KING EDWARD VIII  &  MRS SIMPSON

  NAZI SYMPATHIZERS ROYALS KING EDWARD WINDSOR PRINCE OF WALES

MISGUIDED - The ruling classes were particularly prone to persuasions that disregarded human lives, because to an extent taxing the workforce is leaning in that direction anyway. A fair and caring administration is one that respects the rights of every citizen to earn a decent wage for a decent living.

DAILY BEAST JULY 2015 SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET - Britain’s Royal Nazi Cover-Up

Teaching Queen Elizabeth the Nazi salute is nothing compared to what the Duke may have been up to with the Third Reich. No wonder Churchill sent spies to post-war Berlin to find records - and destroy them.

Queen Elizabeth has every right to expect that Bad Uncle Edward, who died in 1972, would remain dead and quiet. But now his ghost blunders back into the light to disturb the golden twilight of her reign.

This wretched man, the Duke of Windsor, and before that King Edward VIII and Prince of Wales (not Prince Charles or Prince William), has left a curse on the House of Windsor. There he is, grinning, as he tutors Elizabeth, aged 7 or 8, and her little sister Margaret in giving the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute, in the film clip released (to much dismay) by Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloid, The Sun.

It should not really be a surprise. The Duke’s own right arm began to twitch early, when he was the Prince of Wales.

In 1935 the German ambassador to London, Leopold von Hoesch, reported to Berlin on conversations he had had with the Prince. The Prince had, he said, been complaining about the behavior of the British government. In talks with Hitler they were not being sympathetic enough to German interests. Hoesch wrote:

“He desired his homeland to remain strong and to command respect, and therefore understood very well that the Reich Government and the German people were inspired by a similar desire. He fully understood that Germany wished to face the other nations squarely, her head high, relying on her strength and conscious that Germany’s word counted as much in the world as that of other nations.”

In January 1936 Edward succeeded his father, George V, as King. He was on the throne for less than a year—in a scandal he chose to abdicate after being told that he would never be allowed to marry his American mistress, Wallis Simpson, because she was a divorcee.

Henceforth the couple, now known as “The Windsors,” were a very public nuisance. And, if up to this point the Duke’s right arm had been held in check only by a suppressive reflex of the kind used by Dr. Strangelove in the Kubrick film, it was no longer tethered.

In October 1937 the couple arrived in Berlin to be warmly greeted by Nazi officials. They had tea with the chief of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Göring, and his wife. Göring told the Duke that he believed that the abdication had been forced on him by people who wanted him off the throne because he was sympathetic to German interests. The Duke was, Göring said, “a man who understood the signs of the times and knew how to interpret them,” and added that the Nazis would like to see him back on the throne.

The culmination of the visit was a meeting with the Fuhrer on his mountaintop at Berchtesgaden. Before this the Duke had been seen responding to enthusiastic crowds with a Nazi salute and he repeated it at Berchtesgaden.

Whatever the Duke thought he was doing in Germany, the Nazis had sized him up very well. He was an empty vessel ready to be given a renewed sense of self-importance by suggestions of a new destiny.

Hitler’s own view was colored by an anachronistic belief that the Brits were in thrall to a combination of the royal family (whose roots were, after all, in German royalty) and the old landed aristocracy. An idea was gaining hold: Once the Nazis conquered mainland Europe, the British would realize the folly of a war they couldn’t win and would capitulate, whereupon the Duke could be restored to the throne as a pliant consul of Berlin. This thought, as absurd as it was, advanced to become a fully developed plot.

As France collapsed under the German onslaught in 1940, the Windsors reluctantly abandoned their mansion in Paris - their chosen place of exile after the abdication - and replete with an entourage of servants carrying many trunks of luggage went first to the south of France and then Madrid.

Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister only a month earlier and was assessing the grim prospects of facing the Nazis alone, was informed that there was a “backwash of Nazi intrigue” centered on the Duke. Churchill decided that the Windsors should be gotten out of Europe as soon as possible.

But they lingered in Madrid, where the American embassy reported to the State Department that the Duke was saying that France had fallen because, unlike Germany, it had failed to reorganize the order of its society. For good measure, the Duchess had added that France had lost “because it was internally diseased.”

