Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt

Princess Marie-Auguste of Anhalt was the daughter of Eduard, Duke of Anhalt, and his wife, Princess Louise Charlotte of Saxe-Altenburg. She married and divorced a son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, then married and divorced a baron. She was raised in Dessau, the capital of the duchy of Anhalt. She had five siblings, but two of them died in infancy. She was an elder sister of Joachim Ernst, Duke of Anhalt. On 11 March 1916 in Berlin, she married Prince Joachim of Prussia, the youngest son of German Emperor Wilhelm II. They had one son, Prince Karl Franz Josef Wilhelm Friedrich Eduard Paul, who later married Henriette von Schönaich-Carolath and became the father of Prince Franz Wilhelm, who married Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, a pretender to the Imperial Russian throne. The couple were divorced soon after the end of WWI. The direct causes of the divorce are not really known to the public, only that there had been no previous report of marital troubles before the divorce was announced. According to another report, Marie-Auguste had previously abandoned her husband and child to run away with another man, had been forcibly brought back home on the orders of the Kaiser, and had filed for divorce as soon as the war ended, when she saw that her husband's family were at their lowest ebb. Regardless of the reasons, this event was one of the main reasons why Prince Joachim died by suicide only weeks after the divorce was finalized. In 1926, she married Johannes-Michael Freiherr von Loën, a baron and a former officer in the German army. They divorced in 1935. She lived in Essen until her death in 1983 at the age of 84. She was buried in Essen as well. She was one of the last surviving members of the House of Ascania, which ruled Anhalt from the 12th century until 1918.