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

by Andrew Morton

  While the tale of Operation Willi is spicy enough, many historians have added further seasoning. A common royal condiment is the duke’s cousin Prince Philipp von Hessen who, it has been claimed, met the duke in Lisbon during July 1940 for informal peace talks. It is not such a far-fetched theory; the prince was used by Hitler as a diplomatic go-between, he was linked to Göring’s peace wing of the Nazi hierarchy, was part of the entourage during the ducal visit to Germany in 1937, and like the Duke of Windsor he was in favour of a peaceful settlement.

  After an exhaustive investigation Prince Philipp’s biographer, Professor Jonathan Petropoulos, found no evidence to support any secret royal meeting. But, as he admitted: “That there were no meetings does not mean that Philipp and his cousins did not try to work for a negotiated peace.”

  Further spicing the story was a 1979 article in the London Sunday Times in which Prince Philipp’s twin, Prince Wolfgang, claimed that the Duke of Kent served as an intermediary between Prince Philipp and the Duke of Windsor. Given the icy relations that existed between the royal brothers, this is doubtful. However, the suspicious absence of and denial of access to papers relating to the Duke of Kent in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle has only served to fuel speculation.

  Most piquant is the story stirred into the mix by historian Peter Allen, who claimed that deputy Führer Rudolf Hess flew himself to Portugal for face-to-face peace discussions with the duke on July 28, the day the duke was also seeing the second Spanish emissary. He was accompanied on this mission by the notorious secret service chief Reinhard Heydrich, who acted as Hess’s bodyguard. It was, claims Allen, Hess’s secret visit to Portugal and his negotiations with the duke and an “important” but unnamed British minister that were the catalyst behind Hess’s secret flight in May 194l to Britain, where he hoped to organize peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton. Given the duke’s discussions with the second emissary and the arrival of Monckton on the same day as Rudolf Hess, this theory seems implausible.

  During their voyage, as the Windsors sunbathed on deck, chatted with their fellow passengers, and watched movies in the ship’s theatre, their indefatigable maid, Mademoiselle Moulichon, endeavoured to deliver the duchess’s precious possessions taken from her Paris home. After waiting for days at the Portuguese border, she found herself jailed for her trouble. “Please ask your friends to release Marguerite quickly as maid situation desperate,” telegrammed the duchess to her friend Tiger Bermejillo.

  When the queen later heard about the duke and duchess’s obsession with their possessions—“their pink sheets” as she called them—she compared their self-absorbed behaviour with the resolute courage of “our poor people spending nights in little tin shelters, and then going to work in the morning.”

  Even though they were thousands of miles away from falling bombs, the Windsors were still agitated about their safety. On August 9, as the Battle of Britain began in deadly earnest, the duke, still worried about an assassination attempt, cabled Monckton as soon as they arrived in Bermuda, saying that it was impossible to continue their journey until he gave them the all-clear, which he duly did. As Churchill remarked, Monckton had done a first-class job of dissipating “strange suspicions.”

  Their one-time cheerleader was equally dismissive of the duke and duchess. At a dinner held at Lambeth Palace as the Windsors sailed off into the sunset, Churchill observed: “The Duke of Windsor’s views on the war are such as to render his banishment a wise move.” Accusations of treachery and treason aside, it seems that Churchill had concluded that, based on their recent behaviour in Madrid and Lisbon, the only cause the Duke and Duchess of Windsor truly cared about was themselves.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Shady Royal in a Sunny Place

  Though they were now firmly planted in the tropics, the topic of conversation for the duke and duchess was quintessentially English—the weather. They arrived from Bermuda to the islands’ capital, Nassau, in the unbearable summer heat and humidity to find all their worst nightmares come true. This was St. Helena in a sauna.

