Between 1713 and 1740, King Frederick William I of Prussia—known to history as the “Soldier King”—transformed a modest German electorate into an austere military Sparta. famously frugal in every other aspect of life, cutting palace staff, selling off royal carriages, and serving simple cabbage and pork at state dinners, the King harbored one bizarre, all-consuming obsession on which he spent millions of silver thalers: the Potsdam Giants (Lange Kerls, or “Tall Fellows”). Assembling an elite personal infantry regiment composed exclusively of men towering between six feet two inches and well over seven feet tall, the King kidnapped giants from across Europe and even attempted a royal human-breeding program inside Potsdam to create a permanent race of colossal grenadiers.
The 6th Prussian Infantry Regiment: The “Long Fellows”
Officially designated as the Old Prussian Infantry Regiment No. 6 and garrisoned inside the royal residence town of Potsdam outside Berlin, the regiment had been formed when Frederick William was still Crown Prince and expanded into a global curiosity the day he ascended the throne in 1713. To qualify for even the rear ranks of the Lange Kerls, a recruit had to measure at least six Prussian feet tall (roughly six feet two inches in modern imperial measure, at a time when the average European adult male stood barely five feet five inches). The front ranks were filled with men standing between six feet eight inches and seven feet two inches tall, made to look even more gigantic on the parade ground by wearing tall, brass-fronted red mitre caps measuring another eighteen inches high.
For the Soldier King, these three thousand giants were not an eccentric joke; he loved them with the possessive passion another monarch might lavish on a collection of Raphael paintings or thoroughbred horses:
- Lavish Pay and Comforts: The taller a soldier was, the higher his monthly salary and signing bonus. Giants who joined voluntarily were gifted fine brick townhouses in Potsdam, farmland, and plots to brew and sell beer tax-free.
- Painting From Memory: Whenever the King suffered painful attacks of gout and porphyria that kept him awake at night, he calmed his nerves by sitting at an easel and painting oil portraits of his favorite tall grenadiers from memory.
- Never Risked in Real Battle: Because each giant cost a small fortune to acquire, Frederick William I considered the regiment far too precious to ever send into an actual war where a random ten-cent musket ball could ruin his investment. Instead, when the King felt depressed, he had two hundred of his giants march directly through his bedroom with brass drums beating and fifes playing to cheer him up.
Kidnapping Across Europe: The Case of James Kirkland
When voluntary recruitment failed to satisfy the King’s appetite for seven-footers, foreign rulers realized that the fastest way to win a diplomatic treaty with Prussia was to send tall men as gifts. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia regularly shipped dozens of towering Russian peasants to Potsdam in exchange for Prussian amber—including the famous Amber Room—and steel weapons, while the Austrian Emperor, the Ottoman Sultan, and the King of England all curried favor by gifting giants.
Simultaneously, Frederick William I employed a ruthless network of covert recruiting agents (Werber) who roamed the taverns, monasteries, and highways of Ireland, Italy, Poland, and the German states with bags of gold, drugged wine, and ropes to kidnap exceptionally tall blacksmiths, priests, and coachmen. The most famous abduction occurred in 1732 when the Prussian ambassador in London spotted an Irishman named James Kirkland, who stood an astonishing seven feet one inch tall (217 centimeters). Tricking Kirkland with an offer to work for double wages as a footman at the Prussian Embassy in Portsmouth, agents got the giant Irishman aboard a ship, clapped him in irons, and sailed him straight to Potsdam—paying nearly nine thousand thalers in expenses and sparking a diplomatic uproar with Great Britain, though Kirkland eventually became the prized right-flank leader of the King’s personal battalion.
Darwin Before Darwin: TheForced Royal Breeding Program
Observing how farmers bred large stallions with tall mares to produce massive warhorses, Frederick William I—more than a century before Charles Darwin or Gregor Mendel—decided he could stop paying kidnappers if he simply bred his own second generation of giants right inside Potsdam. Whenever a particularly tall woman was spotted anywhere in Prussia—such as a six-foot-plus milkmaid or peasant girl blocking the road—the King ordered her brought to Potsdam and forcibly paired in marriage with one of his seven-foot grenadiers, paying the couple a generous cash dowry and standing personally as godfather at the baptism of their newborn infants.
To the King’s frustration, the breeding experiment was a biological failure. Because many of the tallest soldiers in the regiment owed their extreme height to sporadic pituitary adenomas (acromegalic gigantism) rather than purely heritable polygenic traits, and because nutritional and developmental timelines took twenty years to show results, the children born to the giant couples grew up at normal rates, and many of the towering soldiers suffered from chronic joint pain, cardiovascular weakness, and infertility.
Disbanded on Day One by Frederick the Great
Inside the palace, nobody hated the Potsdam Giants more than the King’s brilliant, flute-playing, French-speaking son and heir, Crown Prince Frederick—later known as Frederick the Great—who viewed his father’s obsession as an absurd waste of money that cost as much per year as eight full combat regiments of regular infantry. When Frederick William I finally died on May thirty-first, 1740—having ordered his beloved giants to march at his funeral wearing black crepe over their tall brass caps—the new twenty-eight-year-old King Frederick II wasted no time. Within weeks of ascending the throne, Frederick disbanded the Potsdam Giants regiment, integrating the healthy men into regular combat units and using the millions of saved thalers to expand the Prussian field army by sixteen new battalions that immediately marched off to conquer Silesia and make Prussia a great European power.
