Prince Louis Ferdinand; Grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II

Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, 86, grandson of Germany’s last emperor and an opponent of Adolf Hitler. Louis Ferdinand had ties to German resistance groups during the Nazi era, and to officers who carried out the failed assassination plot against Hitler in 1944. He was the second son of Germany’s Crown Prince Wilhelm and worked as a mechanic for the Ford Motor Co. in Detroit during the 1930s. He later became first in the line of succession and head of the Hohenzollern family even though the German throne no longer existed. Germany’s monarchy had been dissolved after World War I, when Louis Ferdinand’s grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated and went into exile and Germany became a republic. After World War II, the prince promised to return the remains of his 18th-Century ancestor, King Frederick the Great, to the palace Frederick built as his summer residence in Potsdam, outside Berlin. Hitler had ordered the coffins of Frederick and the emperor’s father, Kaiser Wilhelm I, moved during the war for fear they might be destroyed in air raids. Potsdam was in Communist East Germany, which made it impossible to return the remains until after German reunification in 1990, and Louis Ferdinand was able to carry out his promise in 1991. In Bremen, Germany, on Sunday