By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Hitler's Aristocrats

King Edward VIII, subsequent Duke of Windsor, told his friend Diana Mosley, the wife of the British Fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, that ‘every drop of blood in my veins is German’ was initially influenced by his family members among the German aristocracy, which also led to Hitler's idea of an Anglo-German collaboration.

Contrary to the conventional history of a country united in opposition to Hitler, right-wing British MPs, Peers, and senior figures in the military clandestinely worked – individually and collectively – to hasten a German victory and to supplant the elected British Government with a pro-Nazi puppet regime which if up to Hitler would be a re-instated King Edward VIII. 

Creating some furor in July 2015 was:

The current Queen Elisabeth, then a seven-year-old princess as pictured, gave a Nazi salute in 1933.

Below King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor with Nazi salute:

Below is the son of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, Prince August Wilhelm, in Nazi uniform

 

In 2017 a subject that briefly drew the general public's attention was the sixth episode of The Crown’s second season titled Vergangenheit, named for the German word for past. The creator of the series and its writer, Peter Morgan, is a skilled romancer of events and characters. But in this impeccably staged pageant of the life and testing times of the House of Windsor, there was one piece of air-brushing that needed more attention than it had received. As we shall see, the history of this era was not only one of appeasement but also one of active collaboration that demonstrated how far the aristocratic ruling class would go to protect their position.

It concerned the role of the family’s lurking albatross, the former Prince of Wales, King Edward VIII, and subsequent Duke of Windsor. The story of the love affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, and his abdication, has provoked endless fascination. However, the full story of their links with the German aristocracy and Hitler has remained untold.

The British royal family’s German origins, the Battenbergs changed their name to Windsor in 1914, and the upstairs/downstairs of British society during this time, divided between a small and insular aristocratic elite and their subjects, is well-trodden territory. However, the implications of this class-based society and the threats posed to British democracy have been largely overlooked. There were many more supporters of Hitler among this small ruling elite than previously thought, which was actively covered up.

Where today, documents in the Chatsworth House and the Royal Archives are essentially closed for researchers, one of the ways around that is to peruse the notebooks of Anthony Blunt when the Russian intelligence services recruited him and later recruited by MI5. He is thought to have traveled to Germany in 1945 to retrieve sensitive letters between the Duke of Windsor and Adolf Hitler. His role in sparing the royals from humiliation is said to have endeared him to the Windsors, and he was given the respected title of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.

Edward VIII became King of England after his father's death, George V. He ruled for less than a year, abdicating the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée (nazi spy). The Church of England, led by the monarch, did not allow divorces at the time. Therefore, not knowing she was working for had a choice: love or the crown. He chose to marry Wallis Simpson.

We know that King Edward VIII, subsequent Duke of Windsor, was initially influenced by his family members among the German aristocracy during the Nazi period, which also led to Hitler's idea of an Anglo-German collaboration.

Early on, Sir Anthony Rumbold, whose father was ambassador to Germany from 1928 to 1933, tried to alert the British government about the rise of groups like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) that claimed to have some 50,000 members in 1934.1 While Mosley’s BUF was noisy and sometimes even violent, the undercurrents of British Fascism were more widespread and nefarious, infiltrated by Hitler at the highest echelons of British society. Hitler actively pursued an effective and largely overlooked backdoor foreign policy with a less traditional spin. 

Suspicious of his Foreign Ministry, Hitler recruited German aristocrats with close family ties across Europe. After the destruction of the First World War, the royal families of Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Romania, and Germany were all looking to seize a more visible political role in their respective countries. Hitler understood early on the strength of this transnational elite, united and emboldened by a fear of Communism and desperate to avoid the same violent end as their cousins, the Russian czar, and his family. As Queen Marie of Romania wistfully remarked, “Fascism, although also a tyranny, leaves scope for progress, beauty, art, literature, home, and social life, manners, cleanliness, whilst Bolshevism is the leveling of everything.” In the case of the British aristocracy, fears of Communism were compounded by the first tremors of the unraveling of the British Empire and their place at its vaulted helm.

By 1938, as German aggression in the Sudetenland became widely anticipated, Chamberlain, known for his Appeasement towards Hitler, spent a late March weekend at Cliveden House. Their visitors were also referred to as the Cliveden Set. In between games of charades, the decision was made to allow Germany to annex Czechoslovakia, a region of little strategic importance to Britain and, therefore, an event not worthy of starting a second world war.

