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

by Andrew Morton

  It was entirely plausible that the Duke of Windsor would have been invited to take on the role of honest broker. The duke was seen by the Nazi hierarchy as “no enemy of Germany.” According to official documents released in 2003, German diplomats considered him to be “the only Englishman with whom Hitler would negotiate any peace terms, the logical director of England’s destiny after the war.”

  Certainly the duke and duchess’s sojourn in Spain coincided with the only period during World War Two when a negotiated peace was possible and plausible.

  The duke and duchess may have arrived in war-torn Madrid unscathed, but the sniper fire from Buckingham Palace was unrelenting. From the moment they had returned to France in late September, the palace had tried to keep the duke in virtual quarantine, isolated from British troops and “kept under control” by his military minders so that he could not stage any kind of comeback. Fearing his charismatic personality, they deliberately starved him of the oxygen of publicity. So when, in November 1939, he took a salute meant for his brother the Duke of Gloucester, the ex-king was formally reprimanded. Naturally he was ordered to make himself scarce when the king toured the British positions before Christmas. As the duchess wrote in her memoirs: “We had two wars to deal with—the big and still leisurely war, in which everybody was caught up, and the little cold war with the Palace, in which no quarter was given.”

  Buckingham Palace had driven the duke to distraction; now the Germans, watchful and waiting, hoped that he would be driven to desertion. The secret tug-of-war between Germany and Britain for the hearts and minds of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor led to one of the most bizarre episodes of World War Two, a story that was kept under lock and key until the late 1950s.

  With the Windsors now in Madrid and von Ribbentrop pondering his next move, Churchill telegraphed the duke, informing him that he and the duchess should come home as soon as possible. A Sunderland flying boat was assigned to fly to Lisbon in Portugal to pick them up. Ambassador Hoare was further instructed by the Foreign Office:

  Please invite Their Royal Highnesses to proceed to Lisbon.

  The palace was furious at this false appellation. At this critical moment in the war, when the royal family were debating whether to evacuate Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret to Canada, the king’s private secretary, Alex Hardinge, found time to chastise the Foreign Office for using the forbidden words “Their Royal Highnesses.” He expressed the king’s desire that steps be taken to ensure that such an error never occur again.

  In this high-stakes game of thrones the duke and duchess were not the only royal chips on the table. On the very day Churchill became prime minister, May 10, he tried to entice the eighty-one-year-old Kaiser to cross the Channel from his exile in Doorn in the Netherlands. An RAF plane was readied and the former monarch told he would be treated with “consideration and dignity.” The Kaiser was not impressed, saying that he would not become involved in what he called Churchill’s game of “political chess,” especially as twelve members of his family were serving in the German armed forces. Clearly Churchill’s aim was to use the Kaiser as a potential rallying point for disaffected German monarchists and other opponents of Hitler in precisely the same way that von Ribbentrop envisioned using the duke and duchess.

  Rumours of anti-Nazi plots had already reached the ears of the British, one secret envoy reporting that a group of generals wished to establish a new government in Berlin that would be monarchist in character. As early as December 1939, for instance, Father Odo, the former Duke of Württemberg, reported directly to Foreign Office mandarin Sir Alec Cadogan with information that two anti-Nazi generals with the support of three tank divisions were preparing for a military uprising. Nothing came of it.

  Nothing may have come from the Windsors’ stay in Madrid either. After receiving Churchill’s telegram, the duke and duchess planned to leave the Ritz hotel, where they were staying, and drive to Lisbon the following day, thus severely constraining von Ribbentrop’s options. The long-running War of the Windsors now helped von Ribbentrop in his secret schemes. As luck would have it, it was belatedly discovered that the Duke of Kent was paying an official visit to Portugal in order to cement ties with Britain’s oldest European ally. It was thought prudent by the British and Portuguese president Salazar for the ducal couple to arrive in Lisbon after the Duke of Kent departed on July 2.

  Such was the antipathy between the once inseparable brothers that when the Duke of Kent was asked if he wished to meet his elder brother before his own departure from Lisbon he was reported by a Portuguese diplomat to have answered “Good God, no.” With the duke and duchess forced to stay in Madrid for a further week, von Ribbentrop was given breathing space to bring them into the Nazi orbit.

  The duke, too, tried to exploit the hiatus, doubtless assuming that with his great political ally Winston Churchill at the helm of government, outstanding and contentious royal issues would be settled in his favour. In a series of increasingly querulous telegrams to the new prime minister he reopened negotiations on some matters that should have been dealt with before he abdicated. Irritated by his treatment in France, he wanted a firm assurance that a proper job would be waiting for him when he returned home.

  Furthermore, he wanted an undertaking that “simple courtesies” would be extended to his wife. The ducal couple had been treated as outcasts when they first returned in September 1939, and he was adamant it would not happen again, insisting that his wife be received by the king and queen.

  Ever the practical politician, Ambassador Hoare boiled the matter down to the duke and duchess meeting the king and queen privately for no more than fifteen minutes and that meeting appearing in the Court Circular. He even suggested that Churchill give the duke a naval command; otherwise he feared Edward might never leave mainland Europe.

