17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up

by Andrew Morton

  Meanwhile the duke and the Führer enjoyed a private fifty-minute discussion. Even though the duke’s German was perfect, translator Paul Schmidt was also present. His recollections are the only independent witness to the nature of their talk. He later recalled: “There was, so far as I could see, nothing whatever to indicate whether the Duke of Windsor really sympathized with the ideology and practices of the Third Reich, as Hitler seemed to assume he did. Apart from some appreciative words for the measures taken in Germany in the field of social welfare the duke did not discuss political questions. He was frank and friendly with Hitler, and displayed the social charm for which he is known throughout the world.”

  When they emerged, Hitler entertained them to tea, Wallis mesmerized by the “great inner force” of the German leader. She was struck by his long, slim musician’s hands, his pasty pallor and his eyes, which burned with a “peculiar fire” rather like Turkish dictator Kemal Atatürk’s, whom they met during the cruise of the Nahlin. When she met his intent gaze she found herself confronted by a mask. She concluded that he was not a man who liked women.

  As Hitler escorted the couple to their car, one of the reporters observed: “the Duchess was visibly impressed with the Führer’s personality, and he apparently indicated that they had become fast friends by giving her an affectionate farewell. Hitler took both their hands in his, saying a long goodbye, after which he stiffened to a rigid Nazi salute that the Duke returned.”

  After they drove away, Hitler said to his interpreter: “The Duchess would have made a good queen.” The next time Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe met Hitler she asked him about the duchess. This time he was non-committal. “Well, I must say she was most ladylike,” he said.

  In conclusion, the New York Times reporter observed that the duke “demonstrated adequately that the Abdication did rob Germany of a firm friend, if not indeed a devoted admirer, on the British throne.”

  Back in Munich, the Windsors spent their final evening at the Harlaching home of Rudolf and Ilse Hess. While there is no extant record of what they discussed, both men were future advocates of a negotiated peace—Hess dramatically flying his private plane to Scotland in May 1941 in the delusional hope that he could meet with first the Duke of Hamilton and then King George VI and begin peace talks.

  After the royal couple departed, both sides declared the visit a “triumph.” Even Winston Churchill, an early opponent of the Nazi regime, was moved to congratulate the duke, writing that the visit had passed off with “distinction and success.”

  Back in Leipzig, Dr. Ley basked in the warm afterglow of a successful tour, telling the German Labour Front that the duke considered the achievements of the Third Reich nothing less than “a miracle.” He quoted the duke as saying: “One can only begin to understand it when one realizes that behind it all is one man and one will.” The man in the street took this, according to the British consul in Leipzig, as an indication of the duke’s “strong pro-Fascist sympathies.” It was also the conclusion drawn by Russian leader Joseph Stalin, who had kept a beady eye on the royal progress. In 1938, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote to British spy Vera Atkins from Moscow saying that Stalin knew all about “British royalty’s warm feelings for the Nazis.”

  The assessment was largely correct, the duke’s equerry, Dudley Forwood, later confirming that both the Windsors had much sympathy and understanding for the Nazi regime, which had, in their eyes, brought order to a country collapsing into chaos during the years of the Weimar government. “Whereas the Duke, Duchess and I had no idea that the Germans were or would be committing mass murder on the Jews, we were none of us averse to Hitler politically. We felt that the Nazi regime was a more appropriate government than the Weimar Republic, which had been extremely socialist.”

  Naïve and gullible or conniving and complicit? It is the question that has haunted the Windsors ever since they stepped off the train in Berlin and began their infamous visit to Hitler’s Germany. The duke would later confess that he was “taken in” by Hitler. Writing in the New York Daily News on December 13, 1966, he stated: “I believed him when he implied that he sought no war with England. I thought that the rest of us could be fence sitters while the Nazis and the Reds slogged it out.”

  Two weeks after he waved goodbye to the duke and duchess and whispered soothing words of peace, Hitler showed his true colours. At a secret conference of his top military advisors he outlined his vision for Germany’s foreign expansion. In what was to become known as the Hossbach Memorandum, he saw the future as a series of small wars of plunder to shore up the German economy before a major conflict with Britain and France between 1941 and 1944. As far as he was concerned, 1939 was much too soon for a general conflagration. Moreover he saw Britain and France as implacable “hate opponents”—Hassgegner—of Germany. While the Hossbach Memorandum has divided historians, the very least that can be said is that Hitler had little if any interest in peace in Europe.

  After Germany, next stop the United States. Bedaux’s proposed five-week visit was to be followed by fact-finding missions to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Sweden, where the Frenchman had lined up a meeting with controversial businessman and Nazi collaborator Axel Wenner-Gren.

  At first the arrangements for the tour of America seemed to be going swimmingly, though it had the feel of a triumphal royal progress rather than a modest private visit to study working conditions, as billed by the duke. Bedaux, who was underwriting trips to Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles, hired a private Pullman train to convey the royal party from coast to coast; General Motors put a fleet of ninety Buicks at their disposal; US government departments offered every facility during their stop-overs; while a Madison Avenue public relations firm, Arthur Kudner, was on hand to deal with the media and publicize the mission.

