Of course that begged the question that if the German records were such a “much tainted source,” why were they used so successfully in the Nuremberg trials? And why had historians from France, Britain, and America laboured over them for more than a decade? Why indeed had Churchill, Eisenhower, and others invested so much political and diplomatic capital in trying to censor them?
For good measure, the duke’s lawyer also issued a statement roundly dismissing the reports of the German ambassadors to Spain and Portugal as “part complete fabrications, and in part gross distortions of the truth.”
The duke stated:
While I was in Lisbon certain people, whom I discovered to be Nazi sympathizers, did make definite efforts to persuade me to return to Spain and not to take up my appointment as Governor of the Bahamas. It was even suggested to me that there would be a personal risk to the Duchess and myself if we were to proceed to the Bahamas.
At no time did I ever entertain any thought of complying with such a suggestion, which I treated with the contempt it deserved. At the earliest practicable opportunity the Duchess and I proceeded to the Bahamas, where I took up my appointment as Governor, in which I served for five years.
That he and his wife visited Germany in 1937 and made cosy with Hitler, that he blurted out sensitive intelligence regarding the transportation of German naval shells to an Axis diplomat, that he made discreet overtures to the German enemy with regard to his rented properties in Paris and the Riviera, that he carefully considered the offer made by his long-time friends to sit the war out in a castle in Spain, that he suspected the British of a plot to murder him and his wife, and that he asked Churchill to let him stay on in Portugal and delay sailing to the Bahamas was rather lost in the shuffle.
If anything, the German cables were much less damning than the splenetic exchanges between Churchill and the Duke of Windsor, the prime minister spending precious hours dealing with a petulant princely prima donna who refused to obey orders. If the press and public had been aware that the duke made hysterical demands at this perilous moment, with the Nazi jackboot poised over Britain’s throat, it is doubtful the verdict about his behaviour would have been so benign.
There was, however, a smoking gun concealed in the documents, identified, according to Frances Donaldson, only by the Daily Telegraph newspaper. This was the revelation about the telegram the duke apparently sent from Bermuda to his Portuguese host, Dr. Ricardo Espirito Santo, on August 15, 1940. In a communiqué to Berlin, the German ambassador to Portugal, Hoyningen-Huene, passed on the following information:
The confidant has just received a telegram from the Duke from Bermuda, asking him to send a communication as soon as action was advisable. Should any answer be made?
While it has been suggested that the confidant, Dr. Santo, fabricated the communication, most historians believe that the duke did indeed send the incriminating telegram. It therefore suggests that far from being an innocent victim of Nazi conspiracies, the duke was reopening lines of communication with the enemy.
His biographer Frances Donaldson believes that he should be assigned “comparative” rather than “actual” guilt for this disloyal behaviour, while the duke’s one-time associate and ghost writer Charles Murphy points out that although the couple laughed off the idea of a plot they were “highly interested parties” if not “active accomplices”:
Although there is little doubt that Windsor’s mood was mutinous, and that he said things that no loyal Englishman should, it must be borne in mind that the Nazi sympathizers who listened to him were eager to ingratiate themselves with their masters, whether German or Spanish.
His official biographer, Philip Ziegler, is more benevolent, arguing that he had always remained a patriot and “could not have allowed himself to rule by favour of the Germans over a sullen and resentful people.” While he was indiscreet, defeatist, and irresponsible, as well as “childish and naïve,” he could not, according to Ziegler, be described as hoping for the downfall of his country. In short, he could be condemned for his behaviour, but not convicted.
Historian Michael Bloch, author of the masterly Operation Willi, opts for a more prosaically domestic explanation: The duke was indeed in contact with Dr. Santo, but about the whereabouts of the ducal trunks—particularly the royal linen—which were en route from Paris and the Riviera. His precious possessions rather than peace in Europe were his primary concerns.
His behaviour was part of a pattern, the duke dancing around the fringes of disloyalty and duplicity but never quite committing. Like a flirt in a nightclub, the duke suggested much but delivered very little. In Lisbon and Madrid he teased the Nazis, giving them the come-on signs, but then peeled away once he had them excited, leaving them confused and empty-handed. In London at the beginning of the war he toyed with Beaverbrook’s treasonous notion of becoming a peace candidate and suing for a truce with Germany.
That idea collapsed when the royal exile realized he would have to pay tax if he returned to Britain. Within months of landing in the Bahamas, the royal governor coquettishly suggested that he would support Roosevelt if he advanced a peace proposal and was suspected of teasingly becoming involved, probably by telephone and telegraph, with James Mooney in Sir William Wiseman’s freelance peace plans. His behaviour was totally at variance with the government he then represented.
That said, his pursuit of peace deals by back channels made him little different from half the aristocrats of Europe—including his brother the king and the Duke of Kent. They all uniformly subscribed to the view that another European conflagration so soon after the horrors of World War One was to be avoided at all costs. The duke was, though, more of a passive rather than active conspirator, always looking for others to do the heavy lifting. He was always an ideal figurehead, a rallying point, the charisma of royalty his primary contribution. It is clear from the trajectory of his life that he had little if any political guile or cunning nor the energy or drive to pursue what ambitions, apart from pleasing his wife, he truly had. He made mistakes, he said things he shouldn’t, and met people he should have shunned. The duke was the ultimate loose cannon, cut free from the ties of monarchy but not from the ship of state, he careened around Europe and America causing some alarms but little damage. Ultimately he was a garrulous nuisance rather than a calculating traitor.
