected with ruthless precision, and the corruption was almost non-existent because everyone was too afraid to steal. Frederick William the Furbers had spent his life building a Ferrari in a garage full of tractors, but he never drove it. He just polished it, tuned the engine, and yelled at anyone who touched it. Now the keys to this Ferrari were being handed to his son, Frederick, the flute player, the poet, the boy who cried when his friend was executed. The courts of Europe rubbed their hands in glee. They whispered that the sensitive new king would disband the army, spend the treasury on French paintings, and let the Prussian state crumble back into the sand. The old king died fearing the exact same thing. He died thinking his life's work was about to be squandered by a soft-hearted intellectual. They were all wrong. They didn't realize that the boy who cried at Kustrin was gone. The man who took the crown was about to pick up his father's loaded gun, aim it at the heart of Europe, and pull the trigger. The year 1740 was the year Europe held its breath. In May, the mad soldier king of Prussia died. In October, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V 6th died in Vienna. The chessboard had been wiped clean, and two new players sat down at the table. On one side was Maria Theresa of Austria. She was 23 years old, pregnant, beautiful, and woefully unprepared. Her father had spent the last 20 years of his life forcing the crowned heads of Europe to sign a piece of paper called the pragmatic sanction, promising that they would respect his daughter's right to inherit the throne. He thought a piece of paper could stop armies. He was very wrong. On the other side was Frederick II of Prussia. The world expected a soft breeze. They got a hurricane. Just months before taking the throne, Frederick had published a book titled Anti-Machavel. In it, he passionately argued that a king should be the first servant of the state, a moral guardian who valued peace and justice above all. He wrote that wars of aggression were crimes against humanity. The intellectuals of the enlightenment, including Voltater, wept with joy. Finally, they thought, "A philosopher king has arrived like Plato predicted." They should have read the fine print. While the world was reading his book, Frederick was reading maps, specifically maps of Sillesia. Slesia was a province of the Austrian Empire, a jewel of industry and agriculture, rich in iron, coal, and people. It was the engine room that Prussia lacked. In December 1740, less than 7 months after his father's funeral, Frederick dropped the mask. He didn't send a declaration of war to Vienna. He didn't send diplomats to negotiate. Derby sent 30,000 soldiers across the border into Sillesia. It was a geopolitical mugging. Frederick acted with the cold precision of a surgeon and the morality of a highwayman. He justified the invasion with some dusty ancient legal claims from centuries ago that nobody took seriously, not even him. In private he was refreshingly honest about his motives. He wrote to a friend admitting that he did it for glory and to see his name in the newspapers. The invasion was a masterclass in real politic before the word even existed. Frederick saw a young woman on the Austrian throne. He saw her army was in shambles and he saw a province he wanted. He calculated that by the time the slow-moving Austrians realized what was happening, he would already be sitting in their capital. And this was the moment the Prussian spirit truly revealed itself to the world. It wasn't just about discipline. It was about speed and audacity. It was about striking while your opponent is still tying their shoelaces. Frederick proved that the pen might be mightier than the sword, but only if you don't have 80,000 Prussians marching on your lawn. The philosopher had vanished. The conqueror had arrived, and poor Maria Theresa, clutching her pregnant belly in Vienna, realized that the piece of paper her father had left her was worthless against the iron reality of the Hoen Zolins. Frederick II did not start as a genius. In his first real battle at Mulvitz, he actually fled the field, thinking all was lost, only to find out later that his iron soldiers had won without him. It was a humiliating lesson, but Frederick was a quick learner. He realized that his father had left him a hammer, but to conquer Europe, he needed a scalpel. He transformed the Prussian army from a brute force into a mathematical impossibility. In the 18th century, armies were sluggish beasts. Musketss were inaccurate, and reloading took forever. Battles were usually pushing matches. Frederick changed the physics of the battlefield. He drilled his men until they were no longer men, but organic automatans. A Prussian soldier could fire three rounds a minute while moving, a rate of fire that was terrifyingly fast for the era. They didn't march. They flowed like liquid mercury across the terrain. His