In January 1891, a seemingly innocent gathering of German nobles at a hunting lodge outside Berlin ignited a scandal that would persist for years. What began as an evening of revelry spiraled into a shadowy campaign of anonymous blackmail letters, a military tribunal, deadly duels, and revelations that shook the German imperial court to its core. At the center of it all stood Princess Charlotte of Prussia, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and sister of the formidable Kaiser Wilhelm II. Born Victoria Elisabeth Augusta Charlotte on July 24, 1860, at the New Palace in Potsdam, she was the eldest daughter and second child of Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia and Victoria, Princess Royal of Great Britain.
From her mother’s side, she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the monarch who ruled the British Empire at the height of its power. Charlotte’s older brother was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose difficult birth had left him with a deformed left arm. In the early years, Charlotte often found herself overlooked as the family focused on Wilhelm’s health, since he was second in line to the throne and expected to one day become emperor. At first, Charlotte’s mother, known affectionately as Vicky, was close to her eldest daughter.
But as Charlotte grew, their relationship deteriorated. By age two, Charlotte earned the nickname the little naughty, charming Ditta, and she would later prove to be the most difficult of the family’s eight children. As a young girl, she was often tense and easily agitated, sometimes pulling anxiously at her clothes. She developed a habit of biting her nails so severely that her parents forced her to wear gloves, though these measures provided only temporary relief.
Letters and memoirs from the time record a deeply troubled relationship between mother and daughter, one that did not soften with the passing years. When Charlotte was just twenty-one months old, Vicky wrote anxiously about her daughter’s tantrums. By the time Charlotte turned three, her mother complained of hyperactivity and sudden mood swings. From London, Queen Victoria urged her daughter to show more patience with her granddaughter, though with little success.
Some historians have since suggested that Charlotte may have inherited a medical condition from her British ancestors, one with roots reaching back to the eighteenth century. Charlotte’s behavior was not her only source of frustration for Vicky. She was also an indifferent student, disappointing a mother who placed great importance on education. Vicky was exceptionally strict with her three eldest children—Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Henry—while becoming far more affectionate and tolerant toward her three younger surviving daughters: Victoria, Sophie, and Margaret.
This difference did not go unnoticed. Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Henry felt their mother’s disappointment keenly and grew resentful as they watched her lavish affection on their younger siblings. Childhood could not last forever, and Charlotte soon entered a new world. In January 1871, the German Empire was formed under Prussian dominance, and Charlotte’s grandfather became Emperor Wilhelm I.
Meanwhile, the Second Industrial Revolution was transforming Germany into an economic powerhouse, and the new imperial power rapidly emerged as one of the world’s great states. This new status meant that princesses like Charlotte suddenly became targets for European thrones seeking to strengthen ties with the German Empire. Charlotte’s engagement, announced on April 1, 1877, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, came as somewhat of a surprise. She would not marry a foreign prince.
Instead, she was to wed her second cousin, Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen, a soldier who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War and was also a scholar. Though the marriage did not bind Germany to a foreign power, it served a broader dynastic purpose by strengthening ties between the Prussian royal family and another German ruling house. Nor was it a marriage between strangers. Charlotte already knew Bernhard, and their affection had begun during a carriage ride at a Berlin amusement park, when Charlotte’s older brother sped up the carriage and the frightened princess clung to Bernhard.
During her teenage years, Charlotte’s difficult behavior took new forms. She was known for flirting, spreading malicious gossip, and causing trouble. Her mother hoped that marriage would give her daughter some direction, writing that at least her bad qualities would no longer be able to do any harm. Some claimed Charlotte herself pushed for the marriage because she wanted to escape her mother’s influence.
The wedding took place on February 18, 1878, at the Chapel of the Berlin Palace. Charlotte was seventeen, Bernhard twenty-six. Guests noted how well Charlotte looked, but behind closed doors she was said to have been very ill and fainted several times during the day—an early sign of her fragile health. The couple settled in Potsdam, and on May 12, 1879, Charlotte gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Feodora, who was notably the first great-grandchild of Queen Victoria.
Charlotte began to enjoy the glittering high society of Berlin, admired for her fashion, her lively parties, and her sharp tongue. She resented anything that threatened this freedom, and pregnancy was something she particularly hated. After Feodora’s birth, it seems Charlotte made a private decision: she would have no more children. Soon she returned to Berlin’s social life and took long holidays.
In March 1888, Charlotte’s father finally ascended the German throne as Emperor Frederick III. Tragically, his reign lasted only ninety-nine days before he died of throat cancer. His death brought Charlotte’s brother to the throne as Wilhelm II, raising Charlotte’s prominence at the imperial court. But it was an event a few years later that would truly cement her notorious legacy.
In January 1891, what was meant to be an ordinary skating and dance party was held at the Jagdschloss Grunewald hunting lodge outside Berlin. The exclusive guest list included the elite of German aristocracy, among them Duke Ernst Gunther of Schleswig-Holstein and Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse. Much of what happened that night became obscured by rumor and legend. What is clear is that heavy drinking and numerous illicit affairs transformed a raucous social gathering into the beginning of a scandal that lasted years.