In London, as we have seen, other hostesses played high-profile roles in the pro-German circles. One was Lady Londonderry, wife of the Marquess of Londonderry, holder since 1935 the office of Lord Privy Seal, and another was Lady (Emerald) Cunard, another American-born Englishwoman. Lady Cunard, the widow of Sir Bache Cunard, maintained a literary and musical salon and was known as 'the Queen of Covent Garden. In 1935 she was enthusiastic not only for Hitler but also for Ambassador Ribbentrop, and it was said that she, through Wallis Simpson, influenced the Prince of Wales to favor Germany. At the instigation of Lady Cunard, the conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, gave a concert in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, which Hitler attended. In 1936 Lord and Lady Londonderry visited Hitler; in February 1937, she described Hitler as the symbol of the new Germany, as its creator and a born leader, a captivating personality, and a man who possessed the greatness 'to act in a perfectly normal way.' She was convinced he was a guarantor of peace and friendship with the British. He had preserved Germany from communism, and he alone “could be relied upon to save Europe.”2

In April 1941, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor set sail on the SS Berkshire from Nassau in the Bahamas to Florida. The former British king and his new wife took one of the last regularly scheduled trips between Nassau and the US mainland before the ship was requisitioned for US government use during the war. Ostensibly, the purpose of the trip was a dentist appointment for Wallis.

What emerges from this six-day trip, meticulously surveilled mainly through J. Edgar Hoover at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt, reveals the concerns the Americans and the British shared about the duke and duchess’s complicity with the Nazi high command. 

A deputy to the duke in the Bahamas claimed that the duke was afraid to travel to Florida because he believed that he would be kidnapped by the Germans and traded for Rudolf Hess, a leading member of the Nazi Party, who had landed in Scotland in 1941 with the intent to make a deal with members of the British government who sympathized with the Nazi regime to avoid a war between the two countries.

The couple had arrived in the Bahamas on August 18, 1940, spirited away on orders from Churchill from Nazi-controlled Madrid and Lisbon, where they were lingering after Wallis grew “bored” with the South of France. According to Nazi war plans, former ambassador to London and now foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had been plotting to reinstall Edward on the British throne as a Nazi puppet, with Wallis as his queen. This end would be accomplished by capitalizing on the Windsors’ established sympathy for both Hitler and the Nazi regime. 

Hitler had long sought an alliance with the British monarchy through a union between the kings of England and the emperors of Germany. Earlier, he had promoted the idea of a marriage between the Prince of Wales and Princess Friedericke, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Duke Ernst August of Brunswick and Duchess Victoria Louise. The Duchess was horrified by the idea of her young daughter marrying Edward, as she had been rumored to be his potential wife. 

As a choice for a wife, Wallis Simpson was equally unappealing to the British royal family. Already twice married and American-born, Wallis Simpson met Edward in 1932. She and her husband, Ernest Simpson, were invited to join a shooting weekend at the Leicestershire home of Viscountess Thelma Furness and her husband. Simpson’s financial pressures had already contributed to Wallis’s roving eye. Soon after the weekend party, she invited the future king to dinner at the Marylebone flat on George Street, 5 Bryanston Court, that she shared with her husband. Wallis was a sought-after dinner party hostess, her table a destination where some of the most influential names in British society and right-wing politics, like Oswald Mosley, were frequent guests. That January evening, the prince stayed until 4:00 A.M. as the conversation drew him into a discussion of new ideas that were bubbling up furiously in the world of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and the New Deal. As the duke would recall, Wallis was extraordinarily well informed, her conversation deft and amusing. 

By 1934, Wallis’s husband was suffering ever more remarkable business reversals, which accelerated her pursuit of the duke. She was sufficiently entrenched in Edward’s circle that Thelma Furness, leaving for an extended trip overseas, met Wallis for tea at the Ritz Hotel before her departure and asked Wallis to look after “her little man” in her absence. Returning a few months later, Thelma wrote that Wallis had “looked after him exceedingly well.” The resulting domestic situation, as Chips Channon, a diarist of the London beau monde, noted, was the “ménage Simpson.” 