signature masterpiece was the oblique order. It sounds like a boring geometry term, but on the field it was a death sentence. Imagine two lines of soldiers facing each other. Instead of attacking head-on like a medieval brawler, Frederick would intentionally weaken one side of his line and refuse to engage while concentrating an overwhelming mass of troops on the other wing to crush the enemy's flank. It was like a boxer holding his left hand behind his back to deliver a knockout punch with a sledgehammer in his right hand. Then came the year 1757. If Frederick had a greatest hits album, this year would be the platinum record. First, there was Rosbach. The French and Imperial army, twice the size of Frederick's, was marching leisurely, expecting an easy victory against the little Maris of Brandenburgg. They were so confident they were practically planning their victory dinner. Frederick caught them while they were still in marching formation. In just 90 minutes, the Prussian cavalry swept through them like a sythe through wheat. The French lost 10,000 men. Frederick lost fewer than 500. It wasn't a battle. It was a slap in the face. It was said that the French army didn't lose its honor at Rosbach. It simply lost its luggage. But the true miracle happened a month later at Lithan. Facing the Austrian army that outnumbered him 2 to one, Frederick conducted his troops like an orchestra. He used the rolling hills to hide his movements, marching his entire army right under the noses of the Austrians without being seen. When he finally emerged on their weak flank, the Austrians were so confused they forgot to fire. The white coated Austrian lines collapsed in panic as the blue Prussian wall advanced with the rhythm of a metronome. That evening on the snowy bloodstained field of Lithan, a single Prussian soldier started singing a Lutheran hymn. "Now thank we all our God." Soon 20,000 voices joined in. It was a sound that chilled the spine of Europe. Frederick had proven that war was not just about brute strength. It was an art form and he was its Michelangelo. He had turned the battlefield into a chessboard where he was the only player who could see the next five moves. If Luan was Frederick's high noon, the 7 Years War was his long dark night of the soul. History books call it the 7 Years War, but for Frederick it was the third Sillesian war or more accurately the time I almost lost everything. By 1759 the euphoria of victory had evaporated. The combined might of Austria, France and Russia was finally crushing the small Prussian state. It was a simple game of numbers. Frederick was running out of men and his enemies had an endless supply. The low point came at the Battle of Kunisdorf in August 1759. Frederick didn't just lose, he was annihilated. His army was shattered, losing 19,000 men in a few hours. He had two horses shot out from under him and a bullet flattened against his snuff box. He retreated from the field, a broken man. He wrote to his ministers in Berlin, "All is lost. I will not survive the ruin of my fatherland. Adure forever." This wasn't melodramatic poetry. He meant it. For years, Frederick carried a small glass vial of poison around his neck. He was fully prepared to commit suicide rather than be paraded in a cage through the streets of Vienna. Berlin was open to attack. Russian troops were practically sightseeing near the capital. The end of the house of Hoen Solen was days away. And then the most ridiculous thing in military history happened. A twist so contrived that if you wrote it in a movie script, the audience would walk out. On January the 5th, 1762, Empress Elizabeth of Russia died. Elizabeth hated Frederick with a passion. She had sworn to crush Prussia into dust. But her successor, her nephew Zar Peter III, was different. To put it mildly, Peter was a Germanborn fanboy of Frederick the Great. He was obsessed with him. He didn't want to conquer Prussia. He wanted to be Prussian. In a move that stunned his own generals and enraged the Russian court, Peter III immediately ordered his armies to stop fighting. He returned all the conquered territories to
Here is the transcript for the last 20 minutes of the video:
...[music] The year 1888 is known in German history as the year of the three emperors. It sounds grand, but it was actually a funeral procession. First, the old waror Wilhelm the Fetus died at the age of 90. The throne passed to his son Frederick III. This was the moment the liberals had been waiting for. Frederick was married to Queen Victoria's eldest daughter. He was progressive, admired the British parliamentary system, and hated war. People hoped he would turn Germany into a liberal democracy. But tragedy struck. Frederick had throat cancer. He couldn't speak. He could only write notes on scraps of paper. He reigned for just 99 days, dying before he could pass a single meaningful law. The hope of a liberal Germany died with him. The crown