Franco's Map

by Walter Ellis

  • Walter Schellenberg (later promoted to Brigadeführer) continued to thrive in the SS, enjoying a particularly close relationship with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, but eventually threw in his lot with the doomed 1944 conspiracy against Hitler. Most of those who took part in the attempt on Hitler’s life died a horrible death, strung from meat hooks on piano wire. Not Schellenberg. The Labyrinth, his memoir of a life in espionage, was published with some success after the war. In 1952, having served six years imprisonment for his part in crimes committed by the SS, he died in Italy of cancer.

  • Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The wily head of the Abwehr was never in favour of Operation Felix. He had privately warned Franco – and Stohrer – that Germany was bound to lose the war eventually and that Spanish entry into the conflict would be ill-advised. By 1944, the Admiral was a fully-fledged member of the German Resistance who hoped to arrest Hitler and open negotiations with the allies. He was shot as a traitor on April 9, 1945.

  The Duke of Windsor served as Governor-General of the Bahamas for the remainder of the War, after which he and the Duchess returned to Paris, where they lived lives of sublime idleness until their deaths. While in the Bahamas, the Duke told a local journalist, “it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown.” He also remarked unabashedly to a Bahamian acquaintance: “After the war is over and Hitler crushes the Americans … we’ll take over. They [the British] don’t want me as their king, but I’ll be back as their leader.”

  On 13th September 1940, an FBI officer sent a memo to his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, in which he claimed that the Duchess had conducted an affair with Ribbentrop and continued to communicate with him. The Duchess, he wrote, had obtained extensive information concerning the British and French official positions that she was passing on to the Germans.

  The FBI kept an open file on the Duchess throughout the War. Later, the agency monitored the fact that she had a bizarre affair with Jimmy Donahue, the gay playboy grandson of stores mogul, J.W. Woolworth.

  The Duke died in 1972; the Duchess lingered on, in splendid isolation, until 1986.