$550
Estimate: $600 - $900
Auction: February 18, 2021 10:00:00 AM EDT
Berlin, ca. 1940. Folio, foolscap. 190 pp. Original typescript carbon; autograph notations, pagination, and emendations in pencil throughout; pages toned, minor edge wear, scattered creasing. No copies of this report are listed in OCLC.
A lengthy and highly detailed report on the actions of the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht and his associates--from before Adolf Hitler's ascension to power in 1933 until just before Rupprecht's exile to Italy in December 1939--that records their various maneuvers to restore Rupprecht to the throne. Likely created after Rupprecht's forced exile and filed as evidence sometime during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals (1945-1949).
Rupprecht Maria Luitpold Ferdinand (1869-1955) was heir to the Bavarian throne and one of Germany's most senior generals on the Western Front during the First World War. He was the eldest child of Ludwig III, the last sitting King of Bavaria, as well as a distant claimant to the British throne, as the Jacobite heir. The House of Wittelsbach had ruled Bavaria for nearly 750 years, but its reign was brought to an end following the First World War by the formation of the German Republic in 1918.
Rupprecht envisioned the establishment of a Constitutional monarchy for Bavaria. Numerous plans by others to create a Bavarian government with Rupprecht at the head were proposed through 1932--some with wide public and political support--but were eventually terminated by Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in 1933. However, Rupprecht continued to believe that a reinstitution of the monarchy was still possible, and his active pursuit of this goal made both him and his supporters a prime target for Nazi surveillance and persecution.
A rare survival.