Wallis had a wandering eye, and Edward was not the only opportunity she entertained. Joachim von Ribbentrop, who presented his credentials as German ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in June 1936, also sparked her attention. Ribbentrop arrived in London with much fanfare, viewing his role as a public relations opportunity at the Foreign Office, whose legions were skeptical of Hitler. One fellow diplomat commented that Ribbentrop was an excellent choice for the Court of St. James’s job, suggesting that he enjoyed the company of prominent people. 

Ribbentrop’s approval for the post of ambassador was accelerated through the usual vetting process, with relief that the German government had not only filled the vacancy but with somebody well known and seemingly well-liked by them. Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had discussed the newly proposed German ambassador with the king. “Herr von Ribbentrop is so well known already it is perhaps unnecessary to give you the usual details about him,” especially since the secretary of state was recommending that Ribbentrop be accepted that same day for an official announcement to be made before Eden went out of town at the end of the week. When Ribbentrop presented his credentials to King George VI in early February, his resonating greeting of “Heil Hitler” was criticized even by Goering, who later said that “because of that stupid tactlessness,” he had risked becoming “persona non grata” with the British. Ribbentrop may have brought controversy with him to Britain, but the British government was willing to overlook it. A brief memo written by Eden marked “Personal” to “Your Excellency” on the topic of Ribbentrop in November 1936 further revealed his determination to safeguard Ribbentrop’s position in London. The memo suggested that no action be taken on an unnamed matter relating to Ribbentrop “since such action must inevitably result in further publicity and controversy. I am sure this is the last thing we desire.” 

In Edward, Ribbentrop had an easy mark. Over the years, the duke spoke fondly of his German ancestry, proclaiming to Diana Mitford that “every drop of blood in my veins is German.” Diana Mitford Mosley recalled Edward mentioning that the royal family would wait until their guests left a gathering, at which point the family “comfortably lapsed into German.” It was widely reported that the duke considered German his mother tongue and corresponded with his extended German family “Auf Deutsch.” One cousin reported that after a trip to Germany in 1935, the future king took to “wearing a German helmet and goose-stepping around the living room, for what reason I cannot imagine.” In his defense, another friend remarked that since England had cut him off after he abdicated the throne, it was only natural that he would pivot toward Germany, with which he had always felt a great affinity. 

Hitler, in turn, saw an opportunity in Edward as heir to the throne. As early as 1936, Hitler was reported to be watching newsreels of the future king before the funeral of George V. To represent Germany, Hitler again sent Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe, and Coburg, a first cousin of the deceased king. This was one of ten trips that Saxe and Coburg made to England on Hitler’s behalf during the period leading up to Britain’s entry into the war. 

The fact that Edward was forced to abdicate the throne to marry Wallis attracted the interest of the German regime. Rumors about his pro-German sentiments quickly circulated among the Nazi Party. The former Austrian ambassador to England, Count Albert von Mensdorff, reported that the duke was interested in returning to the throne if the Germans successfully invaded England, a development that he found “interesting and significant.” As the duke planned his wedding to Wallis in Paris in June 1937, the British ambassador, Eric Phipps, cabled the Foreign Office speculating about the duke’s plans: the duke “seems to be rather embarrassed by the excessive attentions of the French, and compares their behavior unfavorably with the discretion with which he was treated in Austria.” In his memoir, Albert Speer, the architect of the 1936 Olympic Stadium and other Fascist Nazi landmarks, wrote about the duke's role in the Nazi regime: “I am certain that through him permanent friendly relations with England could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.” 

Another British diplomat, Sir Robert Lockhart, noted in his diary after meeting Edward at St. James’s Palace that “the Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs, either re Jews or re anything else and added that dictators are very popular these days and we might want one in England before long.” Ribbentrop also quickly recognized the advantages of the duke’s pro-German position and was eager to exploit it: “I am convinced his (Edward’s) friendly disposition towards Germany will have some influence on the formation of British foreign policy.” 

Ribbentrop’s ambassadorship had all the hallmarks of great success, a sworn allegiance and backing of Hitler, and a popular choice at the Court of St. James’s. He also had the advantage of social charms cultivated and appreciated by the British aristocracy. As the German diplomat Paul Schwarz recounted, “Ribbentrop was a snob with a vengeance. To twist his stomach with caviar in the presence of the Duke of Devonshire or the American Ambassador, he would walk more than a mile. . . . There is no genuine trait in him.” 