The Windsor entourage then moved on to Portugal and to a villa in the resort town of Estoril, west of Lisbon, where the Duchess negotiated with Nazi officials in occupied Paris to send a maid to fetch some her wardrobe that had been left there.

There has always seemed to be a farcical element to the final act of the Nazi scheme for the Duke’s future that unfolded in Estoril. The Germans dispatched a senior intelligence officer, Walter Schellenberg, to engineer the abduction of the Windsors - they were to be taken back to Madrid and held there until Churchill surrendered and then the Duke would become the head of a new puppet monarchy in Great Britain?

In order to unnerve the Windsors the Germans suggested that the British intelligence agents who had now arrived in Estoril to protect the Windsors were, in fact, going to engineer an “accident” in which they would be disposed of because they had become an embarrassment to the British government. Only the last part of that thesis was true.

The German foreign ministry sent a long message to their ambassador in Lisbon to be forwarded through Portuguese friends to the Duke that said, in part: “Basically Germany wants peace with the English people. The Churchill clique stands in the way of this peace… It would be a good thing if the Duke were to keep himself prepared for further developments.”

In the event, the Windsors were finally persuaded to board an American ship and sailed away to the exile that Winston Churchill had dictated for them: The Duke would be Governor of the Bahamas.

I have never really bought the idea that this was all a farce. I realized that the more comical it seems, the less likely it is to be taken seriously. In his memoirs Schellenberg made light of the Nazi operation and suggested that he never thought the Duke would consent to the role Hitler assigned to him. But that was self-serving, intended to make Schellenberg seem less dangerous than he had actually been. Schellenberg was a member of the SS and, within that instrument of terror, also a member of its inner corps, the SD. He did not play games.

As have others who have tried over the years to get to the truth of this saga I found that important parts of the official record are missing. After the end of the war Churchill gave high priority to a team called “the weeders” who were sent to mine German archives in Berlin for anything related to the Windsors, particularly the German accounts of the Duke’s conversation with Hitler in 1937 and other messages that passed between the Duke and various Nazi officials until they reached Portugal.

Churchill’s motive was very clear. The Duke’s brother who had succeeded him as King, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth (who reviled Wallis Simpson) had restored public loyalty to the monarchy by exemplary behavior during the war (nicely evoked in the movie, The King’s Speech.) This was no time to have the monarchy sullied by revelations about a proto-Nazi in the family.

The weeders did a fine job. Of any damning new evidence of treachery there was no trace. I discovered that the Weeder-in-Chief had been none other than Anthony Blunt, whom we now know had, since the outbreak of war (and long afterward), been a Communist mole at the highest levels of British intelligence.

Of course, it is the specific absence of any record of crucial conversations that underlines how important (and damning) they probably were. The smoking gun would be an explicit understanding between the Duke and the Nazis that he understood and was willing to accept two things: his role as a conciliator between a victorious Germany and a British government ready to sue for peace, and his future part as king in that arrangement. We know from the accounts of others that he always seemed to take both these ideas seriously, but neither German nor British archives have a paper trail. There are no transcripts with redactions. There are no transcripts at all, period.

The narrative I have given here is informed by clues found in the diaries of a range of politicians and diplomats that were published well after the event, as well as original research in the Spanish and Portuguese archives.

There is a postscript to this hunt for the missing details. A member of the staff of the Public Record Office in London was very apologetic to my wife, who did much of my research. He explained that any documents disclosing the Duke’s activities in Germany that had survived fell, at the request of the royal family, under what is known as the 100 Year Rule - they could not be disclosed until a hundred years had passed.

He did, however, offer up a morsel that, he said, had just been released. It was a letter written by the Duke to Churchill from the Bahamas in 1941. In London, Churchill was contending with the darkest months of the war, when bombs were raining down on the capital and other cities, when defeat still seemed possible.

The Duke complained that the Duchess was being prevented from making a trip to Miami and New York. She needed to go shopping to refresh her wardrobe and it was causing her distress.

Winston Churchill refused, politely.

