German aristocrat Count Friedrich of Hohenau was BOTD in 1857. Born in the Albrechtsberg Palace in Dresden and christened Bernhard Wilhelm Albrecht Friedrich von Hohenau, he was the younger son of Prince Albrecht, Count of Hohenau and Rosalie von Rauch. Due to their mother’s inferior social status, Friedrich and his siblings were excluded from the House of Hohenzollern and unwelcome at the Prussian royal court, despite being first cousins of Prince Wilhelm, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. After Rosalie’s death in 1879, Friedrich and Wilhelm inherited Albrechtsberg Castle, where Friedrich lived for the rest of his life. In 1881, he married Charlotte von der Decken, with whom he had four children. They had an open marriage, in which the rampantly homosexual Friedrich pursued affairs with men while Charlotte had affairs with Prince Wilhelm and other noblemen. In 1891, Friedrich and Charlotte were involved in an orgy at a hunting lodge in Berlin, hosted by Wilhelm’s sister Charlotte von Preußen and attended by high-ranking members of the Prussian aristocracy. The next day, anonymised letters were sent to the participants, with detailed descriptions and illustrations of the various homosexual and heterosexual acts performed. The letters were leaked to the press, causing a national scandal. A police investigation wrongly accused court chamberlain Leberecht von Kotze of sending the letters, and he was subsequently imprisoned, deflecting attention from the Kaiser’s family and the other participants. Friedrich followed his brother into the German military, joining the Imperial Guard cavalry. In 1901, Wilhelm, Friedrich and his close friend Prince Friedrich Botho zu Eulenburg were forced to resign from the Army for suspected homosexual offences. Their court-martial was the first of a series of investigations into homosexuality within the Prussian aristocracy, culminating in the outing of Prince Philip of Eulenberg in 1906. Little is known about Friedrich’s life after his resignation. He died in 1914, aged 56, three months before the outbreak of World War One, survived by Charlotte and his four sons. Subsequent academic studies have concluded that von Kotze was not the author of the letters, with suspicion most likely falling on Charlotte.