Ribbentrop saw an opportunity to infiltrate the heart of British tradition and political power through the Duke of Windsor. His first line of approach was through Wallis Simpson. Ribbentrop met Wallis through another American society hostess, Lady Emerald Cunard. He was a guest of honor at a dinner at her home on Grosvenor Square in June 1935. The two met privately again soon after. Ribbentrop sent Wallis seventeen carnations daily, delivered to her flat in Bryanston Court by a shop attendant. These carnations and her affair with Ribbentrop quickly became the main topic of conversation at the German embassy. Wallis was in “constant contact” with von Ribbentrop. In practice, “the Duchess was obtaining a variety of information concerning the British and French government official activities that she was passing on to the Germans.” 

As Ribbentrop infiltrated the Windsors’ close circle, sensitive information about England began to leak into German diplomatic circles. One German diplomat pointed a finger not only at Edward but at Wallis’s access to her husband’s papers. Berlin was filled with loose talk about Edward. It was said that he neglected his duties in handling official documents. Secret Ambassadorial reports were especially emphasized. At Fort Belvedere, the Foreign Office dispatch bags were said to have been left open, and official secrets might have leaked out. Was it not true that in Nazi Berlin, one could hear stories that London passed for State Secrets? Undoubtedly, some people in official British circles were aware that these rumors cast an unwanted reflection upon their King.

While there are both German and American files about the wartime activities of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, only the British held a copy of a German file innocuously labeled as “Matters relating to the Royal Household 1940–66.” This includes a top-secret file dated August 24, 1953, containing the German correspondence relating to the Nazi plan for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during their stay in Madrid and Lisbon during the summer of 1940.

One of the duke and duchess’s first trips as a married couple was to Germany. Sir W. Selby, British ambassador to Germany, wrote to Ambassador Eric Phipps in Paris, where the Duke and Duchess had set up residence, that he had received “a letter dated September 20th from the Duke of Windsor informing me that he and the Duchess are visiting Germany shortly ‘to see what is being done to improve working and living conditions of laboring classes in several of the larger cities.’” Selby wanted Phipps to tell the duke that he would not be in Germany during the proposed dates, hoping that might head off an awkward visit by a former monarch with suspicious political allegiances. 

Ambassador Phipps then updated Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in a cipher telegram noting that “His Royal Highness told me he was leaving for Berlin on October 7th and expects to stay there for a couple of days. After that, he will travel about in Germany; he does not quite know where, and will study housing and working conditions there. I warned his Royal Highness that the Germans were past masters in the art of propaganda and that they would be quick to turn anything he might say or do to suit their purposes. He assured me he was well aware of this, that he would be cautious and not make any speeches.” 

News of the duke and duchess’s trip also came through the “private channels” of the British embassy in Berlin. Cables exchanged between the various British consulates lamented the breach of diplomatic protocol in that the Reich command had organized the trip without consultation with the British embassy and confirmed that “Germany would pay all costs of the trip.” 

As a conclusion to Part One, we can say that Hitler’s aristocrats, figuratively speaking became his eyes, listening posts, and mouthpieces in the drawing rooms, cocktail parties, and weekend retreats of Europe and America. They were the trusted voices disseminating his political and cultural propaganda about New Germany, brushing aside the Nazis’ atrocities. Distrustful of his Foreign Ministry, Hitler used his aristocrats to open the right doors and, as we will see in parts two to four created a formidable fifth column within government and financial circles. As we will see, there were also three conspiracies intended to stage a coup d’état to be led by a coalition of British fascist groups, which had been under consideration within the wider British fascist movement in the weeks immediately after the war was declared.

 

 

Continued in Part Two

 

1. Andrzej Olechnowicz, ‘Liberal Anti-Fascism in the 1930s: The Case of Sir Ernest Barker, in Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 36 (2004), 636– 60, here 643. On the British Union of Fascists more generally, see Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006).

2. See Ian Kershaw, Making Friends With Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War II, 2004.

Mosley's, which borrowed from Nazi German Fascism.

Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists claimed to have some 50,000 members at the peak of its popularity in 1934.

3. Andrzej Olechnowicz, ‘Liberal Anti-Fascism in the 1930s: The Case of Sir Ernest Barker’, in Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 36 (2004), 636– 60, here 643. On the BUF more generally, see Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006).

 

 

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