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

by Andrew Morton

  Once the implications of the duke’s utterances had leap-frogged up the chain of command—first to the Foreign Office, then Downing Street, and finally Buckingham Palace—it provoked a radical rethink about how to use the captured German Foreign Office documents. From being gung-ho about using these documents to discredit Allied enemies, the British rapidly put on the policy brakes.

  This policy rethink had consequences not just for the propaganda uses of the German Foreign Office records themselves but also for the use of documents for the International Military Tribunal and the historical record itself. Powerful voices in Britain and some in America now urged the complete destruction of German Foreign Office documents as they related to the duke.

  The man who came close to destroying the sacred compact between the palace and the people as a result of his abdication in 1936 now stained and strained the so-called special relationship between Britain and America, pitting civil servant against civil servant, politician against politician, and historian against historian.

  It could be argued that two events firmly rooted in Britain’s class system, namely the tug-of-war over the Windsor file and the belated discovery of the Cambridge spy ring, radically corroded the hitherto close working relationship between the two Allies.

  Not only did the contents of that slim manila folder provoke one of the biggest attempted cover-ups in history, involving King George VI, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and General Dwight Eisenhower, but it also exposed the essential cultural and political divide between the two countries. It was soon apparent that while a belief in openness was in the American DNA, the British instinctively reached for the blue marker pen to censor and delete. Secrecy was their default position, and when mixed with reflex deference towards the House of Windsor it created a potent and on occasion explosive cocktail.

  During this time, the Duke of Windsor was a man effectively exiled from his homeland and consistently denied any official position. He had resigned in March 1945 from his post as governor of the Bahamas and was currently staying at a suite in the Waldorf Towers in New York, the duke and duchess blithely unaware of the consternation they were causing on both sides of the Atlantic. Their focus was on cultivating New York society, in particular the friendship of their next-door neighbours, songwriter Cole Porter and his wife, Linda.

  It is little wonder, then, that the Americans were nonplussed by the British behaviour, baffled that their allies would expend so much diplomatic and political capital on a man with no discernible official future. For the next twelve years—more than twice the length of World War Two—the British fought a tenacious and highly effective diplomatic and political rearguard action to prevent the Duke of Windsor’s unguarded and embarrassing words from reaching the wider world. “No other group of documents was pursued with so much determination and energy by the Foreign Office,” observes Astrid Eckert. “The British obsession with the Windsor file and the demand that it be destroyed undermined the trust of the Americans directly involved with the Auswärtiges Amt records. The conduct of the British in this matter was another impediment to co-operation.”

  By a curious paradox of history, the most resolute opponent of publication was wartime leader Winston Churchill, who was ousted from power following the Labour Party’s election landslide in July 1945. He firmly and consistently urged that the Windsor file be consigned to the dustbin of history. Churchill was no stranger to the suppression of publications of record: In 1943 he had been able to successfully persuade President Roosevelt to stop the ongoing publication of the special series on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States.

  Yet throughout the period, not only was he granted privileged access to secret official documents for his majestic series of books on the Second World War (he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for the work in 1953) but his personal relationship with the Duke of Windsor, whom he had known and supported for most of his life, was at a low ebb precisely because of the Duke’s behaviour during the conflict.

  Such was his instinctive loyalty to the institution of monarchy that just a day after being shown details of the file by Prime Minister Clement Attlee on August 25, 1945, he wrote back: “I earnestly trust it may be possible to destroy all traces of these German intrigues.”

  The new prime minister was equally anxious that the documents never see light of day. He considered they had “little or no credence” and “might do the greatest possible harm.” After consultations with his Cabinet colleagues, the consensus was for destruction. While technically the duke may not legally have committed treason, at the court of public opinion he may well have been found guilty—with dire consequences for the Crown.

  Attlee’s opinion was doubtless reinforced by his first visit to Balmoral in the late summer of 1945. There he spent the traditional “prime minister’s weekend” as a guest of George VI and Queen Elizabeth. During strolls across the heather, the Duke of Windsor was the central topic of conversation. The king was pleased with Attlee’s attitude towards his brother. He told Queen Mary that the prime minister “agrees with me that he cannot live here permanently owing to his wife and he is not prepared to offer D [David] a job here or anywhere.”

  The king immediately appreciated the potential for the Windsor file to compromise not just his elder brother but the family as a whole. At the time, no one knew for certain either at the State Department, the Foreign Office, or for that matter Buckingham Palace what further embarrassments concerning the duke, his American wife, or other members of the royal family would be revealed in the German or Italian Foreign Office records. After all, the duke had visited Germany in 1937 and famously spent nearly an hour in private conversation with Hitler at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Where was the official record of that interchange now lurking? There was much more. Before the war, Edward had spent time with his German cousin Prince Philipp of Hessen, now on trial for his life over his intimate association with Hitler and the Nazi Party. It had not escaped the palace’s notice that there were high-grade rumours swirling around suggesting that in the early months of the war the Duke of Windsor had secretly met the now disgraced Prince Philipp in an effort to secure a negotiated settlement.