During and after the war his opinions remained constant, and he stayed in contact with those viewed with suspicion by the Allies. In August 1941, for example, Ambassador Huene sent a telegram to Berlin regarding a letter sent by the duke to his one-time host Dr. Santo Silva about his interview with American journalist Fulton Oursler:
The intermediary familiar to us from the reports at the time has received a letter from the Duke of Windsor confirming his opinion as recently stated in a published interview that Britain has virtually lost the war already and the USA would be better advised to promote peace, not war.
After the end of World War Two his political views were essentially those of a right-wing aristocrat, lamenting the lost order, sniffy about the very Socialists who were trying, without his knowledge, to save his ducal hide, and terrified of the spread of Communism. He was a man of the people only in the popular imagination. Given his subsequent behaviour, his “something must be done” phrase rings somewhat hollowly down the decades. Gardening, gossip, golf, and pleasing his wife were the mainstays of his life.
When conversation turned to the war, he remained firm in his conviction that Britain should have remained neutral, that a negotiated peace should have been made with Hitler in 1940, thus allowing the Axis powers to take on and destroy the Soviets. Communism rather than National Socialism was always his greatest fear. He never forgot that the Bolsheviks killed his godfather Czar Nicholas II and his family.
When British diplomat Sir John Balfour dined with the duke and his friend, American railroad tycoon Robert R. Young, in Washington shortly after the war, Balfour was struck by their right-wing attitudes. He noted:
Both
of them seemed oblivious to Nazi misdeeds and were at one in thinking that, had Hitler been differently handled, war with Germany might have been avoided in 1939.
Eventually the couple settled permanently in France, where they enjoyed tax exemptions and, as in the Bahamas, duty-free alcohol, tobacco, and other goods thanks to the British embassy. It meant that he was able to entertain in the grand manner, employing at La Croë some twenty-two staff, the equivalent of a midsize embassy. If something was to be done about the world, it was not going to be by him, especially if it endangered his tax status. Money was his mantra and his motivation, his meanness legendary. The suggestion by the king, Alan Lascelles, Churchill, and others that he settle in America and turn his private home into a centre for the betterment of Anglo-American relations collapsed the moment he realized he would have to pay income tax.
In Paris his regular guests included his near neighbours, Sir Oswald and Lady Diana Mosley, who were interned by the British during the war, and other members of the “tarnished nobility” of Germany and elsewhere. His cousin, former Nazi Prince Philipp of Hessen, who was effectively cleared of war crimes after several appeals, as well as members of the Bismarck family, including Countess Mona Bismarck, were all welcome. Lady Mosley told author Charles Higham that the duchess concurred with her views on Nazi Germany, arguing that there would have been no need for a Holocaust had Hitler been allowed to deport Jews to Britain and America. The war, she argued, was the result of the clashing egos of Hitler and Churchill. “If the right people had been in power in England, particularly Lloyd George, there could have been a negotiated peace.”
To that end the duke approved the repressive policies of Cuban dictator President Batista and heartily supported Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who campaigned for president in 1964 on a platform that included the use of tactical nuclear missiles in Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism. He was pleased when United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash, believing that it would hasten the end of an organization that gave such influence to the Soviet Union.
Of course he was entirely sympathetic to Prime Minister Eden’s decision to join with the French and invade the Suez Canal Zone in 1956 following the provocative decision by Egypt’s President Nasser to nationalize the vital passageway.
Before the war he was unemployed, an outcast from his own land. During the war he was treated with much suspicion, a Quisling or Laval in the making, watched warily by both Washington and London. His close friends were arrested or blacklisted for their pro-German views, his wife’s mail was censored, their movements monitored by Hoover’s FBI. After Pearl Harbor, staff on the Combined Chiefs of Staff committee in Washington were warned that the Duke of Windsor was under no circumstances to be allowed to enter the basement room in which the strategic maps and plans were kept.
His wife, thanks to her perceived relationship with von Ribbentrop, was, according to official thinking, only a hair’s breadth away from being a spy. At the palace “that woman” always remained a witch, a sorceress who had cast a malign spell on the king who was never crowned. After the war the duke was officially unemployable, living for the rest of his life in genteel exile, the triangle of New York, Palm Beach, and Paris forming the contours of the couple’s annual round from their home in the French Riviera. By his early fifties, the duke was becoming a somewhat pathetic, disjointed figure. Their long-time friend, Lady Diana Cooper, dined with them in May 1949 and afterwards noted in her diary: “Wallis herself in fine repair. . . . The Duke looked his withered self and never made head or tail of anything I said.”
Everywhere they went, their trio of cairn terriers—later pugs—went with them. They were more than just companions, they were family. “You see we can’t leave the dogs behind; they’re all we have,” Wallis told Lady Halifax.
