Dark and handsome, we don’t know, but King Frederick William I certainly liked his men tall.
He was a sucker for uniform too, once confessing that “the most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers they are my weakness.” For Frederick, however, these men were more than just a weakness. The Grand Grenadiers of Potsdam (or “Potsdam Giants” as they came to be known) were an all-consuming obsession.
You might think that forming a regiment made up exclusively of giant men would be a tall order in any age. But the eighteenth-century Prussian king was not, in fact, the first ruler to try. In the first century CE, the megalomaniacal Roman emperor Nero recruited a regiment of six-foot-tall soldiers from Italy, Legio I Italica, which he called the “Phalanx of Alexander the Great.”
Napoleon too would later introduce height requirements of 5”10 (178cm) for grenadiers in his prestigious Old Guard. But what made Frederick’s Potsdam Grenadiers so unique were the purposes for which he used them.
What Was the Purpose of the Potsdam Giants?
Frederick fell short in ever deploying his Grenadiers in battle. Instead, he positioned them at the centrepiece of imperial pomp and ceremony, dressing them up in striking blue uniforms with 18-inch caps (to make their height all the more imposing) and parading them for his amusement.
It gets weirder. When feeling melancholy, the Soldier King would sometimes send for a couple of hundred grenadiers to lead a procession of tall, turbaned moors carrying cymbals and trumpets (not to mention an enormous tame bear at the rear) to march around the palace and cheer him up.
It wasn’t all fun and games though. Some say that Frederick had his grenadiers fitted to racks so he could stretch them even further. There are even claims that he would graze on his lunch while presiding over this horrific spectacle. But Frederick was eventually forced to abandon this cruel practice after too many of these soldiers e began suffering from an inconvenient side effect known as death.
While service in the Grenadiers may have inadvertently ended up costing one’s life, it did in some ways pay to be in Frederick’s regiment. His beloved grenadiers enjoyed the best accommodation and food available in the Prussian military. It also paid to be tall, as the king devised a pay scale that differentiated according to height (though this may have left some of the smaller members of the regiment feeling somewhat short-changed).
How Tall Were the Potsdam Giants
The original height requirement was 6 Prussian feet (which is about 6 ft 2 in or 1.88 metres). The tallest man in the regiment was an Irishman called James Kirkland who measured a staggering seven feet, one inch. Believe it or not, this beast of a man didn’t enter Frederick’s services voluntarily but was cunningly, and brutally, press-ganged.
In 1730, Kirkland was serving as a footman to the Prussian ambassador in London, Baron Borck. At least this is what he thought. In fact, his employment by Bork was a guise, and in the seaside English town of Portsmouth, Kirkland was tricked into boarding a Prussian ship, by which he was taken to Prussia and forced into the Potsdam Grenadiers.
Kirkland’s was not the only case of a man being kidnapped to swell the ranks of the Potsdam Grenadiers when their numbers were in short supply. Frederick’s pious Christianity did nothing to dissuade him from forcing a towering priest to abandon his vestments in exchange for a blue uniform. Nor were the stories of Kirkland or the priest the worst. One episode even resulted in the accidental death of a press-ganged recruit.
In the German town of Jülich, Major General Baron von Hompesch came across a tall young carpenter labouring away in his workshop. Believing that persuading him to join the regiment would be futile, Hompesch asked the carpenter to construct a packing box measuring a height of six feet, six inches. The same height as the carpenter himself, as coincidence would have it.
The carpenter got to work and soon finished the box. But Hompesch complained that it was too small. Not wanting to lose the baron’s custom, and desperate to prove his proficiency, the carpenter climbed inside the box and lay down.
This was the moment the baron had been waiting for. He slammed down the lid and ordered his burly companions to seal it shut. Smug with his cunning, and eagerly anticipating the prize that awaited him, he ordered for the box to be sent to the king. However, he’d forgotten one rather important detail: to cut out some air holes.
The carpenter suffocated to death in transit, earning the baron a brief stint in prison rather than the reward he had been waiting for. Things turned out okay for him though—better than they had for the carpenter at least—and in the end, Hompesch received a royal pardon.
