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

by Andrew Morton

  Following his initial encounter with von Loesch, Thomson fortuitously teamed up with Dr. Ralph Collins of the State Department, who was on a similar mission. Together they tried to find military intelligence officers to advise on the next step. After taking soundings from several senior officers the duo decided to trust von Loesch and allow him to lead them to the hidden microfilm. On Monday, May 14, just five days after the unconditional German surrender, Thomson and Collins found themselves motoring to a large country house twenty-five miles from Mühlhausen. This was the place where the alleged treasure was buried. It was also the temporary quarters of a detachment of the Fifth Armored Division. Once the duo arrived and met up with von Loesch, as a precaution they requested the services of an armed American officer. Following von Loesch’s lead, the unlikely quartet, which now included Captain Albert Folkard, who volunteered to be their bodyguard, made their way along a private track to a steep valley where, the German official assured them, the microfilm was buried.

  In his report Thomson described the moment of discovery:

  We had to descend, rather uncomfortably, a steep ravine banked with pine trees. Our guide halted at a certain spot where he and Captain Folkard with iron bars soon scraped the soil from a waterproof cape covering a large battered metal can. This Captain Folkard brought to the top of the declivity and placed under guard at the mansion.

  Such store was placed on this archival treasure that Colonel Douglas Page, of the Fifth Armored Division, provided an M40 armoured carrier to transport the find back to Marburg. Certainly von Loesch was not exaggerating about the value of the film. On the journey Thomson met with an RAF microfilming unit at Dentine Camp and was able to use their magnifying apparatus to take a first look. It didn’t take long for Thomson to realize that the contents of the microfilm went to the very heart of German foreign policy. As he noted: “They fully correspond to the informant’s description and will undoubtedly supply information of immense value which may not be obtainable elsewhere.”

  Even though von Loesch was as helpful as he could be, he was treated with suspicion by his new masters. “The man may be an opportunist but he quite accepts the situation that he is in our power and to my mind seems quite prepared to be useful to us in the interests of his own future,” noted Thomson. “His Germany is gone forever and he is quite willing to adjust himself to a new state of affairs. I am seeing that he is treated with courtesy and consideration but without tenderness.”

  He proved to be a willing ally as well as a wily negotiator. Less than a month later, on June 12, 1945, he revealed the whereabouts of a large wooden box containing the private films of Dr. Paul Otto Schmidt, official interpreter at the German Foreign Ministry. These films, which were recovered from the grounds of the same country estate near Mühlhausen, showed the records up to late 1944 of meetings between Hitler, von Ribbentrop, and other Nazi leaders as well as politicians from collaborating nations.

  Of immediate interest to the British were the files relating to the English comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, who had been detained as an enemy alien following the invasion of France, allowed to see his wife only after taping five light-hearted broadcasts for the Germans. His controversial actions caused some, including the writer A. A. Milne, to accuse him of being a collaborator. For a time his books were banned by a number of British libraries.

  The Schmidt box and the von Loesch microfilms were easily the most valuable of the many tons of documents now possessed by the Allies. By the time the Schmidt box was uncovered, the von Loesch microfilm was in London and the 9,725 pages in the slow process of being translated and examined. At first the find was treated with a degree of scepticism, officials concerned that it was an elaborate “plant” to embarrass the Allies. So joy was unconfined when Oxford historian Ernest Llewellyn Woodward, who was attached to the Foreign Office, reported at the end of May that the documents were indeed genuine.

  Dr. E. Ralph Perkins of the State Department, who was one of the first to review the content, spoke of a “tale of pirate gold hunting.” Other Foreign Office officials immediately recognized the sensational nature of the contents. “I saw enough to convince me that they are dynamite,” wrote one. “It is obvious that there is red-hot propaganda material in this can of films,” concluded another. This was even before the reports relating to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor made their provocative appearance, throwing all Allied thinking into turmoil.

  The publicity value of the existing documents was obvious enough. “I have seen a red hot letter from Franco to Hitler . . . and there is a lot of dirt on Molotov,” noted Foreign Office official Geoffrey W. Harrison. In the first few heady weeks of discovery, the Allies were eager to exploit the find to convince the world—especially neutral countries—of the justice of the Allied cause and the perfidy of the Nazi regime.

  A note for a Foreign Office meeting on June 19, 1945, to discuss the “finds” of German and Italian documents confirmed both the size of the discovery and the propaganda potential. “We are left with an embarrassingly large quantity of documents (far more than we expected) which throw light on every major aspect of German and Italian policy.” While the author acknowledged the scale of the task, he identified five key foreign policy interests where immediate publication would be of benefit. Besides German-Italian and German-Russian exchanges, and evidence of Vichy collaboration, German, Italian, and Spanish negotiations were singled out for special attention. “We might decide to publish without asking Franco and in order to discredit him.”

  The author even recommended that Britain take the initiative and announce that they held a cache of German and Italian documents and that, together with the Americans, they planned to publish the highlights.

