the 49 - year -old " but very wealthy and young looking" — Viktoria left Berlin and moved into a "luxuriously furnished" castle in Bonn. The war years threw Viktoria's life into chaos: Adolf died in July 1916, after nearly thirty years of marriage; in 1917, Viktoria's brother-in-law the King of the Hellenes who married her sister Queen Sophia of Greece in 1890 was deposed; and in 1918, her brother Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and the German nobles and royals legally lost their titles under the new Weimar Republic. After the war, she met her first cousin once removed, the future King George VI of the United Kingdom, and expressed the wish that they "would all be friends again soon". George told her he did not think this would be possible for a great many years. After Adolf's death, Viktoria asked her brother for permission to marry one of Adolf's nephews; Wilhelm refused. Following the war, though she did not lose her home, Viktoria's finances began to dwindle. In the mid-1920s, she was offered the paid opportunity to write a memoir of her life. Her memoirs, which were published in 1929, moderately distorted some facts, probably to generate greater profit. Second marriage In 1927, Viktoria held a party for university students at her castle in Bonn. One of the students in attendance was Alexander Anatolievitch Zoubkoff (Russian: Aleksander Anatolyevich Zoubkov), a Russian immigrant who was studying law at the University of Bonn. Zoubkoff told Viktoria that he had fled the Russian revolution and that he had been a baron. Infatuated with Zoubkoff, Viktoria provided the young student – 35 years her junior – with lavish gifts; he, in turn, proposed marriage. Without asking permission from the former Emperor Wilhelm, Viktoria renounced her titles and married Zoubkoff first at the town hall in Bonn, then in a Greek Orthodox ceremony at which none of her family was in attendance. The couple were married on 19 November 1927, which would have been Viktoria and Adolf's 37th wedding anniversary. She wore the lace bridal veil worn by her mother in 1858. Viktoria was 61, while Alexander was only 27. The two had known one another for only two months, and their wedding was a royal and society scandal. Soon after the wedding, Alexander Zoubkoff, whom Viktoria called "Sascha", began spending large amounts of Viktoria's dwindling fortune. Alexander's financial troubles, combined with