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

by Andrew Morton

  Though the duke was frustrated by the lack of appreciation for his military assessment of French defences, it was those very observations that reinforced suspicions about his loyalty to the Allied cause. Hitler’s audacious advance into France and the Benelux countries on May 10, 1940, bypassing the Maginot Line and overrunning the inadequate antitank defences previously identified by the duke, was the pivot for renewed concern.

  That the duke’s recommendations about strengthening the very defences that were breached by General Guderian’s Panzers were ignored is rather lost in the shuffle. If they had been acted upon, the thrusting tank attack may have been blunted. When Hitler launched the Battle of France, the Western powers had the upper hand in terms of the number and quality of armaments, the Germans gaining an advantage thanks to superior strategy and execution. As historian Professor Petropoulos observes: “The questions that would logically follow center on whether espionage or indiscretion contributed to this superiority and whether the Windsors were the source of any intelligence.”

  The finger of suspicion has pointed at Charles Bedaux. During the so-called Phoney War, Bedaux was close to von Ribbentrop and his emissary in Paris, Otto Abetz, and had also been a frequent dinner guest of the duke, now “Major General Edward,” and the duchess. He also made sure that he was on good terms with the ducal entourage. Over dinner at Claridge’s in London he offered Forwood a “good post,” implying he would do well in a new pro-German government. His conspiratorial attitude merely baffled Fruity Metcalfe. “I can’t make him out. He knows too much,” Metcalfe observed.

  Nonetheless it was the doggedly loyal Metcalfe who organized dinners between Bedaux, now under secret service surveillance, and the duke and duchess when they first returned to Paris. After the humiliating debacle of the cancelled visit to the United States, the duke may have been more guarded with a man described by Dudley Forwood as a “clever manipulator.” However, as Bedaux invariably picked up the tab for dinner, it could be that the duke felt obligated to sing for his supper, inadvertently giving away important military information to this Nazi collaborator.

  The duke had always taken a dim view of the French, thinking them decadent and corrupt. His first-hand investigation into the country’s defences had merely reinforced that view. It may well have been that he communicated those views more freely than he ought.

  During the Phoney War, Bedaux still believed that active hostilities were not inevitable between the combatants and used his contacts to try to resolve the potential conflict. As historian Gerhard Weinberg observes: “In the critical period of May and June 1940 Bedaux was pro-Nazi and thought it best for the Western powers to make peace with the Nazis on any terms they could.”

  The evidence that Bedaux was a possible channel of communications between Windsor and Hitler appears in January 1940 communications from the German ambassador in The Hague in Holland, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, to Germany’s under-secretary for foreign affairs, Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker.

  “Through personal relationships I might have the opportunity to establish certain lines leading to the Duke of Windsor,” the count reported, explaining that the duke was “not entirely satisfied” with the role he had been given with the British Military Mission. “Also there seems to be something of a Fronde [a rebellious conspiracy among nobles] forming around Windsor which for the moment had nothing to say but which at some time under favourable circumstances might acquire a certain significance.” During this time, according to historian John Costello, Bedaux made frequent trips to his offices in The Hague, and it was Zech-Burkesroda who identified the duke in his reports to Berlin as the source of military intelligence.

  As Costello states: “By comparing Allied and German records it is now possible to develop a convincing case that an intelligence leak leading back to the Duke of Windsor may well have played a significant part in prompting Hitler to order his generals to change their battle plan.”

  In his own extensive investigations, Professor Weinberg, a former diplomat, came to believe that it was a German agent attached to the duke’s office rather than the duke himself who was leaking information to the Nazis. “During the first months of the war important information passed from his blabbering through that agent to the Germans.” The question is: Did the duke know what this person was doing?

  Biographer Charles Higham goes further, asserting that on November 4, 1939, the duke wrote to Hitler under the name EP (Edward Prince), saying that he had information regarding his trip north to survey the British troops and that Bedaux was entrusted with that information. “I am hardly able to stress the importance of the information which is why I have gone into so much detail in explaining it to our friend,” he wrote. Bedaux handed the report to Hitler in Berlin on November 9. Bedaux further claimed that during dinner parties the duchess was passing on classified military information which she had gleaned from her husband. “As a result the information made its way into German hands,” wrote Higham.

  This is an enduring perception of the duchess as a spy, collaborator, or plain disloyal, which was widespread in the British Establishment at the time and became an accepted fact after the war. With some justification. Her friend, journalist and playwright Clare Boothe Luce, vividly recalls one evening in May 1940 when the Windsors were playing cards at their Paris home and she was listening to the BBC news, which was describing Luftwaffe fighters strafing English coastal towns. When Luce said how sorry she felt for them, the duchess briefly looked up from her cards and replied: “After what they did to me I can’t say I feel sorry for them—a whole nation against one lone woman.”

  The most damning assertions about the duke’s behaviour during the fall of France come from author Martin Allen, who argues in his book Hidden Agenda that the ex-king spied for Hitler, supplying Bedaux with crucial information about French troop deployment which he passed on to the Nazis. As a result of the duke’s betrayal, Hitler was able to change his battle plans and ordered the thrust of his attack on France through the poorly defended Ardennes forest, resulting in the German army’s stunning victory.