  Much closer to home, George VI himself was also party to the informal but palace-sanctioned diplomatic activities of his younger brother George, Duke of Kent, who had also met with his now toxic cousin, Prince Philipp. If those documents were found, they, too, could prove an embarrassment.

  With appeasement a wholly discredited policy and the horrific contours of the Nazi regime daily becoming clearer, it was not just the Duke of Windsor who would be embarrassed by the release of German and Italian Foreign Office documents but the entire royal family. As Sarah Bradford, George VI’s biographer, observes: “From the king’s point of view, the first sifting of the documents seems to have been highly embarrassing and necessitated urgent action.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sovereigns, Secrets, and Spies

  The summer of 1945 saw a concerted British blitzkrieg to obliterate the Windsor file. Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and Buckingham Palace strained every sinew, pulled every string, called every old boy in the network to wipe the toxic file from the face of history. Moreover, King George VI set in train a series of secret missions to remove diaries, documents, jewelry, and other important royal artefacts from the castles, châteaux, and Schlösser of recently liberated mainland Europe. Many historians and commentators believe that this operation was put in place to ensure no incriminating evidence regarding the duke, his American-born wife, and other members of the royal family could ever be viewed by prying eyes. It was not just the antics of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that worried the king. There were other royals, too, whose private behaviour the House of Windsor was anxious to stop becoming a public embarrassment. As Sarah Bradford explains: “The king was very concerned about the image of the monarchy. He took several steps to ensure that
the crown would not encounter hostility or be unnecessarily damaged.”

  On August 3, 1945, the king sent two courtiers on a highly sensitive mission onboard a military plane to Germany. One was Sir Owen Morshead, a much decorated war hero who served the king and his father, George V, with distinction as royal librarian. The other was Anthony Blunt, a homosexual intellectual and art historian who once shocked the queen when he told her that he was an atheist. Blunt, who had only recently accepted the position of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, was a major in British counter-intelligence, MI5, as well as a Soviet spy who had been feeding secrets to the Soviets since 1937.

  Their stated task was to recover the historic and lengthy correspondence between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal who married Frederick III of Prussia in 1858, became the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II and, in 1888, Empress Frederick of Germany. The four thousand or so missives, known as the “Vicky letters,” were currently housed in Schloss Friedrichshof, a few miles outside Frankfurt, which was the main residence of the king’s cousins, the von Hessen family. Given the widespread looting of property by Allied troops and the fact that the castle was now an American officers’ mess, it was felt prudent to recover the letters, which were the property of the Hessen family, and bring them to Windsor Castle for safekeeping. Several weeks before the duo set off, the king’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, had written to “My Dear Jacob,” presumably Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacob, military assistant to the Cabinet, on July 25, requesting that General Eisenhower provide Blunt and Morshead every facility, including transport and accommodation, to complete the assignment.

  The King understands that there are in the Schloss a number of the private papers, diaries etc. of the Empress Frederick which, besides being of considerable historical importance are naturally of great interest to the Royal Family; it is essential that these papers should not fall in to the wrong hands.

  The task required some delicacy, as the current head of the house of Hessen—the landgrave—was Prince Philipp, then ranked number 53 among the most-wanted Nazis and under guard at an American-run interrogation centre. Even as Blunt and Morshead boarded their plane, he was being vigorously questioned about his role in bringing Hitler to power as well as his personal relations with Mussolini.

  The two men were an unlikely double act; Morshead, some fourteen years older than his colleague, had trained to be an engineer before the First World War intervened. During his service on the French and Italian fronts he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross and was mentioned in dispatches five times. After the war he took a degree in modern languages at Cambridge before switching to a career as a librarian, becoming the royal librarian in 1926, the same year that he married his wife, Pacquita. Friendly, outgoing, and a noted conversationalist with a fund of anecdotes, he became a genuine friend of George V and Queen Mary.

  Such was his position of trust inside the Royal Household that when the Tower of London, home to the crown jewels, suffered a bombing attack in 1940, George VI consulted him about how best to safeguard the priceless gems. The jewels were moved from the Tower to Windsor Castle, where the king and his most trusted courtier borrowed pliers and other workmen’s tools and set to work wrenching diamonds, rubies, and other precious gems, including the fabled Koh-i-noor diamond, from their settings. They placed the gems in hatboxes and hid them in the basement of the castle, the two men vowing that, if the Germans landed, they would hide the jewelry in a tin box and sink it in one of the ponds surrounding the castle. As Sir Owen recalled: “In the event of one of us disappearing, a record of these facts was to be kept in a safe place. During the entire war I kept this secret.”

  Morshead had first encountered Blunt as a young art historian in 1932, but it wasn’t until midway through the war that they became friends, after he asked Blunt to catalogue the Old Master drawings held by the palace. The tall, aquiline, rather patrician Blunt visited Morshead’s Berkshire home where, to the surprise of his circle, he enjoyed playing surrogate uncle to Morshead’s three children. Most surprising, though, was his acceptance of the position of surveyor of the king’s pictures in April 1945 after the resignation of the incumbent, Kenneth Clark. “We all thought it was a joke for a communist to become a courtier,” recalled his friend, librarian Lillian Gurry.