then fell to his 29-year-old son, Wilhelm II, and with him the tragedy began. Wilhelm II is perhaps the most psychologically complex monarch in history. To understand World War I, you have to understand his left arm. Due to a traumatic breach birth, his left arm was withered and paralyzed, significantly shorter than his right. In a Prussian society that worshiped physical perfection and military prowess, this was a curse. His mother, horrified by his imperfection, subjected him to brutal treatments, strapping his arm to weird machines, forcing him to ride horses before he could walk. The result was a man with a colossal inferiority complex. He spent his entire life overcompensating. He talked too loud, laughed too hard, and wore the flashiest uniforms he could find. He grew a mustache that defied gravity, the ends waxed into sharp points like bayonets. He was desperate to prove to the world and to his British grandmother that he was strong. He was a manchild playing with a loaded gun. Naturally, this erratic young peacock clashed with the old walrus Otto Fon Bismar. Wilhelm II wanted to be loved by the workers. Bismar wanted to crush them. Wilhelm wanted to rule personally. Bismar wanted the king to be a rubber stamp. The tension exploded in 1890. Wilhelm, chafing under the old man's control, demanded Bismar's resignation. It was a shock to the system. The famous British magazine Punch published a cartoon titled Dropping the Pilot, depicting a weary Bismar descending the ladder of a ship while the young Kaiser watches smugly from the deck. It was the most dangerous moment in German history. The safety switch had been removed. The intricate web of alliances that Bismar had spun to keep Germany safe was about to be unraveled by a man who treated diplomacy like a game of poker where he could bluff his way to victory. The pilot was gone. The captain was insane and the iceberg was waiting. With Bismar gone, Wilhelm II was free to unleash his own vision upon the world. He called it politique, world politics. It was a vague, bombastic concept that essentially boiled down to a simple childish desire. Germany is big. Germany is strong. So, Germany should have what the other cool kids have. He famously declared that Germany demanded a place in the sun. Bismar had always been content with Germany being a land power, the master of the European continent. Wilhelm II looked at the map and felt claustrophobic. He looked at the British Empire, painting the globe pink with its colonies, and he felt jealous. He wanted colonies in Africa. He wanted ports in China. He wanted a navy that would make his grandmother, Queen Victoria, tremble. This obsession with the navy was his fatal error. It was the geopolitical equivalent of poking a sleeping bear in the eye with a sharp stick. For centuries, British foreign policy had a simple rule. They didn't care what happened on the continent as long as no one challenged their dominance at sea. Wilhelm decided to challenge it. He appointed Admiral Alfred Fon Turpitz, a man with a forked beard and a dangerous theory. Titz argued that if Germany built a massive battle fleet, Britain would be so intimidated that they would be forced to ally with Germany. It was called risk theory. It backfired spectacularly. Instead of being intimidated, the British were terrified and furious. They launched a massive ship building program of their own, culminating in the launch of the HMS Dreadnaugh in 1906. A battleship so advanced it made every other ship on Earth obsolete overnight. The Anglo-German naval arms race began. It was a contest to see who could burn the most money floating on water. While Wilhelm was busy measuring battleships, he forgot to watch the back door. In 1894, the unthinkable happened. Tsarist Russia, the most autocratic regime in Europe, signed a military alliance with Republican France, the most democratic. It was an unnatural marriage like a polar bear mating with a shark. But they had a common bond, fear of Germany. Bismar's nightmare of coalitions had come true. Germany was now surrounded, but Wilhelm dismissed it. He believed that the British would never ally with the French because of their centuries old rivalry. He was wrong again. In 1904, Britain and France signed the Anton Cordial. By 1910, but the diplomatic genius of the Hohen Solins had achieved a miracle. They had united their three biggest rivals, Britain, France, and Russia, into a single block against them. Germany stood alone in the center of Europe, armed to the teeth, paranoid, and holding the hand of its only remaining real ally, the decaying, scenile Austrohungarian Empire. Wilhelm II had wanted a place in the sun, but he had maneuvered his country into the shadows. On a sunny Sunday morning in June 1914, in a dusty street in Sievo, a teenage student named Gabriilo Princip fired two shots that ended the world. He killed the Archduke France Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne. It