  Here the plot thickens. In his book Allen cites a number of documents held at the National Archives in London, some of which were subsequently discovered to be forgeries. A police investigation during 2007 discovered that no fewer than twenty-nine documents had been placed in twelve separate files and cited in one or more of Allen’s three books. As Financial Times journalist Ben Fenton, who spent months investigating the whodunit, states: “According to the experts at the Archives, documents now shown to be forgeries supported controversial arguments central to each of Allen’s books: in Hidden Agenda, five documents now known to be forged helped justify his claim that the Duke of Windsor betrayed military secrets to Hitler.” While the police made an arrest in the case, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that it was “not in the public interest” to pursue the matter.

  Even though the forgeries at the National Archives in London muddied the waters about the wartime activities of the Duke of Windsor, the irony is that they are entirely consistent with the way Britain’s ruling elite viewed the ex-king and his American wife. He was seen as a loose-lipped defeatist who could not be trusted with information of any military importance. As for the duchess, for the past several years she had been suspected of being in cahoots with her “lover” von Ribbentrop and other leading Nazis.

  An FBI report which was sent by J. Edgar Hoover to President Roosevelt in September that year distilled official thinking in London and Washington about the ducal couple. “For some time the British Government has known that the Duchess of Windsor was exceedingly pro-German in her sympathies and connections and there is strong reason to believe that this is the reason why she was considered so obnoxious to the British Government that they refused to permit Edward to marry her and maintain the throne.” For good measure, the report’s author, agent Edward Tamm, added that the duke was often too drunk to make sense and that the duchess was in “constant contact” with von
Ribbentrop. “Because of their high official position the Duchess was obtaining a variety of information concerning the British and French government official activities that she was passing on to the Germans,” stated agent Tamm.

  Add to this toxic mix of royal distrust and perceived disloyalty the elderly personage of Lloyd George, the former prime minister and Liberal leader. In May 1940, at the moment of Britain’s greatest peril, when the island stood alone against Hitler, he refused all entreaties to join a government of national unity now led by Winston Churchill.

  Chamberlain suggested that perhaps the defeatist Lloyd George, who once lauded Hitler as Germany’s “George Washington,” saw himself as Britain’s equivalent to France’s Marshal Pétain, who was then desperately suing for an armistice with Germany. Churchill thought that speculation highly likely. Other senior politicians cast Lloyd George in the role of veteran politician Pierre Laval, Pétain’s deputy, who was executed by firing squad at the war’s end, with the Duke of Windsor as Marshal Pétain, a popular war hero but also guilty of collaboration.

  In June 1940, when Britain’s army was awaiting rescue on the beaches of Dunkirk, it was not an implausible scenario to believe that Lloyd George could engineer a coup d’état against the “Churchill clique,” sue for peace with the Germans, and install the Duke of Windsor as puppet king. As the duke’s official biographer Philip Ziegler has argued: “A great many people believed in June and July 1940 that Britain was likely to lose the war. The Duke’s fault was that he said it out loud, and not just to his fellow countrymen.”

  At the time, though, the ducal couple’s thoughts were focused on how to get away from the Germans rather than represent them. The duke had engineered a switch from northern France and was seconded to the Armée des Alpes on the Italian frontier and then attached to the French command in Nice. The posting was conveniently near to the Château de la Croë, their rented villa in Cap d’Antibes. It proved to be only a temporary stay, Italy declaring war on France in the second week of June. With the German army advancing southwards and the Italian army poised to invade the holiday towns along the Côte d’Azur, prudence dictated that they return to Britain immediately or head to a neutral country. While the local British consul suggested that they should go to Lisbon and from there back to England, the duke had grander plans. In a show of “incredible self-importance, which wasn’t completely out of character,” early in the morning of June 17 the duke telephoned Major General Edward Spears and asked him to arrange a Royal Navy warship to pick him up from Nice.

  An irritated Spears tersely informed the duke that no warship could be made available and that the road to Spain was open to motor cars. So Franco’s Fascist Spain, some three hundred miles south-west, it was. Though Spain was officially neutral—or “non belligerent”—Hitler was putting great pressure on the Caudillo, who had benefited from German military support during the vicious civil war, to join the Axis.

  By heading to Spain, Major General Windsor was entering the lion’s den, gambling that he would be given safe passage. This was by no means certain. As a military man entering a country that was officially neutral, he could be arrested and detained. The precarious situation was such that several days before, Britain’s new ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare, had contacted air minister Sir Archibald Sinclair in London, urgently requesting a plane be sent to Madrid in case of “a coup organized by German gunmen.”

  The duke and duchess decided to take their chances. They said their farewells to their American friends Herman and Katherine Rogers, who decided to stay on at Lou Viei and continue running a soup kitchen which was feeding up to sixty people a day. Herman went on to become the head of the French section of Voice of America, broadcasting pro-Allied propaganda to Occupied France. On June 19, just as the French were contacting their putative Nazi rulers for armistice terms, the ducal couple, two consular officials, and royal staff set off in a four-car convoy—one hired van just for the royal luggage—and headed for the Spanish frontier. With the country in turmoil, barricades manned by locals had sprung up along the route. At each checkpoint the duke would announce: “Je suis le Prince de Galles. Laissez-moi passer, s’il vous plaît.” The magic name parted the way, the party arriving in Barcelona on June 20.