As a devout Calvinist, Frederick adhered to a particularly Protestant branch of Christian beliefs that closely embraced the concept of predestination. You might have thought that believing one’s lot in life was divinely chosen well before birth might have dissuaded him from wanting to “play god” himself by dabbling in eugenics. Alas, it did not.
Frederick’s obsession with creating tall recruits for his Grenadiers soon turned into a eugenics-driven breeding program, whereby tall men in the regiment were to be paired off with particularly tall women, in the hope they produce enormous offspring. It might not have worked in his lifetime, but by the late eighteenth century, it meant the population of Potsdam had its fair share of tall folk.
This was not the only thing he did to provide for the next generation of Potsdam Grenadiers: the king also requested that newborn babies of tall parents be given a red scarf to mark them out as potential future recruits.
Despite Frederick’s fanatical interest in all things military, he was a phenomenally peaceful ruler. Except for his brief intervention in the Great Northern War, the Soldier King never actually started a war, concerning himself more with military reform than conquest.
Through the conscriptional canton system, he considerably increased the size of the Prussian army. He also introduced several tactical and technological advances (such as improving the rate of infantry fire) that made the Prussian army the formidable fighting force it would be under his successor, Frederick the Great.
Frederick’s Troubled Relationship with His Son
But while Frederick’s foreign policy can be described as peaceful, when it came to running things within his own family the king was an absolute tyrant. Though a competent autocrat, Frederick I was a nightmare to be around. He had a notoriously short temper and was known to cane his servants and children for the slightest of reasons. Any mention of France would particularly grind his gears, sending him into a blind rage that sent shivers down the spine of anyone around.
Frederick had a particularly testing relationship with his eldest surviving son, Frederick II (who went on to become Frederick the Great). The king wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become an exemplary soldier as well as a fine ruler. He went to extraordinarily psychopathic lengths to drill this into him. As a child, Fritz was woken up every morning to the sound of cannon fire. At the age of six, rather than toy soldiers, Fritz was gifted his very own regiment of children, who he was to train as cadets for the future. Not long after that, his father presented him with every child’s dream: his own mini arsenal.
However, the young Fritz soon showed himself a lover rather than a fighter. Music, reading, and the arts occupied his interest far more than military drills, and his father took out his frustration by punishing him with a strict Protestant education and handing out regular—and very public—beatings. In 1730, the 28-year-old Fritz tried to escape to England with his tutor, and an officer of the King’s Guard, Hans Hermann von Katte. The two were intercepted, however, and after a court martial found Katte guilty of desertion, the king ordered for Fritz’s tutor to be beheaded.
Katte’s execution drove an even greater wedge between the king and his son. There were even rumours, propagated by the great French writer Voltaire, that the king had pushed to have his son illegally executed alongside his beloved tutor. But it didn’t mark the point of no return. Gradually, Frederick relaxed his attitude towards his son’s liberal pursuits.
By the time of Frederick I’s death in 1740, the two were at least on speaking terms, with Frederick II coming to understand his father’s greatness as a head of state, if not as a father figure.
The Soldier King ultimately died in the same manner he had lived. Days before his death, the 51-year-old king was asked to inspect his coffin. Finding it to his liking, he remarked, “I shall sleep right well there.” He then began making his final arrangements and a priest gave him a bible reading. While reading from the Book of Job, his priest uttered the line, “Naked I come from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return.” The Prussian king at this point interrupted him and said, “No, not quite naked. I shall have my uniform on.”
As for the Potsdam Grenadiers, Frederick II saw no real need to maintain a regiment of—what now numbered 2,500—giants. So he began sending the Grenadiers to serve in other units in the wars to come.
The Grand Grenadiers of Potsdam was finally dissolved in 1805, but their legacy long outlived the regiment’s lifespan. Charles Darwin would cite them in the 19th century as the one instance of selective breeding amongst humans rather than livestock. And, as we all know, the Potsdam Grenadiers weren’t the last experiment with eugenics to come out of Prussia (or Germany more broadly).
Hitler’s concept of eugenics was pooled from Prussian militarism and contaminated with misinterpretations of Darwinian theory. This all had roots in Frederick’s Potsdam Grenadiers, who may never seen battle but whose eugenics-based existence would go on to set a costly precedent. Being the big men that they were, they were always going to leave a long shadow.