was a tragedy, yes, but in the grand scheme of things, it should have been a local police matter. Archdukes got assassinated all the time. It was practically an occupational hazard. But because of the tangled web of alliances that the Hoenzins had helped create, these two bullets triggered a Rube Goldberg machine of doom. Austria wanted to crush Serbia, but Serbia was protected by Russia. Austria was terrified of Russia, so they turned to their big brother in Berlin. They asked, "If we attack Serbia and Russia attacks us, will you have our back?" This was the moment, the fork in the road. Kaiser Wilhelm II was about to go on his summer vacation yaching in Norway. He didn't want to be bothered with details. He essentially told the Austrians, "Do whatever you want. We are with you." Historians call this the blank check. It was the most reckless financial transaction in history. Wilhelm II handed a scenile, dying empire the full military backing of the most powerful army on Earth. No questions asked. He bet the entire 500year legacy of his family on the competence of Austrian generals. That is like betting your house on a horse that has three legs. The dominoes began to fall. Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia mobilized. Germany, panicked by the Russian mobilization, declared war on Russia. France, allied with Russia, declared war on Germany. And then in a final act of strategic suicide, Germany invaded neutral Belgium to get to France, which brought Great Britain into the war. Wilhelm II told his troops, "You will be home before the leaves fall." He truly believed it. He thought war was still a gentleman's game of cavalry charges and colorful uniforms. He was wrong. The leaves fell and then the snow fell and then the leaves fell again. four times. The war was not a game. It was an industrial slaughter house. The place in the sun turned into a muddy hole in Verdon. The glorious Prussian army, the masterpiece of Frederick the Great and Bismar, was ground down into meat by machine guns and artillery. By 1918, the German home front was collapsing. The British naval blockade had strangled the economy. It was the turnip winter where the proud people of Germany were reduced to eating animal foder to survive. The army was undefeated on the battlefield, but the nation was starving to death behind them. On November 9th, 1918, the unthinkable happened. The German people, disciplined and obedient for centuries, finally snapped. Sailors in Keel mutinied. Workers in Berlin went on strike. The generals came to the Kaiser and told him the truth. Sire, the army no longer stands behind you. The all highest warlord, the man who wanted to rule the world, stood on a train platform, waiting for a ticket to run away. He boarded a train not for Paris but for the neutral Netherlands. As the train crossed the border, the house of Hoen Zan effectively ceased to exist as a ruling power. Five centuries of climbing the mountain ended with a stumble in the mud. There are few spectacles in history as sad as a fallen king who refuses to admit the show is over. After fleeing Germany in 1918, Wilhelm II settled in a small mana house in Dawn in the Netherlands. The all highest warlord, whose voice once made Europe tremble, was now just an angry old man with a lot of luggage and no job. To pass the time, and perhaps to channel his frustration, Wilhelm developed a new obsession, chopping wood. He didn't just chop a little firewood for the fireplace, he declared war on the local forest. It is estimated that during his exile, the former Kaiser personally chopped down over 40,000 trees. He would stand there for hours hacking away at the timber, perhaps imagining that every log was a British battle cruiser or a treacherous general. The man who wanted to carve up the world was now reduced to carving up logs. But the tragedy of Wilhelm II had one final dark chapter. When the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, the old Kaiser got excited. He delusionally believed that Adolf Hitler was merely a tool, a drummer who was whipping up the crowd to prepare for the return of the monarchy. He invited Herman Guring to tea. He sent messages to Berlin hinting that he was ready to come back. Hitler, however, despised Wilhelm. To the Nazis, the Kaiser was a loser, a man who had capitulated in 1918 and betrayed the German soldier. Hitler had no intention of sharing power with a ghost from the past. The ultimate irony came in June 1940 when Hitler's armies conquered Paris, achieving in 6 weeks what Vilhelm's army couldn't achieve in 4 years. The exiled Kaiser sent a telegram to Hitler congratulating him on the mighty victory granted by God. It was a pathetic attempt to stay relevant. A scenile grandfather trying to high-five the criminal who had taken over his house. Wilhelm II died on June 4th, 1941 of a pulmonary embolism. He died while German troops were massing on the border of Russia, about