  This conclusion was based on the assumption that the Americans would want to exploit the German records, a surmise that proved to be right on the money. The eager Americans wanted to convince not just neutral countries but their fellow countrymen that America had fought a just war, that the sacrifice in blood and treasure was not in vain. Decades before WikiLeaks had ever been heard of, State Department officials were anxious to use official German Foreign Office documents for American advantage. One unsigned memo that circulated around the State Department about this time summarized the mood:

  The documents are rich in information which, if made public, might exercise considerable influence on the thinking of American citizens on the subject of German occupation policy.

  It is obvious that some of this material must for the time being remain unpublished. This includes material the release of which might embarrass present negotiations with foreign governments, but there is documentary background material available here for an almost limitless number of general topics bound to prove of extreme interest to newspaper and magazine writers, radio commentators, and so forth.

  While the Allies may have differed on the extent of publication for propaganda purposes, where they were united was in using the files to underpin their fundamental war aim—namely, to stop Germany from ever starting another war. This point was stressed in the Talisman plan for the occupation of Germany, which was drafted in August 1944.

  By July the State Department alone had accumulated 750,000 documents and microfilms; a month later that figure had risen enormously to 1,200 tons of files held under joint Anglo-American control inside the American zone. Most documents lay unopened and untranslated. Not so the material supplied by Carl von Loesch.

  This was pirate gold indeed, the investigated documents seen as the archival equivalent of the crown jewels. Among the gems were comparatively full reports of conversations between Hitler and von Ribbentrop and Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka during his visit to Berlin in 1941, at which time the Germans strongly urged that Japan attack British-held Singapore. Also in the archive was ample proof of the close collaboration between Germany and the Spanish dictator, General Franco. For example, one letter from Franco to Hitler dated February 26, 1941, included a pledge of his friendship and the urgent reco
mmendation for the closing of the Strait of Gibraltar.

  However, the most incendiary material—and the most politically controversial—were the records concerning the relationship between the Nazis and their one-time ally, the Soviets. There were notes of conversations between Hitler, von Ribbentrop, and Soviet foreign minister Molotov, as well as documents containing the text of the non-aggression agreements made between Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939. The most contentious information related to the secret supplementary protocol to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact regarding the division of Poland and other territories by these two powers. It was, observed historian Astrid Eckert, “a find perhaps second only to the protocol of the Wannsee Conference [the meeting of Nazi officials that put ‘the final solution’ of the Jewish question into effect] in impact on international politics.” An early indication, too, that the von Loesch files were a Pandora’s box of treasure. With Russia still an ally and part of the four-power division of Germany, the release of these documents would have far-reaching diplomatic consequences.

  It was not until January 1948, when the cooling of relations between the Soviets and the Allies had transitioned to the Cold War, that the State Department published Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941, a book that became an international bestseller and was the first effective blow in an ideological propaganda war. The publication of the secret protocol provoked fury in Russia, where Soviet historians and politicians described the documents as forgeries. This bitter controversy was not resolved until December 24, 1989, when the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies passed a resolution that finally admitted to the existence of the supplementary protocol.

  At the time, though, the discovery of the supplementary protocol came as a profound inconvenience to both the British and American governments. As Thomson, Perkins, and others perused the find, the overriding concern of the Allies was to keep the Russians out of the information loop for as long as possible. However, it was not long before rumours of the “pirate gold” reached British newspapers, in May several reporting that three planeloads of files of the German Foreign Office had been flown to London. At the time, the physical files were still at Marburg Castle, which gave British officials the opportunity to brush aside demands from the Russians, notably the Soviet ambassador Feodor T. Gusev, to see these materials. When the Sunday Chronicle reported on June 24, 1945, that the von Loesch files had been flown to Britain, the cat really was out of the bag. “Germany’s Most Secret Documents Are Safe in Allied Hands” shouted the headline, causing the Foreign Office to launch an inquiry to find the source of the leak.

  Their sensitivity was understandable. Publicity and propaganda purposes aside, the documents were vital for the intelligence service but also as evidence in the forthcoming International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. In June 1945, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor, announced that captured German documents would be used as evidence. At the time, the British thought it appropriate to offer documents to the French and the Norwegian governments in their prosecutions of Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval and the political collaborator Vidkun Quisling. Officials soon realized that this would set off a chain reaction: The courts would ask for the originals, the story of the find would emerge, and the Russians would ask how documents discovered in their zone were in the hands of the British and Americans.

  Just weeks after the discovery of the German Foreign Office files, the British came to the horrifying realization that not just Stalin, Franco, and others would be embarrassed by the documents—but themselves. It was not long before they were limiting their co-operation with the war crimes tribunal, compromising their relations with the Americans and attempting to destroy incriminating files—a criminal action that had put a number of Germans behind bars.