  The White House invited them to visit; the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, intended to show them her pet housing projects, and NBC were lined up to broadcast the duke making a personal plea for world peace. What could possibly go wrong?

  The British were incandescent. The duke was embarking on a populist movement at a time when the new king was still finding his feet. British ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay bluntly explained to Sumner Welles, under-secretary of state, that this visit was viewed with “vehement indignation” by Buckingham Palace at a time when the new king was “trying to win the affection and confidence of his country’s people, without possessing the popular appeal which the Duke of Windsor possesses.”

  The ambassador became increasingly suspicious of the real nature of the visit. He soon discovered that it was much more than an innocent fact-finding mission about housing and labour conditions; it was an attempt to launch the ex-king as a world ambassador for a peace movement that was effectively a front for Nazi ambitions. The ambassador saw his ploy of cosying up to organized labour as nothing more than an attempt to stage a “semifascist comeback in England.”

  When Lindsay surreptitiously obtained letters written by Bedaux, it confirmed his view that the tour had a quasi-political dimension. In the duke’s proposed manifesto, Bedaux linked working conditions with the wellbeing of the common man, emphasizing that a worldwide peace movement must have as its task “to raise humanity’s level of life’s enjoyment.” He went on to say: “No better leadership for such a movement could be found than in the Duke of Windsor.”

  Bedaux let his guard down further in the unlikely setting of a New York publisher’s office, where he was discussing a selfpenned medieval novel with editor John Hall Wheelock. During the meeting he described Hitler as “a man of genius” and foretold that the whole world was “going Fascist.” As for his friend the Duke of Windsor, Wheelock recalled him saying that he would be “recalled to the throne as a dictator.” Essentially he saw the duke’s leadership of an apolitical worldwide peace movement as little more than a front, an arm of German foreign policy that would ultimately result in the duke regaining a p
owerful role in British governance.

  Once the full itinerary was revealed, even the White House realized the duke had gone too far. The duke and duchess intended to start their tour in Washington on Armistice Day, November 11, attending the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery before making a broadcast to the American nation in which the duke would announce his new international role. In order to avoid a diplomatic incident, Mrs. Roosevelt organized for the royal train, which would have taken them from New York to Washington, to be “delayed” so that at least they would miss the sombre ceremony of commemoration.

  Indeed, a visit to America by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had concerned the president virtually from the day they married. In order to avoid what he termed “diplomatic complications,” he suggested to Herman Rogers that he should entertain the couple at his country house of Crumwold, so that the couple could meet the president informally at Hyde Park next door.

  Alive to British sensibilities, the president now appreciated that the visit by the duke and duchess to America could have the makings of a “second abdication crisis.” What no one foresaw was the eruption of grassroots hostility towards Bedaux and his guests, the duke and duchess. When Bedaux arrived in New York on November 1, 1937 he was met by a hostile media and organized labour unions eager to use the publicity of a royal visit to exact revenge on a man whose time-and-motion systems meant more work for less pay.

  Communist-dominated unions in Wallis’s home town of Baltimore led the charge, criticizing Bedaux’s time-and-motion system and his association with Dr. Robert Ley, the man who had directed the destruction of all German free trade unions. The execution of two Communist labour leaders in Germany days after the Windsors left the country merely fuelled hostility. Labour leader Joseph McCurdy singled out the duchess for particular scorn, saying that when she was a young woman living in the city, she had “not shown the slightest concern nor sympathy for the problems of labour or the poor and needy.” The New York Times weighed in, too, taking a pot shot at the duke. “He has lent himself, unconsciously but easily, to National Socialist propaganda. There can be no doubt that his tour [of Germany] has strengthened the regime’s hold on the working classes.” Many others, ranging from fellow trade union organizations to Jewish societies, weighed in, focusing on Bedaux, his methods, and his Nazi friends.

  Several of his clients cancelled their contracts, a number of his engineers resigned in protest, while his fellow directors, seizing the opportunity to stage their own coup, demanded that he disassociate himself from the company. Stunned by the uproar, he agreed to relinquish control but not ownership.

  The Internal Revenue Service got in on the act, issuing an income tax notice on Bedaux, while a former mistress lodged a legal suit for breach of promise. Such was the hue and cry that Bedaux slunk out of the Plaza hotel in New York through a side door to avoid the waiting press and drove to Montreal in Canada to take a boat out of the country. As far as Bedaux was concerned it was a government-inspired conspiracy, and he blamed Mrs. Roosevelt for stirring up the labour unions against him.

  Meanwhile the Windsors, their trunks packed, waited in Paris for Bedaux to green-light the visit, their stateroom on the Bremen—Churchill chided them for choosing a German liner rather than a French vessel—ready and paid for. Instead they received increasingly hysterical telegrams from the beleaguered businessman urging them to cancel the visit. The duke contacted British ambassadors in Paris and Washington and the American ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, for advice on how to proceed. Only Bullitt voiced his support. The duke, realizing that the paymaster for the visit was hors de combat, decided to postpone the planned tour, announcing that the ducal couple would at an unspecified date go on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet Union to balance the visit to Germany.