  When they managed to cool down after their arrival on August 17, the duchess instantly realized that Government House, their official home, was certainly not fit for any king, even an ex. They moved out while she undertook extensive and expensive renovations, dragging local politicians, kicking and screaming, to pay for a £5,000 (£200,000 or $320,000 today) redecoration. She did not help her cause by frequently flying her hairdresser Antoine in from New York to tend her tresses. When the works were completed, pride of place in the drawing room was given to a full-length portrait of Wallis by Gerald Brockhurst. On her bedroom dressing table was said to be an autographed photograph of von Ribbentrop, deliberately displayed as a “show of loyalty to friends.” With the completion of the works, the duke at last had his “treasures” around him—a rack of fifty pipes; a box made of wood from Nelson’s ship, The Victory; a midshipman’s dirk; and a field marshal’s baton. “Don’t you see I must make a home for him?” the duchess said. He thought she had succeeded.

  Meanwhile, the duke fretted about their properties in France, organizing payment of the remaining staff through the good offices of his friend Herman Rogers who, with Katherine, remained at Lou Viei in Cannes. He described his new life in a letter to his American friend:

  Although my job as Governor luckily keeps me very busy, it is a very narrow and restricted life for both Wallis and myself. The thermometer registered a steady 80 degrees Fahrenheit and upwards for the first six weeks we were here; the temperature is now in the 70s but this is mainly due to a persistent northeast wind which has the worst “mistral” beat as regards it getting on your nerves.

  There is a flat and very uninteresting golf course, very similar to Cagnes; but at least one can exercise yourself sometimes—and you would of course love the swimming.

  Government House was in such a filthy state, almost denuded of furniture and having the appearance more of an institution than an official residence, that we refused to live in it after a week until it was reconditioned. We have been living in two rented houses—and the people here work so slowly that we will be lucky if we get in before Christmas. However, Wallis has contrived to make it quite habitable; in fact the rooms and furniture are really very attractive—but it has been disheartening for her redecorating an official residence when we have just completed our two private houses in France. However . . . c’est la guerre.

  The duke, who had managed to send £1,000 to Rogers, discussed the detailed arrangements to enable him to pay “hungry and faithful” servants in France and have the telephone and electricity, which had been cut off by the municipality because of unpaid bills, reconnected.

  He concluded:

  You can well imagine how desperately faraway from all our interests and possessions we feel but one has to be philosophic these days and remember that there are many others who are in a far worse plight.

  At the same time, the new man in the Bahamas was constantly reminded that those he served felt barely disguised hostility towards himself and his wife. During his stopover in Bermuda he had, to his mortification, discovered a secret telegram from the secretary of state at the Foreign Office on the official etiquette to be observed for those meeting the royal couple.

  Unlike the Nazi hierarchy or the aristocratic Falangists of Spain, no one in the British empire was allowed to curtsey to the duchess or address her as “Your Royal Highness.” She was referred to as “Your Grace.” When they finally arrived in the Bahamas, the caste system continued, the duchess sitting one step below the new governor in the council chamber but one step higher than the normal place reserved for the wife of a governor. It had taken hours of discussion to reach this diplomatic decision.

  The duke was constantly on his mettle, sensitive to any perceived insults to his wife. When the wealthy Canadian Sir Frederick Williams-Taylor gave a speech of welcome to the royal couple before two hundred invited guests at a dinner-dance held at the Emerald Beach club in Nassau, the du
ke had to correct him publicly. During his address Williams-Taylor never once mentioned the duchess. When the duke rose to reply he explained to the audience that in the original approved version of the welcome address the ducal couple were both welcomed, but that their Canadian host had not read the text clearly in the dim light.

  The numerous “petty humiliations” to which the duchess was subject, the “chronic insult” of her status, and the hostility of the court weighed heavily upon the duke. He penned but did not send a long heartfelt letter to Churchill enumerating his complaints. He had a point. However the British Establishment chose to portray him, the duke remained much more than a minor colonial governor. Powerless yet internationally influential, he and the duchess were the social equivalent of Semtex, inert on their own yet highly explosive when mixed with the electric charge of publicity. “Handle with Care” was the watchword for any British—or American—officials dealing with the ducal couple.