to launch an even more horrific war than the one he had started. In his will, he commanded that his body should not return to Germany until the monarchy was restored. He is still waiting. His coffin sits above ground in a moraleum in the garden of Hoist Dawn. It is a lonely shrine to a vanished world. The Hoenzan dynasty, which began with ambitious counts climbing the Swayabian hills, ended with a bitter wood chopper in a Dutch garden while the world burned around him. The Hohanzolins are gone, but like radioactive fallout, their influence lingers in the soil of Europe. Their legacy is a paradox that historians still struggle to untangle. On one hand, they were modernizers. They gave the world the concept of compulsory education, realizing that a soldier who can read is a soldier who can follow complex orders. They created the first modern welfare state under Bismar, providing health insurance and pensions long before liberal democracies considered such things. They built a bureaucracy so efficient that it became the gold standard for public administration. But on the other hand, they poisoned the German soul with a dangerous idea, the worship of the uniform. They created a society where the highest virtue was kadorsome, the obedience of a corpse, blind, questioning loyalty. They taught a nation that authority is always right, that the military is superior to the civilian and that order is more important than freedom. This mindset didn't vanish when Wilhelm II hopped on his train. It remained dormant, waiting for someone else to exploit it. When the Nazis came, they didn't have to build a machine of obedience from scratch. They simply plugged themselves into the one the Hoen Zolins had left behind. The story of the Hoen Zullins is the ultimate case study in the limits of force. They started with nothing but sand. They realized that in a cruel world, you need iron to survive. So they became hard. They disciplined themselves when others were lazy. They saved when others spent. They drilled when others danced. And it worked. The iron protected them, but then they made the classic mistake. They fell in love with the iron. They confused the tool with the purpose. They forgot that an army is meant to serve a nation, not the other way around. Under Frederick the Great, the iron was guided by a brilliant mind. Under Bismar, it was guided by a brilliant schemer. But under Wilhelm II, the iron was guided by ego. And that is the law of history. Power without wisdom is just a very efficient way to commit suicide. The dynasty that rose by the sword died by the sword. They spent 500 years building the most perfect military machine the world had ever seen, only to drive it off a cliff because they forgot to install a steering wheel. From the swamps of Brandenburgg to the hall of mirrors at Versailles and finally to the quiet woods of Dawn, the Hoen Zolan ark is complete. They proved that you can build a state out of blood and iron, but you cannot build a home. Iron eventually rusts. Blood eventually dries. And in the end, the sand of Brandenburgg reclaims everything. Friedrich ner the philosopher who lived in the shadow of this empire once warned he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. The Hoen Solins fought for centuries to build a state that could rival the great powers of the west. They gazed so long at the glittering palaces of France and the mighty ships of England that they became a dark twisted reflection of both. They built a Versailles in Berlin but without the soul. They built a royal navy but without the sea. And in their desperate attempt to be equal, they burned the house down. History is an endless chain of cause and effect. The rise of Prussia was not an accident. It was a reaction. To fully understand this tragedy, you must look at the enemies they tried to destroy. We saw them humiliate France in the Hall of Mirrors. But who built that hall? If you want to witness the grandeur and the decadence that fueled their rivalry, our complete chronicle of the House of Bourbon is waiting for you right here. And what of the east? We saw Wilhelm II push his cousin Zar Nicholas II into the abyss of war. If you want to see how the Russian steamroller collapsed under the weight of its own crown, you can watch the tragic saga of the house of Romanov on our channel. Now, but the story isn't over. There is one family that stood in the center of this storm and somehow survived. Wilhelm II spent his life jealous of their navy, their empire, and their stability. So for our next saga, should we cross the channel to dissect the house of Windsor, the masters of branding who kept their throne while the rest of Europe burned? Or should we look at the man who destroyed old Prussia and forced them to become ruthless, the House of Bonapart, the survivor, or the conqueror? The choice is yours. Leave your vote in the comments below. I am Dynast and this has [music] been Dynast's saga.