  The first sign of this volte-face came in correspondence relating to the man once considered a possible British prime minister, Sir Oswald Mosley. As leader of the British Union of Fascists, he was interned at the beginning of the war. Captured Italian archives showed that Mosley, who was a leading advocate of a negotiated peace, had been funded by Mussolini’s government. How to deal with Britain’s own Quislings, particularly those from the ruling classes, was the question that now exercised official minds. A top secret note, dated July 21, 1945, from George Middleton of the British embassy in Washington to W. C. Dowling in the State Department, gave a sign of British thinking:

  The question of the publication of these papers naturally raises important issues which will require consideration by the cabinet. It is therefore of great importance to us that there should be no premature leakage. While it is our understanding that there should be no publication of these Italian or German archives pending agreement between the two Governments, we should nevertheless be grateful if particular care could be taken to ensure that there is no possibility of the contents of the documents relating to Sir Oswald Mosley becoming public knowledge.

  Dowling was able to reassure him that the papers had been classified as “secret” and would not be published.

  However, if the activities of high-born Fascists—when Mosley, the son of a baronet, married Diana Mitford in Germany, the 1936 nuptials were attended by Hitler—provoked official demands for concealment and secrecy, what of other, more reputable Establishment figures?

  On July 17, 1945, the brilliant young historian Rohan Butler, an acolyte of Llewellyn Woodward, was spending a hot afternoon at the Foreign Office leafing through translated documents from the German Foreign Office files. On his desk was a slim manila folder containing the translated contents of film B15, the negatives ranging from B002527 to B003018. It was part of the contents of the fabled von Loesch hoard, which had been first photographed on June 13.

  What he read left him shocked, surprised, and somewhat at a loss as to what to do next. The file contained details of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s stay in Spain and Portugal following the collapse of France in 1940. It was not just the fact that the ducal couple were at the centre of an elaborately hare-brained Nazi kidnap plot, but that the former king showed such disloyalty to his country and his family. With laconic understatement the Oxford-educated don’s memo simply stated that Edward’s comments placed him “in a somewhat curious light.”

  As Butler recalled several decades later: “I reacted with surprise. I had no idea of that particular episode. I wrote a short and flat minute rather deliberately. I thought it was perhaps a judicious way of describing what was distinctly unusual material.”

  The jaw-dropping contents of the file concerned the wartime activities of the Duke of Windsor, the German diplomatic documents painting an astonishing portrait of a man who was disaffected with his position, disloyal to his family, and unpatriotic towards his country. Such was his disaffection that his lifelong friend and staunch supporter, war leader Winston Churchill, had threatened him with court-martial if he failed to obey orders and take up his post as the wartime governor of the Bahamas.

  Edward uttered distinctly treacherous sentiments during the brief stay in Madrid and Lisbon in 1940, after he and his wife were forced to leave their mansion in Paris following the invasion of France. During that sojourn many of his unguarded utterances were recorded by German diplomats, Spanish aristocrats, politicians, and others. Then they were duly sent to Berlin and pored over by Hitler and von Ribbentrop.

  Not only did he express himself strongly against Churchill and the war; he was also convinced that if he had stayed on the throne, conflict would have been avoided. Only the continued heavy bombing of British cities, he believed, would bring the United Kingdom to the negotiating table.

  Taken at face value the duke was speaking high treason, giving succour to the enemy when Britain faced its darkest hour of the war. If the German files were to be believed, here was a man who had little faith in his country’s leaders or his own family but fully approved of Hitler and his spurious plans for peace. As John Costello noted: “Such subversive statements would have been unforgivable for
any British citizen. When they were promulgated from the lips of a former King who made no secret of his pro-German sympathies, it was tantamount to treason.”

  Even his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, considers him “indiscreet,” talking to the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong place about the wrong things. “There has been a lot of embroidery and exaggeration along the way but there is no doubt that the Germans genuinely believed that he could be set up as a potential puppet ruler,” Ziegler told Denys Blakeway. “They believed that he was to some extent on their side.”

  Such was the dangerous import of these unguarded private utterances that it gave the Nazi High Command utter faith in a bizarre plot to entice the duke to stay in Spain, where he would wait for the Germans to invade his homeland. Then the man who spent his honeymoon in Austria before the war and visited Germany in October 1937 as Hitler’s honoured guest would return to Britain as the Führer’s puppet king. The Germans even had a code name for the plot—Operation Willi.

  Just three days before Butler began reading about the frenetic merry-go-round of diplomatic telegrams between Lisbon, Madrid, and Berlin linked to the duke, the Norwegian government had asked the Foreign Office for access to captured German Foreign Office documents in order to bolster their prosecution of politician Vidkun Quisling, whose collaboration with the Nazis at the expense of his own country had made his name a byword for treachery. His fervent belief that Germany was a bulwark against Bolshevism and his attempts to broker a peace between the Nazis, Britain, and France in 1939 bore remarkable similarities to the Duke of Windsor’s own sentiments and behaviour. The difference was Norway was conquered and occupied, Quisling doing the political bidding of the nation’s new Nazi masters. Found guilty of war crimes, Quisling was executed by firing squad in October 1945.