  Even in exile the Duke of Windsor was a lightning rod, the talisman for international peace movements; the very mention of his name in conjunction with peace could set church bells ringing in Germany and elsewhere. When he told the governor of Bermuda, Lieutenant General Sir Denis Bernard, “If I had been king there would have been no war,” he was speaking no more than many believed. In the first few months of his tenure as governor, the duke was at the swirling centre of several so-called “peace plots” which, like tropical tornadoes, pulled him hither and thither into a vortex of hope, conjecture, and speculation.

  Some plots were more sinister than others. Almost before he had unpacked his toiletries—or rather his soldier valet had—the duke received a telegram from his Portuguese host, Dr. Silva, the chosen conduit for the Germans to send messages. The telegram, sent on or about August 15 on what became known as “Black Tuesday” during the Battle of Britain, asked if “the moment had arrived.” That is to say, did the duke feel ready to return to Europe to accept the German offer?

  Clearly it hadn’t, or else British intelligence would have been aware of it at the time. As they suspected that Dr. Silva’s bank was funding German secret agents, they were routinely monitoring correspondence sent to and from the bank.

  The Nazis, orchestrated by von Ribbentrop, were also pursuing other avenues to keep alive their dream of winning over the duke. They had, according to a secret report from a Lisbon-based British intelligence agent, approached the duke’s friend, Nazi collaborator Charles Bedaux, and asked him to find out if the duke would become king in the event of a German victory. His conduct, which was described in MI5 deputy director Guy Liddell’s diaries, suggests that Bedaux turned down the German request, though a telegram sent by his wife, Fern, to the Duchess of Windsor reveals that the two couples had been in conversation about the duke’s possible role long before he sailed for the Bahamas.

  In her message Mme. Bedaux referred to a talk they had in 1937, when the duke and duchess visited Germany. The issue discussed was not mentioned but presumably was related to the duke’s possible return to the throne. That same question was, hinted Fern Bedaux in her telegram, “very prominent in the minds of certain powers today,” meaning the Nazis. Her cable continued:

  We have been asked seriously of the possibility, and we, continuing to believe that you and –––– [presumably the Duke of Windsor] are still of the same opinion, have given absolute assurance that it is not only possible but can be counted on. Are we right?

  The ambiguous nature of Fern Bedaux’s telegram was later put in context by spy chief Liddell in his August 24, 1945, diary entry:

  I gather that Censorship obtained during the early days of the war a telegram from Mme Bedaux to the Duchess in the Bahamas which seemed to be of a singularly compromising nature. There were a lot of blanks in this telegram but the sense of it seemed to be that the question either of the Duke’s mediation or of his restoration was discussed at some previous date and Mme Bedaux was anxious to know whether he was now prepared to say yes or no.

  At the time, the telegram was seen by a second pair of eyes, Alec Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, who gave the duke the benefit of the doubt: “The paragraph is certainly capable of the blackest interpretations. But it would be difficult to get a conviction on it.” The Liddell diaries, released only in 2012, give a sharper perspective on this incident. In his August 24, 1945, entry he makes clear that the security forces were monitoring the telegrams sent and received by Bedaux and Dr. Silva. If the Duke of Windsor had indeed replied in the affirmative, the information would have given Churchill a dilemma: whether to charge the ex-king with treason or collaboration.

  He was certainly mixing with murky company. Two years later Charles Bedaux himself was arrested in North Africa by American troops on the direct orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. At the time, Bedaux was preparing to build a pipeline to transport oil across the Sahara desert for the Vichy French government and the Nazis. He spent two years in detention in Miami before dramatically committing suicide in February 1944.

  It was not long after the Germans tried to entice the duke into their fold that he was involved, at least tangentially, in another intriguing and complex British-inspired plot to begin peace negotiations, brokered by the Americans, between Britain and the Axis powers. The tentative talks had their genesis in the power struggle between new prime minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. With the fall of France in May 1940 and the disaster of Dunkirk the following month, Halifax was broadly in favour of a negotiated settlement with Hitler. He oversaw tentative contacts with the Nazis via the papal nuncio in Berne as well as neutral missions in Portugal and Finland. There were hopes that if Washington organized a peace conference this would start a rapid military de-escalation on both sides.