  Churchill, all too aware of the unbending obduracy of the court and the fabled obstinacy of the ex-king, sent a non-committal response, saying, somewhat lamely: “It would be better for Your Royal Highness to come to England as arranged, when everything can be considered.”

  It was a holding position, Churchill consulting closely with the king and his advisors before firing his big guns. As his assistant private secretary John Colville noted in his diary entry of June 29, the prime minister met with Beaverbrook and the king’s private secretary, Alex Hardinge, to discuss the duke’s demands. “It is incredible to haggle in such a way at this time, and Winston proposes to send him a very stiff telegram pointing out that he is a soldier under orders and must obey. The King approves and says he will hear of no conditions, about the Duchess or otherwise.”

  Even the duke’s friends agreed that at this moment of crisis it was not appropriate to raise these personal matters. It was, according to his friend, right-wing political commentator Kenneth de Courcy, an enduring character fault in the duke, namely a persistent stubbornness about trivia and a “dithering” about decisions:

  Unhappily the Duke lacked both tact and skill in arguing his case. He annoyed or neglected important persons who, had they not been snubbed, would have been his very important allies. As a shadow king he would constantly and repeatedly get himself into trouble and they concluded that he was only fitted to be a café society royal.

  As his ghost writer Charles Murphy, who worked with the duke for several years, observed: “The kindest judgement in the face of the evidence is that if Windsor was only playing a game with the object of forcing his government’s hand it was brinkmanship of an appalling kind.”

  With his as-yet unanswered ultimatum hanging in the air, the duke went sightseeing, cheering crowds watching the royal progress. His own country might not want him, but there was little doubt of his popularity elsewhere. Presumably, then, he was flattered and not a little intrigued when the Spanish foreign minister, having been given the green light by von Ribbentrop, secretly invited the duke and duchess to stay in Spain as long as they wished. He proposed to put at their disposal the palace of the Moorish kings situated in the remo
te hilltop town of Ronda in Andalusia.

  After the bleak two weeks he spent in blacked-out England—and with the prospect of invasion imminent—it was such a tempting proposal that he telegraphed Churchill and asked if there was any need for a prompt return.

  He did not mention the offer of the palace to either Churchill or Hoare. Nor did he discuss the secret contact he had made with the Axis powers during his stay in Madrid. In a display of questionable judgement he asked his good friend and boon companion, Spanish diplomat Don Javier “Tiger” Bermejillo, to contact the German and Italian embassies in Madrid and ask if they could protect, for the duration of the conflict, his two houses, on the Boulevard Suchet in Paris and La Croë in Cap d’Antibes.

  Was this a straightforward if misguided request or, given the very recent Swedish initiative, a coded peace overture via diplomatic back channels to the two enemies of Great Britain? Axis diplomats mulled over the significance of the duke’s entreaty, trying to divine meaning in the royal tea leaves. The Italian chargé d’affaires in Spain, Count Zoppi, reported on the duke’s state of mind thus: “The Duke is not certain he will be returning to Great Britain in spite of the pressure of the British Government upon him to do so. Rather he seems to wish to keep himself outside events, following developments from afar.”

  On June 30 the Germans responded by letting the duke know, through Tiger Bermejillo, that they would indeed protect his properties. It was made clear that nothing was to be put in writing about this secret arrangement. In an ironic juxtaposition, the diplomatic telegram preceding the duke’s matter, which was subsequently revealed in captured German Foreign Office documents, unveiled the true attitude of the Nazi regime towards Britain. A top secret message from the secretary of state at the Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, to government heads of department stated baldly: “Germany is not considering peace. She is concerned exclusively with preparations for the destruction of England.” It was these German Foreign Office telegrams that would come to haunt the duke and the British and American governments after the war.

  Yet three weeks later, on July 19, Hitler was still paying lip service to peace, in his famous speech to the Reichstag suggesting that England should call off the war and shelve their plans to invade Belgium and Holland. “Herr Churchill may dismiss this declaration of mine. In that case I have freed my conscience about what is to come.” Three days earlier he had ordered preparations for the invasion of England to begin.

  The duke exercised a similar diplomatic duplicity. In public he was circumspect about the war: At a cocktail party for five hundred influential Spaniards held at the British embassy, the ducal couple were the souls of discretion, going out of their way, as Hoare reported, to show their belief in final victory.

  In private it was a different story. Their defeatist attitude greatly concerned the British ambassador, especially as they consorted with influential pro-Fascist Spanish aristocrats and others who would have no hesitation about making mischief for the duke. As Michael Bloch, author of Operation Willi, says:

  He believed that Great Britain faced a catastrophic military defeat, which could only be avoided through a peace settlement with Germany. Even if successful resistance were possible for a period, there was little point in continuing a struggle which could no longer attain any of its original objectives and which could only lead to prolonged destruction and suffering.

