In 1908, the Harden–Eulenburg affair badly damaged Wilhelm's reputation when Wilhelm's and Chamberlain's mutual friend Eulenburg was exposed in the press as a homosexual. Since Eulenburg had been the Emperor's best friend since 1886, the scandal led to much gossip all over the "Reich" about whether Wilhelm and Eulenburg had been more than just best friends. Eulenburg was quite open about being gay when he was in the company of his closest friends, and he and Wilhelm had been the very best of friends for 22 years, leading the British historian John C. G. Röhl to conclude it was very unlikely that Wilhelm was ignorant of Eulenburg's sexual orientation as he claimed after Eulenburg was outed. After Eulenburg was exposed, the Kaiser wrote him a very cold letter saying that he could not stand the company of homosexuals, as such their friendship was now over and he never wanted to see or hear from Eulenburg again. Chamberlain was never as close to Eulenburg as Wilhelm was, and seemed genuinely shocked to learn of the allegations that Eulenburg was gay. The Eulenburg affair played a role in Germany very similar to the Dreyfus affair in France, except that the victim in this case was the prominent anti-Semite Eulenburg. During the scandal, practically the entire "völkisch" movement came out in support of Eulenburg whom they portrayed as an Aryan heterosexual framed by false allegations of homosexuality by the Jews Max Bernstein and Magnus Hirschfeld. The German journalist Theodor Wolff wrote in 1906 about Eulenburg's role as one of Germany's chief anti-Semites: