In January 1891, a seemingly innocent gathering of German nobles at a hunting lodge outside Berlin ignited a scandal that would fester for years. What began that night led to a campaign of anonymous blackmail letters, a military court, duels, and revelations that shook the German imperial court. At the center of it all stood Princess Charlotte of Prussia, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and sister of the powerful Kaiser Wilhelm II. Charlotte, born Victoria Elisabeth Augusta Charlotte on July 24, 1860, in Potsdam, was the eldest daughter of Prince Frederick William of Prussia, the future Emperor Frederick III, and his wife Victoria, Princess Royal of Great Britain.
Through her mother, she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her older brother, Wilhelm, who would one day become Kaiser Wilhelm II, was born with a deformed left arm after a difficult birth. In those early years, Charlotte was often overlooked as the family focused on Wilhelm’s health, since he was second in line to the throne. Victoria, known affectionately as Vicky, was initially close to her eldest daughter, but their relationship soured as Charlotte grew.
By age two, Charlotte had earned the nickname “the naughty, nice little Ditta,” and she would later prove to be the most difficult of the family’s eight children. As a young girl, she was often nervous and easily agitated, sometimes tearing at her clothes in anxiety. She developed a habit of biting her nails so severely that her parents forced her to wear gloves, though the measure provided only temporary relief. Letters and memoirs from the time record a difficult relationship between mother and daughter that only worsened.
When Charlotte was twenty-one months old, Victoria wrote anxiously about her daughter’s tantrums. At three, she complained of hyperactivity and sudden mood swings. Queen Victoria, writing from London, urged her daughter to show more patience, but with little success. Some historians have suggested that Charlotte may have inherited a medical condition from her British ancestors, a condition with roots stretching back to the eighteenth century.
Charlotte was also an indifferent student, disappointing her mother, who placed great importance on education. Victoria was harsh with her three eldest children—Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Henry, born in 1862—while becoming more affectionate and tolerant toward her three younger surviving daughters: Victoria, Sophie, and Margaret. Two sons, Sigismund and Waldemar, had died young, devastating their mother. The difference in treatment did not go unnoticed.
Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Henry felt their mother’s disappointment and resented watching her shower affection on their younger siblings. For Charlotte, these tensions left a lasting mark. Her difficult relationship with her mother and her volatile temperament made her childhood far from easy. But childhood could not last forever.
In January 1871, the German Empire was formed under Prussian dominance, and Charlotte’s grandfather became Emperor Wilhelm I. The Second Industrial Revolution transformed Germany into an economic powerhouse, and the new empire quickly emerged as one of the world’s great powers. This meant that princesses like Charlotte suddenly became targets for European courts seeking to strengthen ties with Germany. Announced on April 1, 1877, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, Charlotte’s engagement was somewhat surprising.
She was not to marry a foreign prince. Instead, she would marry her second cousin, Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen, a soldier who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War and was also a scholar. The marriage strengthened ties between the Prussian royal family and another ruling German house, an important consideration within the newly formed empire, where Prussia dominated but individual German states retained significant influence. This was not a marriage between strangers.
Charlotte already knew Bernhard, and their romance had begun during a carriage ride at a Berlin amusement park. When Charlotte’s older brother sped up the carriage, the frightened girl clung to Bernhard, and an unexpected love story began. During her teenage years, Charlotte’s difficult behavior took new forms. She was known for flirting, spreading malicious gossip, and stirring up trouble.
Her mother hoped marriage would give her daughter some direction, writing, “At least her bad qualities will not be able to do any harm. ” Bernhard seemed a suitable partner. Charlotte was strong-willed and knew what she wanted, while Bernhard was far more reserved. Princess Catherine Radziwill, who was familiar with the imperial court, later claimed that Charlotte herself had pushed for the marriage despite her youth because she wanted to escape her mother’s influence.
The journey from engagement to marriage took about a year. The wedding took place on February 18, 1878, at the Berlin Palace Chapel. Charlotte was seventeen; Bernhard was twenty-six. Guests noted how well Charlotte appeared, but behind closed doors she was said to be very ill and fainted several times during the day.