  When he and the duchess were invited by Alexander Weddell, the American ambassador in Madrid, to watch a tennis match at the residence, the ducal couple were on good form. An astute judge of character, Weddell was suitably impressed, writing to his sister Elizabeth:

  Our chief excitement in the past few days was the visit to Madrid of Wally Simpson and her Boy Friend. We invited no one except two or three people that they asked for. He is immensely improved and I think that she has had a wonderfully good effect on him. Wally herself gives every suggestion of extreme acuteness and unlimited ambition; her exterior suggests heavy armour plate or some substance slightly harder than a diamond. But very pleasant, very genial, and very witty.

  When conversation turned to the war, the duke, speaking with first-hand knowledge, was dismissive of the organization behind the French military. He observed, as Weddell duly reported back to Washington, that Germany had spent a decade reorganizing their society so that they could accept the sacrifices of war. France had not. The duchess was more direct, saying that France had lost because the country was “internally diseased.” “A country which was not in a condition to fight a war should not have declared a war,” she argued. Weddell further reported that the duke was the natural leader of any peace party that may emerge in Britain.

  Similar sentiments, relayed by Tiger, reached the ears of Franco, who together with his brother-in-law, the minister of the interior Ramón Serrano Suñer, believed that the ex-king was keen to act as peacemaker. Throughout the summer of 1940 Suñer and the Caudillo were willing collaborators in German machinations to keep the duke in Spain, an ill-defined strategy linked to the overarching scheme to use the duke for future negotiations with the “Churchill clique.” Their reward would be a seat at the table when the spoils of war were carved up.

  As Franco’s biographer Paul Preston observes: “With France on her knees and Britain with her back to the wall, Franco felt all the temptations of a cowardly and rapacious vulture.”

  In spite of all these plots and secret manoeuvres, on July 2, as planned, the ducal couple left Madrid and drove to Lisbon. While von Ribbentrop was furious that they had escaped the Nazi net, it was by no means certain that they were prepared to return immediately to Britain.

  In his report to Berlin, Ambassador Stohrer confirmed that the duke would return to Spain after replenishing his money supply, as it was “out of the question” that the British government would agree to his demands for a position of influence either in a civilian or military capacity, or for the duchess to be recognized as a member of the royal family. He added: “Windsor has expressed himself to the Foreign Minister and other acquaintances in strong terms against Churchill and against the war.” (When the duke eventually saw the telegrams, he agreed with the observation about the duchess but not Churchill.)

  As Madrid was a centre for Nazi diplomatic and espionage activity and Spain was teetering on the brink of entering the war on the side of the Axis, it seemed eminently prudent to travel to Portugal. It was, as the visit by the Duke of Kent had just shown, a much safer and friendlier country. With their good friend Sir Walford Selby, the former ambassador to Austria and guest at their wedding, in charge at the embassy, they thought it was a chance to catch up on gossip and enjoy some fine wine, courtesy of the embassy cellars. They were to be proved sadly mistaken.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Plot to Kidnap a King

  In the turmoil of the first months of the war, the duke and duchess were not the only homeless royals fearful for their personal safety. Kidnap, ransom, and abduction have been the lot of royalty in wars down the ages. It was no different in 1940. As the duke and duchess whiled away the days in Nazi-dominated Madrid, another European royal was also at the centre of a German plot. The Nazis were desperate to prevent the “playboy king,” Carol II of Romania, from fleeing Europe. Anxious about his security, the ousted monarch, who was lurking in Madrid, sent a message to the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, pleading for sanctuary. He agreed, provided that Carol II sail for exile in Mexico at the earliest possible opportunity.

  If the duke and duchess thought that Lisbon—a city of spies, refugees, and double agents—was more of a safe haven than Madrid, they enjoyed a rude awakening. The welcome they received, at least from the British government, was hardly the one they expected. When they arrived in Lisbon on July 3, there was a telegram from Churchill waiting for the duke. His hope that the prime minister was going to comply with his demands quickly evaporated.

  The telegram, which had followed them from Madrid to Lisbon, read:

  Your Royal Highn
ess has taken active military rank and refusal to obey direct orders of competent military authority would create a serious situation. I hope it will not be necessary for such orders to be sent. I most strongly urge immediate compliance with wishes of the Government.

  The terse tone distilled an ocean of discussion inside the palace and Downing Street, much of it uncomplimentary. It fell short of accusing him of desertion—but not by much. In the original version, Churchill asked pointedly about the circumstances in which he left Paris for the South of France, implying that he had acted without appropriate military orders.

  For a man who had, in his own mind, served his country loyally for all his adult life, this came as a slap in the face, especially as it was signed by the man he saw as his ally, friend, and advisor. Impetuous as ever, the duke drafted a furious response, resigning all military rank. Wallis stayed his hand, though he later wrote bitterly to the prime minister complaining about his “dictator methods.”

  The episode marked a sea change in the relationship between the two men. As Churchill’s biographer Roy Jenkins observed: “This exchange probably marked the end both of Churchill’s romantic attachment to the duke, and of the duke’s belief that he could get Churchill to go on being as totally in his favour as he had been in December 1936.” Later in the war, as Churchill’s physician Lord Moran recounted, every time he was informed that the Duke of Windsor had asked for an appointment, the prime minister “sighed before arranging the day and time.”