  In the fevered atmosphere, the ex-king was a lightning rod for rumour and speculation. As with the wildfire story claiming that George VI had abdicated and the duke was seeking peace, which had gripped the German public the previous October, the duke was once again seen as Edward the Peacemaker. This time the story, which appeared in the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero and the Madrid paper Arriba, alleged that the Duke of Windsor had not merely been restored to his throne following a popular mutiny by British troops but had flown to Berlin to negotiate an end to hostilities. According to these excited reports, Prime Minister Churchill had even threatened to jail the duke if he returned to Britain. While the stories in Fascist newspapers could be dismissed as irritating propaganda, even Ambassador Hoare, who had advised the ex-king during the abdication crisis and was intimately aware of the concern in Downing Street and the Palace about the duke’s loyalties, was uncertain of what to think. In a cipher to London he said that he planned to extend the “usual courtesies” to the duke but asked: “In view of press articles saying that it is intended to arrest him on arrival in England please confirm that I am acting correctly.” As a hive of journalists buzzed around the duke’s hotel in Barcelona it was left to his comptroller, Major Gray Phillips, to swat the story.

  Within twenty-four hours of Sir Samuel Hoare contacting London about the duke’s status, the German ambassador to Madrid, Dr. Eberhard von Stohrer, was alerting his own boss, German foreign minister von Ribbentrop, about the movements of the royal couple. In his telegram he said that the Spanish foreign minister, Colonel Juan Beigbeder y Atienza, had asked for guidance on how to handle the imminent arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Madrid.

  In his message Stohrer stated: “The Foreign Minister gathers from certain impressions which General Vigón [Head of the Spanish Supreme General Staff] received in Germany that we might perhaps be interested in detaining the Duke of Windsor here and eventually establishing contact with him.”

  Vigón’s evidence is fascinating. On June 16 the general, who was representing Franco, met with Hitler at the Château de Lausprelle in Acoz, Belgium, two days before the Germans entered Paris. He was there for discussions concerning the role of Spain in the conflict. While his primary purpose was to deliver a message from Franco stating that Spain was in no position, after three years of debilitating civil war, to join the Axis offensive, during their conversation Hitler intimated that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor would be arriving in Spain. “He suggested that Nazi Germany would have substantial interest if the Duke and Duchess could be delayed long enough for secret contacts and peace talks.”

  As Hitler’s conversation with Vigón had taken place three days before the duke and duchess had actually left their villa for Spain, it further suggests that the Germans had an agent within the duke’s entourage or at least with knowledge of his proposed movements. This lends further credibility to Professor Weinberg’s assertion that the military information the duke gleaned from his “spying mission” in northern France was intentionally leaked to the Germans by a member of staff or Nazi sympathizer.

  When von Ribbentrop was told about the couple’s arrival in Spain he was, according to his young aide, Erich Kordt, “electrified” by the idea of them staying for a time. He telegraphed Stohrer:

  Is it possible to detain the Duke and Duchess in Spain for a couple of weeks to begin with before they are granted an exit visa? It would be necessary to ensure at all events that it did not appear in any way that the suggestion came from Germany.

  From von Ribbentrop’s point of view, here was a heaven-sent opportunity to have a pro-German head of state waiting in the wings once Britain had capitulated. With the Spanish clearly eager to act as middlemen, who could blame him for exploring the
situation? While the plot, which was eventually codenamed Operation Willi, has been dismissed as “ludicrous and naïve,” at the time it seemed eminently prudent to see if a major British figure could be lured into the Nazi net.

  As Edward VIII’s biographer Frances Donaldson observed:

  The Germans believed themselves to be within an ace of conquering Britain. What more certain than that they would be on the lookout for a man who, while not the stamp of a traitor, might see his duty to his country in the light that Pétain had seen his? And what more likely prospect than the man who as King had made no bones about his admiration for the German nation and his belief that war could settle nothing in the modern world, who less than three years before had travelled through Germany with the most notorious of the Nazi leaders, reportedly giving a ‘modified version’ of the Nazi salute, and who had appealed directly for peace?”

  In the days following the “miracle of Dunkirk,” with most of the British army’s modern equipment abandoned on French fields, a negotiated peace seemed a likely option. The empire would be preserved and England would live to fight another day. In a now overlooked episode in the heroic Battle of Britain, in June 1940 Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax—the king and queen’s preferred candidate as prime minister—and his political aide R. A. Butler were in touch with Swedish diplomats with a view to asking them to act as intermediaries regarding possible peace talks with Germany. On June 17, just after Hitler had talks with Spanish general Juan Vigón, Butler told the Swedish minister that “no chance would be missed to reach a compromise peace if reasonable conditions could be obtained.” Several weeks later, Prince Max von Hohenlohe reported a meeting between himself and the British representative in Switzerland where ill-defined and somewhat nebulous peace overtures were made.