Kaiser Wilhelm II

Wilhelm II ruled Germany for thirty years, but never learned to rule himself. Born with a withered left arm he spent his entire life trying to hide, he compensated with theatrical uniforms, bombastic speeches, and an exhausting need to prove his strength to everyone around him. His ministers learned to schedule important meetings for mornings, before his energy curdled into paranoid fury by afternoon.

The man who supposedly led Germany into the Great War actually tried desperately to stop it once the shooting began. In July 1914, Wilhelm scrawled increasingly frantic marginalia on diplomatic cables: "This is a confession of weakness!" and "Now or never!" But when Austria declared war on Serbia, he panicked. He fired off contradictory orders, begged his cousin Nicholas II of Russia to pull back, and spent the crucial final days of peace locked in his study, emerging only to demand his generals explain how they'd gotten him into this mess.

Once the war started, Wilhelm discovered his own government had been planning around him for years. His famous Supreme War Lord title meant nothing — Hindenburg and Ludendorff ran military strategy while ignoring his increasingly desperate suggestions. Wilhelm retreated to his various palaces, obsessively redesigning uniforms and ranting about Jewish conspiracies to anyone who would listen. By 1918, his own ministers were plotting his abdication behind his back.

The final irony came at war's end. This emperor who'd spent three decades preparing for Germanic glory fled to Holland in the middle of the night, disguised as a tourist, carrying a single suitcase. He spent his remaining twenty-three years chopping wood, writing bitter memoirs nobody read, and watching newsreels of the war he'd accidentally started.