It was a sign of her fragile health. The couple settled in Potsdam, and on May 12, 1879, Charlotte gave birth to her only child, a daughter they named Feodora. She was the first great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. Charlotte had begun to enjoy Berlin’s glittering high society, admired for her fashions, lively parties, and sharp tongue.
She resented anything that threatened her freedom, and she particularly hated pregnancy. After Feodora’s birth, Charlotte seems to have made a private decision: she would have no more children. Soon she returned to Berlin’s social scene 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, and Charlotte’s standing at the imperial court grew more prominent. Then came the fateful gathering in January 1891. What was supposed to be a sledding and dance party at the Grunewald hunting lodge outside Berlin turned into the beginning of a scandal that lasted for years.
The exclusive guest list included the elite of German aristocracy, led by Duke Ernst Günther 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 excessive drinking and numerous illicit affairs transformed a raucous social gathering into the start of a scandal. 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 happened, dredged up scandalous old gossip about those present, threatened to reveal details about attendees, and in some cases included explicit photographs and excerpts. News of the letters soon spread beyond the royal court, and suspicion quickly fell on Charlotte. Her reputation for spreading biting gossip 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. There was even debate about the affair in the German Reichstag. Finally, in June 1894, Liebrecht 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 at least responsible for the photographs included with some letters. Blotting paper found in his office matched his handwriting almost exactly, though nineteenth-century handwriting analysis made it difficult to prove beyond doubt.
He protested his innocence and was acquitted after a military court trial. Kotze eventually regained his position at court, but not before fighting several duels against his accusers. Despite the strong suspicion surrounding Charlotte, investigators ultimately settled on another suspect. They concluded, perhaps incorrectly, that the letters had been written by Ernst Günther’s mistress, who was deported to France as an easy scapegoat.
But Charlotte was far from unharmed. 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 contributed to the scandal. Wilhelm never fully forgave his sister.
Bernhard was transferred to a regiment in Wrocław, effectively exiling the couple from Berlin. Wilhelm also restricted their ability to travel abroad without surrendering royal privileges. The damage extended beyond Charlotte herself, striking at the reputation of the German monarchy. For Charlotte, another nightmare was taking root at home.
Her relationship with her daughter was growing increasingly strained. Charlotte was, by all accounts, not naturally affectionate as a mother. She happily left Feodora to be raised by her grandmother for long periods while she occupied herself with Berlin society life. 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 Heinrich 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. That rift deepened bitterly in the following years.
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 and underwent a series of painful and dangerous procedures in a desperate attempt to have a child. What makes the conflict 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 physician.
They included psychological symptoms such as depressive episodes, along with physical problems including severe itching, rashes, swelling, nausea, and dizziness. Later, she reported occasional partial paralysis in her limbs, and her urine had become 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, with her condition appearing more advanced at an earlier age.
Nineteenth-century medicine tended to describe such behavior as hysteria, especially in women. Modern analysis has looked to the broader family background of Charlotte and Feodora, particularly the condition of their maternal ancestor, King George III of Great Britain. George had suffered episodes of hysteria and mania intermittently since 1788, spending the last decade of his life in his own world. The most likely cause of what was called the madness of King George III is porphyria, a metabolic disorder in which enzyme deficiency causes porphyrins to accumulate 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, explaining 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 first decade of the twentieth century. Those were difficult years for the German imperial family as a whole. Charlotte’s brother the Kaiser suffered a near-total psychological collapse in the late 1900s due to the Eulenburg affair at court, which raised questions about his sexuality.
His reckless foreign policy pushed Germany toward conflict with Britain and France and contributed significantly to the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. Just before that conflict began, Charlotte’s husband assumed the position of Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. Charlotte’s health worsened during the war years. By the winter of 1917, she suffered increased kidney pain and digestive disorders, and her mobility became severely limited.
She spent much of her time in a clinic, growing increasingly dependent on morphine for pain relief. She lived long enough to see her brother abdicate in early November 1918 and Germany defeated 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’ councils 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 age seventy-six and was buried beside her at Altenstein Palace in Thuringia. There is no evidence that Charlotte and Feodora ever reconciled after their earlier conflicts. 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 proven beyond doubt.