Empress Hermine of Germany

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Today marks the Anniversary of the birth of Empress Hermine of Germany, who was born on this day in 1887.The fifth child and fourth daughter of Heinrich XXII, Prince Reuss of Greiz and Princess Ida Mathilde Adelheid of Schaumburg-Lippe, in the Principality of Reuss-Greiz, a state of the German Empire. Princess Hermine was raised at the court of the Grand Duke of Baden and his wife, Princess Louise of Prussia. In 1907, she married Prince Johann of Schönaich-Carolath, and the couple had five children before he passed away in 1920. In 1922, she visited the recently widowed Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in exile in Huis Doorn in The Netherlands, marrying him later that year despite grumblings from his monarchist supporters and the objections of his children. Empress Hermine managed Huis Doorn and established her own relief organization, also publishing her memoir ‘An Empress in Exile: My Days in Doorn’, remaining in The Netherlands until the Kaiser’s death in 1941, when she returned to her first husband’s estate, Schloss Saabor, in Silesia. In 1945, she fled from the Red Army to her sister in Roßla before being arrested by the Soviets, and passed away under supervision in Frankfurt an der Oder, being buried in the park of Sanssouci in Potsdam, near Empress Augusta.

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