The personality and position of Karl Kautsky puts his unique book in the front rank of authoritative records, and settles, once for all, the question of the personal responsibility of William Hohenzollern for the outbreak of the Great War. Appointed by the German Republican Government to examine the secret archives of the German Foreign Office, Kautsky was able to study the documents which passed between the German authorities and the other parties to the great conspiracy, documents which passed through the hands of the ex-Kaiser and bear his notes and comments, which showed William Hohenzollern as the driving force behind the war-party in Germany, as a man determined not to let slip what seemed so favorable an opportunity of settling accounts with Russia — and, if necessary, the world.

"Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers"--Copyright page.

The first ever in-depth study of the role played by the nobility in the Nazi rise to power in interwar Germany, this is a fascinating portrait of an aristocratic world teetering on the edge of self-destruction.

'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished ... Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be ... The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' Sunday Telegraph

A personal and political analysis of the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II using new archival sources.