  While President Roosevelt sent the duke a conciliatory note hoping that the visit would soon take place, in Britain the ducal farrago was greeted with undisguised glee by the ruling class. Even his supporter Lord Beaverbrook advised him to “quit public life.” As for his many enemies, the Earl of Crawford reflected the views of many when he wrote:

  He had put himself hopelessly in the wrong by starting his visit with a preliminary tour in Germany where he was of course photographed fraternizing with the Nazi, the Anti-Trade Unionist and the Jewbaiter. Poor little man. He has no sense of his own and no friends with any sense to advise him. I hope this will give him a sharp and salutary lesson.

  The duke duly retired from the fray, blaming the American media for spoiling what Wallis described as a “lovely innocent trip.” Before he and the duchess set about restoring their rented home in the South of France, the duke left the British ruling class an unwelcome Christmas present revealing where his loyalties lay. In December 1937 he gave an interview to the left-leaning Daily Herald, stating that if the Labour Party were ever in a position to offer it, he would be prepared to accept the presidency of the English Republic. The incendiary story, which for some reason was never published, was passed on to Sir Eric Phipps, now the British ambassador in Paris, who in turn informed Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and thence the prime minister.

  With that, the duke and duchess busied themselves shopping for designer clothes, jewelry, and furniture in Paris, leaving the possible impact of their proposed visits to America, Italy, Sweden, and Russia as one of the delicious “what ifs” of history. Even if his various peace missions had gone ahead, it is doubtful they would have made the slightest difference to Hitler’s timetable of conquest. By March 1938 the government of Austria, the country the duke had chosen for his honeymoon, had allowed German troops to march into Vienna as part of the Anschluss or annexation.

  Resource-rich Czechoslovakia was the next country on the German leader’s shopping list, and when Prime Minister Chamberlain made clear that Britain would not risk war to defend Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity—“a faraway country of whom we know nothing”—it was only a matter of time before Hitler acted. The infamous Munich Agreement of September 1938 conceded the German-populated Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany, though it quickly became apparent that the piece of paper Chamberlain waved when he arrived back in Britain and his hollow boast that he had secured “peace in our time” had done nothing to quench Hitler’s thirst for conquest. In March 1939 German troops marched into Prague and Hitler declared that Czechoslovakia no longer existed as a country. There was dismay in London, delirium in Berlin as the German people celebrated their nation’s inexorable expansion without the cost of a single German life.

  As the international scene darkened, the duke and duchess enjoyed the blue skies of the French Riviera, focusing purely on matters domestic. The news may have been bleak, the possibility of peace retreating by the day, but for the duke and duchess it was perhaps one of their happiest times. For months they energetically remodeled and restored Château de la Croë, the twelve-acre property beside the Mediterranean they now called home. Complete with gold-plated bath taps, twelve bedrooms, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and footmen in the red-and-gold livery of the British royal family, it was a fitting place for an ex-king to hang up his crown.

  A convoy of vans brought heirlooms that were stored at Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle outside London. There were dozens of cases of fine wines and liquor, chests of silver and French linens, paintings and objets wrapped in canvas, some of which were laid out on the lawn for royal inspection, the duke letting out excited cries “like a small boy at Christmas” when he spotted a half-remembered treasure.

  Largely out of the public eye, they celebrated their first anniversary as a married couple with a cruise along the Amalfi coastline onboard the luxury yacht Gulzar with their friends Herman and Katherine Rogers. The smiles and body language of the newlyweds were in complete contrast to the tension and strain of the infamous Nahlin cruise of 1936 when the king was wracked with torment, contemplating abdication so that he could secure the hand of the then married Mrs. Simpson. (The Gulzar had a more heroic
future: Two years later, the 202-ton yacht would save forty-seven exhausted soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk before being sunk by German air raids in Dover harbour in 1940.)

  During that voyage he had to hide or disguise his affections even when onboard the yacht. This time the duke and duchess were relaxed and publicly affectionate with one another. Herman Rogers, his trusty cine camera at the ready, filmed the couple laughing and joking while they admired the Leaning Tower of Pisa. As they wandered through the ruins of Pompeii they were clearly at ease with one another, as was Wallis when she entertained the elegant Princess Maria of Piedmont, who came for lunch onboard. The duke, a cigarette or pipe never far away, even tried his hand at a concertina as he sat on deck. Fit, tanned, and frequently bare-chested, the duke looked like a man very much at peace with himself.

  One incident filmed by Rogers during the holiday perfectly captures the ambivalence of the duke’s position and his political affiliations. As the couple boarded the Gulzar after a day spent sightseeing on the island of Ischia, they were watched by a crowd of well-wishers. The duke turned to the throng and grabbed his wife’s forearm, forcing her into a brief but reluctant salute before waving to the crowd. At first glance it seems as though the duke was encouraging his wife to acknowledge the watching throng. A second look reveals a large painted slogan on the quayside wall where the yacht was moored. It reads in Italian: “Europe will be Fascist.” Was the duke forcing his wife to salute the crowd or to recognize the sentiments of the huge black sign? It remains an intriguing if unanswered question.