While it is not conclusively proven that this ultimately isolated and forlorn figure flirted with treason or collaboration, what is undeniable is that the casual remarks of a man without place or position in British society, as reported by the German ambassadors to Portugal and Spain, led to remarkable efforts by the British and even some powerful Americans to have the potentially damning Windsor file destroyed, sequestered, or suppressed.
It was an attempted cover-up that lasted from the moment the file was discovered in a wooded valley in May 1945 to its contentious publication in August 1957. The fact that it was ever published at all was, to misquote Wellington, a “damned close-run thing.” If not for the actions of a couple of cussed American historians, notably Professor David Harris and Dr. Paul Sweet, the world would have heard of Operation Willi only in the unreliable memoirs of easily discredited German diplomats and agents.
As Professor Sweet observes, the episode displays “remarkable deference to the perceived interests of the royal family. From first to last the political leadership exercised a protecting hand, never allowing itself to be seen as under pressure from Buckingham Palace. Far from being an anachronism in the modern secular society of Great Britain today, the institution fulfils a vital, unique and intuitively recognized function.”
Nor was that deference confined to the romantic love of monarchy as expressed by Winston Churchill. Among the most stalwart defenders of the Crown were the Socialist prime minister Clement Attlee and his working-class foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin.
Historian John Wheeler-Bennett exemplifies this contradiction. At the time of Edward VIII’s accession he was gossiping with the best, passing on his considered and well-informed view that Wallis Simpson was being used by von Ribbentrop to gain access to the new king. Yet when the institution of monarchy was threatened, he was prepared to destroy a historical project of vital national importance in order to protect the royal family. As lyricist W. S. Gilbert wrote in The Pirates of Penzance:
We yield at once with humbled mien,
Because, with all our faults, we love our queen.
Nor was this episode simply a British Establishment cover-up. They were supported in the endeavour by America’s most powerful man, Dwight Eisenhower, both as president and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. His view may have displeased his generals, historians, and civil servants—as well as being illegal—but this was the way royalty was seen on both sides of the Atlantic. Royalty, even a royal outcast, was treated as a special case. In those halcyon days, misdemeanours by Hollywood stars and White House incumbents never appeared in the popular prints.
There was, though, a high political and diplomatic price to be paid. It was a special case that chipped away at the special relationship, the Americans coming to view the British as untrustworthy, shifty, and unreliable, the existence of the Windsor file corroding the bonds that had united the two countries through six years of war. A special case that shaped and reshaped British foreign policy, altering the way the government approached central war aims, namely the prosecution of war criminals and the re-education of the German people so that they fully appreciated the causes of the war and why they had lost it.
Would, for example, more war criminals have faced trial at Nuremberg had not the British, because of the discovery of the Windsor file, tightened the rules of access to German Foreign Office files? Certainly Britain’s postwar relations with Germany would have begun on a surer footing had there not been so much prevarication around the return of the German government documents, a decision tainted, once again, by the existence of the Windsor file.
Given the effort expended by the British and the Americans in trying to destroy a vital piece of historical evidence, it is easy to understand why the Blunt-Morshead missions to Germany and Holland were treated by historians and journalists with such suspicion. It is an avenue of history where conspiracy theories are de rigueur. While there is no direct evidence that either man was tasked with specifically locating correspondence between the Duke of Windsor and his German cousins, it is highly likely that the king suggested that they keep their eyes and ears peeled.
Meanwhile, other courtiers were busily squirrel
ling away other correspondence relating to other royal black sheep that could damage the good name and image of the House of Windsor.
Illusion and reality, a balancing act that goes to the heart of monarchy, the king and all his courtiers instinctively working to ensure that the audience never pays attention to the man behind the curtain. The sentiments of Prime Minister Baldwin’s advisor Thomas Jones about Edward VIII during the abdication had the same resonance and relevance in the years after the war: “What a problem the king has been. We invest our rulers with qualities which they do not possess and we connive at the illusion—those of us who know better—because monarchy is an illusion which works. It has ‘pragmatic sanction.’ ”
The Windsor file exposed that man, his faults, his frailties, and his petty indulgences. He may have been blackballed from the club but he was once a member of a very exclusive guild of kings and sovereigns without a throne. To expose him would, by association, have exposed the monarchy, that national crucible of duty, honour, and stability, to possible shame and contumely. The monarchy is the beating heart of the nation, its patriotic soul. Anything other than complete fealty to the flag is a sign of dishonour, a stain on the institution, especially by one of the blood royal. The Duke of Windsor was deemed to have tainted the monarchy by his perceived treachery and disloyalty. At least that was the thinking.
The Windsor file, though, was published and the sky did not fall in, the world continued on its axis, Queen Elizabeth’s reign remained untroubled, and the duke and duchess continued their social round. It was only in death that the duke and duchess were finally readmitted to the royal club, lying side by side in the royal burial ground at Frogmore in the grounds of Windsor Castle. A family feud that cost the country so much in compromised democratic principles finally laid to rest.
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 33