  Not only was he compromising his political principles to work in the world’s largest privately-held art collection, but the haughty young aesthete and connoisseur was entering a world where the middlebrow and middle-of-the-road were the norm. George V thought J. M. W. Turner, one of the finest English artists, was “mad,” and the king once attacked a Cézanne with his cane. His son George VI was little better. When artist John Piper was commissioned by the queen to paint a series of watercolours of Windsor Castle in 1942 during the darkest days of the war, the king’s comment on the paintings, which showed a delicately tinted stone castle drawn against a brooding, forbidding sky, was revealing: “You have been unfortunate with the weather, haven’t you, Mr. Piper.” He later confessed to Blunt that he never knew if the name on the bottom of a portrait was that of the artist or the sitter.

  While there has been much speculation about Blunt and his role inside the palace, what seems clear is that his decision to accept the unpaid post was not suggested by his Soviet handlers. Former Soviet ambassador to Britain Viktor Popov, who wrote a profile of Blunt that was published in Russian in 2005 and was based on his exclusive access to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and to one of Blunt’s Soviet “minders,” confirms that the first the KGB knew about the appointment was an announcement in the Daily Telegraph.

  Blunt’s complex life as a Soviet agent, an art expert, and a royal knight has inevitably added considerable spice not only to his work inside Buckingham Palace but also to the 1945 mission to Friedrichshof Castle in the town of Kronberg. In his biography of Blunt, Popov suggests that Blunt did relay to the Russians the contents of conversations he had had with the king and his courtiers as well as with Cabinet ministers. While he was working at the palace, Blunt, according to Popov, even recruited two more “influential” Soviet informers. Tantalizingly, they are not named, nor does he say if they worked inside or outside the palace. Blunt’s British biographer Miranda Carter thinks it “unlikely” that he would have exerted himself to recruit fresh agents, as he left MI5 shortly after taking up the palace post and was generally exhausted by his efforts during the war.

  However, according to Popov’s account, translated for the first time for this book, Blunt’s minder is certain that Blunt was still passing on secrets. He stated:

  Blunt’s minder not only confirmed my idea that Blunt continued his active work [for Soviet intelligence] while in the palace but added: “Blunt was getting a lot of information from his conversations with Cabinet ministers and the queen’s personal secretary. I suspect that when he had to quit British counter-intelligence, ‘our people’ agreed, thinking that getting into the king’s retinue would give him access to new sources of information.”

  The minder also stressed that in his new position Blunt managed to recruit two very influential informers.

  Like Blunt’s career, the continuing ambiguity and suspicion surrounding the true purpose of the royal mission to Germany in 1945 came into sharp relief in 1964 when the urbane courtier was exposed by fellow traveller Michael Straight as a member of the Cambridge spy ring. It was not until 1979 that his double life as traitor and royal knight was publicly revealed by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in a statement in the House of Commons.

  Even after he was unmasked, Sir Anthony remained tight-lipped about revealing any details of his mission to Schloss Friedrichshof. Author Peter Wright, who wrote the dramatic exposé Spycatcher, was the MI5 officer tasked with questioning and debriefing Blunt. At one stage he asked him about his visit to Germany. “At this point Blunt immediately became very aggressive, and said nastily: ‘Now this isn’t on. You know you’re not supposed to ask
me that!’” His comment implied that a deal had been made beforehand, shielding the spy from inquiries related to his royal duties. This was underlined, according to Wright, by the queen’s private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, who told him before he began questioning the traitor: “You may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace—a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to national security.” Reflecting on his many weeks spent interrogating Blunt, Wright admitted that he never did learn the secret of Blunt’s mission to Germany.

  This intriguing and unresolved episode, particularly Adeane’s dour warning, has focused historians on the ulterior motive that may have underpinned the mission to collect the Vicky letters, namely that Blunt and Morshead were sent by the king to recover damning correspondence between the Duke of Windsor and Prince Philipp and other Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself.

  Roland Perry, Michael Straight’s biographer, reflects this perspective:

  The real assignment was to find letters and memoranda of conversations by the monarch’s brother, the Duke of Windsor, with Hitler and top Nazis. Blunt and Morshead were to search for transcripts of telephone calls made by the Duke of Windsor during his visit to Germany in October 1937. Of particular concern was the October 22, 1937, meeting . . . with Hitler. . . . Better that they did not end up in American hands, especially the press.

  As for the details of the mission itself, these are wreathed in drama and deceit. First there is the jaunty account written by one of the protagonists, Sir Owen Morshead, which is lodged in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

  In his version, he explains that he was sent on the mission because he was known to the Hessen family. Blunt came along for his “agreeable companionship,” his excellent German, and because, as an intelligence officer, he had to undertake military business in the Frankfurt region. As they needed the permission of the seventy-three-year-old Landgravine Margarethe to remove the papers, it was felt that, as she had lost three sons in two world wars and felt a “rancorous hatred” towards Britain, the presence of an English officer might scupper the deal. Blunt kept a low profile, helping Morshead locate the letters and various signed books in the castle library while he made a cursory inventory of the important paintings.