  Churchill set his face against any compromise with the Nazis, telling a tense War Cabinet meeting that “nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.” In any case, based on past behaviour, Hitler was unlikely to honour any agreement. When various peers and MPs sent Churchill a memo in July about a negotiated peace, he replied that this “dangerous” discussion was “an encouragement to a Fifth Column.”

  With Halifax thwarted by the prime minister, it was now too politically dangerous to attempt peace feelers via the representatives of neutral missions in London. The search for settlement went underground and moved abroad, to both Switzerland and the United States. In both countries the senior British diplomats—Ambassadors David Kelly and Lord Lothian respectively—favoured talks with Hitler.

  Lothian, a tall, bespectacled Christian Scientist, had visited Germany in 1935, and his earlier sympathy for the country was well known. Roosevelt, though, was angered by his attitude of “complete despair” in the face of German aggression. “What the British need today is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilization but the continued belief that they can do it,” he told his old Harvard professor Roger B. Merriman.

  Nonetheless, in the early months of the war Roosevelt had sent emissaries to Germany to assess the mood and demands of the Reich leaders. In February 1940 Sumner Welles, under-secretary of state, sailed to Europe on a fact-finding mission while James Mooney, the European head of General Motors, was also given permission by Roosevelt to have informal talks with the Nazi leadership, in a March meeting with Hitler and Göring. The catastrophic events of the summer made that avenue no longer worth exploring, Roosevelt much more comfortable with Churchill’s robust response to Nazi aggression than the appeasement policies pursued by Halifax and Chamberlain.

  It seemed that the door to any peace negotiations was now closed—on Churchill’s direct orders. Others linked to the Halifax cabal still thought there was a chance. Secretly, Lothian’s close friend Sir William Wiseman, the former head of British intelligence in America, began putting out feelers among influential Americans. On September 2, 1940, he met with James Mooney and admitted that he was “groping about for some means o
f initiating an effective peace move.”

  In Mooney he had chosen an odd bedfellow. Though he had been an informal emissary for the president, his reputation was that of a right-wing zealot eager to see the fall of Britain. George Messersmith, now ambassador to Cuba, described Mooney, whom he considered a friend, as “dangerous and destructive,” part of an Irish Catholic group of influential Americans “so blind in their hatred of England that they are prepared to sell out their own country in order to bring England down.”

  There was another side to the businessman who was awarded the Order of the German Eagle in 1938—he was a good friend of the Duke of Windsor. They first met in 1924 when, as Prince of Wales, Edward had ordered two custom-built Buicks, their friendship blossoming on the golf course. That Christmas, Mooney planned to join the duke on a foursome at Cat Cay, an island north of Nassau. They were scheduled to spend several days onboard the Rene, a sleek yacht owned by Mooney’s boss, GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan, another businessman who was pro-Nazi and a financial supporter of the fiercely anti-Semitic Sentinels of the Republic.

  This, then, was the man in whom the peace wing of the British government placed their trust. During their initial discussions, Wiseman emphasized that, in order to be acceptable to the British, any peace moves would have to be initiated by the Nazis. The two men accepted that only the Pope could make the necessary public utterances that would prepare world opinion for a negotiated peace.

  As Wiseman didn’t have any contacts with the Vatican, Mooney arranged for him to meet New York archbishop Francis Spellman. While that meeting came to nothing, Wiseman suggested that Mooney travel to Germany via London under the guise of General Motors business in order to discover the minimum terms necessary for ending the war. Such was the delicacy of the task assigned to Mooney that when he informed Wiseman that he had been invited to play a foursome at golf with the duke over Christmas, Wiseman advised against it, as it would give the Germans the impression that Mooney was too pro-British.