German Royalty. The second son of German Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and Crown Princess Cecelie, he was also the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria. With the collapse of the German monarchy in November 1918, his guaranteed life as a royal person ended, and he was obliged to earn his living. After completing a university degree in Berlin, he eventually worked from 1929-1934 in Detroit, Michigan for Henry Ford. Despite their loss of power in Germany, the royal family remained important to German life, and many looked upon the royal family's loss of power as only temporary. With the removal of his eldest brother due to an unsuitable marriage to a commoner, he became the next in line after his father to be the future head of the House of Hohenzollern. Upon his return to Germany in 1934, he became an instructor with the German Luftwaffe, although he was unable to take up any real military leadership position due to Hitler's dislike of the former dynasty. In 1938 he married Russian Grand Duchess Kira Kirilovna, daughter of Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich and Grand Duchess Victoria Feodorovna, and a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria. Although the communists had overthrown the Russian royal family in 1917, Kira's father, Grand Duke Cyril, was the titular heir to the Russian throne and head of the House of Romanov. The couple were married in two ceremonies: the first at the Russian Orthodox Church in Potsdam and the other a Lutheran ceremony at Doorn in the Netherlands at the home of his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Louis Ferdinand and Kira had four sons and three daughters. At the end of World War II, he lived in Bremen and also had a residence in Berlin. He became head of the House of Hohenzollern in 1951 on the death of his father, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. He spent a considerable time trying to restore the reputation of his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm II. When his wife Kira died in 1967 from a heart attack, he never remarried. With the reunification of the two Germanys in 1991, he was able to make the transfer of a number of remains of his ancestors possible. One of them was the famous King Friedrich the Great, who was reburied where he had wished: in the gardens of his beloved Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam. This was his last great public appearance as the Head of the house of Hohenzollern. His two elder sons had renounced their positions in order to marry commoners, and his third son died in 1977 in an accident, thus leaving his grandson, Prince Georg Ferdinand, as his designated heir.