Frederick the Great Gets His Last Wish : Reburial: King who made Prussia a great power to be interred at palace in Potsdam.

Frederick the Great, the 18th-Century philosopher-king who made Prussia a military power, is to be reburied at his palace in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, in a unified Germany.

Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, a direct descendant of King Frederick II, said the Hohenzollern family will respect the monarch’s last wish now that East German communism has fallen and Germany is soon to be united.

The prince told the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper that the king and his warrior father, Frederick William I, will be reburied beside the rococo Sanssouci Palace “very soon, namely in the coming year.”

Their coffins were taken from Potsdam’s Garrison Church in 1944 for safety as Allied planes bombed Nazi Germany and Allied armies advanced toward Berlin.

“Old Fritz,” as Frederick the Great was nicknamed, was reburied in 1952 at the Hohenzollern castle in Hechingen, near Stuttgart, West Germany.

In his last will in 1752, the king who gave refuge to French philosopher Voltaire said: “I have lived as a philosopher and I wish to be buried as such, without pomp and circumstance or the slightest ceremony. Let me be taken by the light of a lantern with no cortege to Sanssouci and buried simply on the righthand side of the high terrace.”

Louis Ferdinand, 82, grandson of the last German Kaiser Wilhelm II, said the Hohenzollern family is not seeking compensation for its former properties in a united Germany.

East Germany’s Communist rulers initially shunned Prussia’s kings as feudal autocrats but rehabilitated them in the 1970s to legitimize their own heritage.