The Duke was not an evil man. He was a feeble-minded twit. (The British Prime Minister who handled the abdication, Stanley Baldwin, wrote, “He is an abnormal being, half child…it is as though two or three cells of his brain remained entirely undeveloped. He is not a THINKER…no serious reading: none at all.”) But if history has taught us anything it is that feeble-minded twits can do harm, sometimes lots of harm.

Edward VIII (Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David; 23 June 1894 – 28 May 1972) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of India, from 20 January 1936 until his abdication on 11 December the same year.

Edward was the eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary. He was named Prince of Wales on his sixteenth birthday, nine weeks after his father succeeded as king. As a young man, he served in the British Army during the First World War and undertook several overseas tours on behalf of his father.

Edward became king on his father's death in early 1936. However, he showed impatience with court protocol, and caused concern among politicians by his apparent disregard for established constitutional conventions. Only months into his reign, he caused a constitutional crisis by proposing marriage to Wallis Simpson, an American who had divorced her first husband and was seeking a divorce from her second. The prime ministers of the United Kingdom and the Dominions opposed the marriage, arguing a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands was politically and socially unacceptable as a prospective queen consort. Additionally, such a marriage would have conflicted with Edward's status as the titular head of the Church of England, which at the time disapproved of remarriage after divorce if a former spouse was still alive. Edward knew the British government, led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, would resign if the marriage went ahead, which could have forced a general election and would ruin his status as a politically neutral constitutional monarch. When it became apparent he could not marry Wallis and remain on the throne, Edward abdicated. He was succeeded by his younger brother, George VI. With a reign of 326 days, Edward is one of the shortest-reigning monarchs in British history.

After his abdication, he was created Duke of Windsor. He married Wallis in France on 3 June 1937, after her second divorce became final. Later that year, the couple toured Germany. During the Second World War, he was at first stationed with the British Military Mission to France, but after private accusations he held Nazi sympathies he was appointed Governor of the Bahamas. After the war, Edward spent the rest of his life in retirement in France. Edward and Wallis remained married until his death in 1972.

FILM MAKING  - Just imagine if actors could not wear Nazi uniforms of give the Seig Heil salute when trying to accurately portray historical characters in documentaries of feature films. Prince Harry may only have been having a bit of fun, but any kind of thinking that such a regime as Nazi Germany is acceptable, is not to be encouraged. Clearly, the Prince was only poking fun at the idea, and what lad does not read war comics and have respect for the Desert Fox and their equipment that was in many ways superior. It is therefore some kind of miracle that the war against oppression was won. It is also the reason we must stand firm against any form of tyranny as it comes to our attention.

THE GUARDIAN OCTOBER 4 2013 - Boy dressed as Hitler: are Nazi costumes ever acceptable?  A boy was sent home from a Staffordshire school after his Hitler costume was deemed inappropriate for a second world war fancy-dress day. Did his teachers make the right call?

Poor little William Ghassemi. Ten-year-old William loves history and when his school announced it was having a themed second world war day, he had a bright idea. "I want to be Hitler," he told his mother Davina. "I wasn't sure at first," she told the Sun, "but William said Hitler was kind of the lead character in the whole war and someone should play him."

William was right: no Hitler, no war. Unless you're the sort of dialectical materialist who believes economic conditions drive history and, if they hadn't created Hitler, they would have created someone just like Hitler. The organisers of the history day, however, deemed his outfit "extremely inappropriate" and made him take it off, as well as the moustache his mother had drawn on with eyeliner. The Sun is resolutely on William's side. "The teachers … should be sitting in the corner wearing dunces' caps," said its editorial, which dismissed the staff of Dosthill Primary in Tamworth, Staffordshire, as "politically correct buffoons".

A - Z OF NAZI GERMANY

MAX HASTINGS - The Queen as a young princess is seen in two cine film frames saluting in Nazi fashion but is too young to have been able to form a political opinion. In any event, Article 10 and any applicable laws then pertaining would have meant that even a Queen in waiting is allowed to express herself and mimic what was then more than likely something amusing, much like the goose step might seem to some onlookers and then copied to show others how daft it looks.

ADOLF HITLER HAD A TOP SECRET PLAN TO ESCAPE THE ALLIED IN THE 20TH CENTURY, TO RESURFACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, AMID A MORE ADVANCED TIME AND TECHNOLOGY

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