In the days that followed, dozens of people began receiving blackmail letters, supposedly from someone who had attended the event and wrote anonymously. The letters described what had happened, dredged up scandalous old gossip about some guests, and threatened to reveal details of those present, sometimes including explicit photographs and excerpts. News of the letters soon spread beyond the royal court, and suspicion quickly fell on Charlotte. Her reputation for spreading caustic rumors led some contemporaries to believe she was behind them.
She herself received letters from the anonymous sender, though many at the time believed she had sent them to herself to cover her tracks. The scandal escalated over months and continued intermittently in the years that followed, even becoming a subject of debate in the Reichstag. Finally, in June 1894, Leberecht von Kotze, a master of ceremonies at the imperial court who had attended the gathering in January 1891, was arrested after suspicions emerged that he was responsible, at least for the photographs attached to some letters. Blotting paper found in his office and handwriting analysis matched almost exactly, though late-nineteenth-century handwriting made proof difficult.
Kotze protested his innocence and was acquitted after a court-martial. He eventually regained his position at court, but not before fighting several duels against his accusers. Despite strong suspicions surrounding Charlotte, investigators ultimately pinned the case on another suspect, perhaps wrongly concluding that the letters were written by Duke Ernst Gunther’s mistress, who was deported to France as an easy scapegoat. But Charlotte was far from unscathed.
The letter writer had somehow obtained her personal diaries, which contained intimate secrets about the imperial family and court. Charlotte may not have written the letters, but her carelessness had contributed to the scandal. Wilhelm never fully forgave his sister. Bernhard was transferred to a regiment in Wroclaw, effectively exiling the couple from Berlin, while Wilhelm restricted their ability to travel abroad without renouncing their royal privileges.
The damage extended beyond Charlotte herself, striking at the reputation of the German monarchy. The scandal was not the only difficulty Charlotte faced in the 1890s. Her relationship with her daughter was growing increasingly strained. Charlotte, by all accounts, was not a naturally affectionate mother, happy to leave Feodora to be raised by her grandmother for long periods while she pursued her social life in Berlin.
Like mother, like daughter: Feodora began seeking a husband to escape her unhappy family environment. In September 1898, the nineteen-year-old princess married thirty-three-year-old Prince Henry XXX Reuss, a man neither particularly wealthy nor high-ranking. The imperial family considered the match beneath her station, causing a serious rift between Charlotte and Feodora. This division grew more bitter in the years that followed.
By 1900, Feodora was telling friends that her mother was spreading malicious rumors about her at court, including claims that Feodora had contracted a venereal disease from her husband. In truth, Feodora suffered from a heartbreaking inability to conceive, undergoing a series of painful and dangerous procedures in a desperate attempt to have a child. What makes the estrangement between mother and daughter particularly strange is that both women appeared ill in ways that affected their behavior toward each other. Charlotte’s health problems were recorded in detail over the years in her letters to her doctor.
They included psychological symptoms such as depressive episodes, along with physical problems like severe itching, rashes, swelling, nausea, and dizziness. Later she even reported occasional paralysis in her limbs, and her urine became dark. One night in 1909, she began screaming and raving for hours until her doctor sedated her. Feodora suffered from many of the same symptoms, except her condition seemed more advanced at a younger age than her mother’s.
Late-nineteenth-century medicine tended to describe such behavior as hysteria, especially when it came from women. But modern analyses have looked at the broader family background of Charlotte and Feodora, specifically the condition of their maternal ancestor, King George III of Great Britain, to understand what they were suffering from. George had suffered intermittent bouts of hysteria and mania since 1788, spending the last ten years of his life in his own world. The most likely cause of what was called the madness of King George was porphyria, a metabolic disorder in which enzyme deficiencies cause porphyrins to build up in the body, poisoning the system over time and leading to a range of psychological and physical symptoms.
There is a compelling, though unprovable, case that both Charlotte and Feodora suffered from a hereditary form of porphyria, and that this explains their strained relationship and Charlotte’s more troublesome behavior throughout her adult life. Charlotte’s health continued to decline through the 1890s and into the 1900s. These were difficult years for the German imperial family as a whole. Charlotte’s brother the emperor suffered a near-complete nervous breakdown in the late 1900s due to the Eulenburg affair at court, which raised questions about his sexuality, and his reckless foreign policy pushed Germany toward conflict with Britain and France, contributing significantly to the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914.
Just before that conflict began, Charlotte’s husband assumed the position of Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The New York Times later ran a story titled The Kaiser’s Cleverest Sister Now on the Throne. Charlotte’s health continued to deteriorate during the war years. By the winter of 1917, she suffered from increased kidney pain and digestive disorders, and her mobility became severely restricted.
She spent much of her time in a clinic, growing increasingly dependent on morphine for pain relief. She lived long enough to witness her brother’s abdication in early November 1918 and Germany’s defeat in the war. As the German Empire and its old order collapsed, her husband Bernhard renounced his title under pressure from the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council during the German Revolution. Charlotte spent the next year between clinics and moving between homes before suffering a heart attack on October 1, 1919.
She was fifty-nine years old. Her husband died nine years later at the age of seventy-six and was buried beside her at Altenstein Palace in Thuringia. Sadly, there is no evidence that she and Feodora ever reconciled after their earlier quarrels. Despite her poor health, Feodora lived until 1945, dying, like her mother before her, shortly after the end of a world war.
The identity of the anonymous blackmailer in the scandal of the early 1890s was never conclusively proven, despite Charlotte’s involvement and contribution to it.