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

by Andrew Morton

  Actually, as Guy Liddell noted in his diary of December 1945, Blunt returned with a diplomatic sack full of Christmas presents for the king, goodies that included the diamond crown of Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III.

  “Anthony has brought back on behalf of the King some very valuable miniatures and other antiques worth about £100,000 [approx. £3 million or $4.75 million today] but it has been made quite clear that these are only on loan from the Duke of Brunswick.” He went on to describe his haul of gold and silver plate as well as a unique twelfth-century illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels, which had once belonged to Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony.

  Blunt and Morshead subsequently flew to Doorn in Holland, where they visited the estate of the deceased ex-Kaiser in order to secure various regal possessions, including those of Queen Victoria, Empress Friedrich, and other European royals. Their brief was to examine objects that once belonged to Queen Victoria and, as Morshead coyly noted in a letter to Tommy Lascelles, to find anything relevant “to relations between the Courts of England and Germany during the past hundred years.”

  While portraits, several Garter badges, and gifts from Queen Victoria to the Kaiser were “quietly secured” by the British ambassador to Holland, no documentary material was discovered.

  These freelance trips, which yielded priceless bounty—though not the incriminating letters between British and German royals—did concern the Foreign Office. At a time when thousands of troops, particularly American GIs, were taking home souvenirs of war, the Foreign Office were extremely concerned about how it would look if the king was seen to be “liberating”—or, as Guy Burgess pithily noted, “looting”—archives and objects, especially when Britain was lecturing the other Allies about their own corrupt behaviour.

  The British were not the only ones who believed they occupied the moral high ground, their American allies increasingly believing that it was the Brits who were playing fast and loose with the truth, especially with regard to their stewardship of the German Foreign Office archives. “It is imperative,” declared one American officer, “that we have at Marburg an administration by American forces so as to ‘free’ . . . the American elements from British rule, I dare say, tyranny.”

  The lightning rod for the growing disenchantment among the allies was the Windsor file. In the months following Allied victory, it changed the day-to-day working relationship between the Americans and their British counterparts. Trust and co-operation were replaced by suspicion and resentment, the Americans now believing that every objection the British made, be it to the American decision to move the German Foreign Office records from Marburg Castle first to Kassel and then to Berlin—as suggested by US general Lucius Clay—or giving Russia, France, and neutral countries access to the files for the International Military Tribunal, was motivated by a deferential impulse to protect the Duke of Windsor or other high-ranking members of the British Establishment who were guilty of appeasement or collaboration. “All sorts of unsavoury stories are getting into circulation,” noted American attaché John T. Krumpelmann at a conference to explain the mysterious gaps in the German Foreign Office files.

  The Americans had a point. The fear of disclosing the contents of the Windsor file to others, particularly the Russians, coloured every British decision. A note from Robert Currie Thomson in October concerning American plans to move the German Foreign Office archive from Marburg reflected official British thinking: “silly to flit [move] lest certain documents be seen by some parties we have in mind.”

  The tone of the correspondence between the two sides, while always polite, grew chillier as winter closed in. In November 1945 the State Department explicitly refused to allow documents to be taken to the British zone of occupation. Quite simply, they no longer trusted the British, noting that “on previous occasion documents taken to England from the custody of U.S. forces in Germany had not been made available for exploitation by U.S. representatives.”

  This cynicism about the duplicitous Brits was articulated in an angry memo to Secretary of State Byrnes from his director of European affairs, H. Freeman Matthews, on January 31, 1946. While he was responding to complaints from British ambassador Lord Halifax about the transfer of the files from Marburg to Berlin—a subject that also vexed the foreign secretary—his note focused on the underhand behaviour of their partner in peace.

  After lamenting the illegality of destroying official records he continued:

  I personally do not believe in efforts to alter historical records by the destruction or permanent withholding of official documents. Quite frankly, conditions at Marburg are such that the British are, in the opinion of some of our people, enabled thereby to play fast and loose with the documents there. I feel sure they would not hesitate to remove any which showed appeasement policies of high British personalities in an unfavourable light. We have on occasion had difficulty obtaining microfilm copies of certain documents.

  The British, on one occasion, formally requested us to sanction the destruction of certain documents dealing with the Duke of Windsor’s passage through Spain and Portugal in the summer of 1940. I think that we should protect legitimate British rights and interests with respect to the German Foreign Office archives, in particular in the matter of releasing them to representatives of other powers, but that we should have in mind our large responsibility towards the security and safeguarding of these irreplaceable historical archives.

  The scene was set for a conflict as the tapestry of shared beliefs began to unravel. The view of the State Department’s director of European affairs, John Hickerson, reflected the bewildered attitude of many American officials towards their British allies.

  In a top secret memo he wrote:

  I am convinced that the British government will adamantly resist any suggestion on our part that any of the documents relating to the Duke of Windsor be made public. There is throughout the United Kingdom an unreasoning devotion to the monarchial principle and an almost fanatical disposition to do everything possible to protect the good name of the institution of the monarchy.

  He went on:

  I think the British Government is wrong about this whole matter and that all of these documents, including agents’ reports, should be made public in the ordinary course of events. But I am not a British subject and I do not view the institution of the monarchy through their eyes.

  It would be many years before Hickerson had his wish.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Burying the “Hot Potato”

  It began, as many things have, with an eloquent letter to the Times of London. Long before the war was over, two of Britain’s most distinguished historians, Sir Lewis Namier and E. Llewellyn Woodward, called for the publication of German and British documents on events leading up to Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the beginning of World War Two. In their letter of September 23, 1943, they argued that never again should the interpretation of the recent past be left to the Germans, as was the case with the previous conflagration.

  It was an argument that fell on fertile ground in both London and Washington, the Allies acutely aware that the German people had to understand and appreciate their collective responsibility for the conflict. The eventual re-education of the German nation was a central war aim, Woodward repeating his arguments at a gathering of diplomats and historians six months before the war ended, suggesting a joint enterprise to publish an authoritative collection of documents on German foreign policy. The impact of material related to the German Foreign Office and other German ministries’ official material was amply demonstrated at the International Military Tribunal, which began at Nuremberg in November 1945, where top Nazi leaders were convicted on the evidence of their own documents. Of the forty-two published volumes of the proceedings of the court, some seventeen were devoted to the documents.

  As historian John Wheeler-Bennett put it: “It had been a fundamental principle of policy among the allied powers that the German people should be convinced irrefu
tably of the cause, the magnitude, and the consequences of their defeat. There must be no danger of the repetition of the mistakes made at the conclusion of the First World War, when this impression was never fully brought home to Germany.”

  By January 1946 the proposal was discussed by the Foreign Office, who in turn sounded out the State Department in Washington. A central question was whether the department was “prepared to support a policy of complete disclosure” even if some documents may prove embarrassing to the government.

  Both Dean Acheson and John Hickerson, the under-secretary and assistant secretary for European affairs, answered in the affirmative, Hickerson commenting: “It seems to me that this Government should not consider publishing in any way under its name a collection of German official documents if it is not prepared to let the whole story be told honestly in accordance with the best criteria of historical research.” It seemed that Hickerson, who was baffled by the British deference to the monarchy, was about to have his wish of seeing incriminating German documents made public.

  These noble ideals were codified in the agreement signed between Britain and the United States—Russia declined to take part—on June 19, 1946. The selection and editing, the agreement stated, was to be “performed on the basis of the highest scholarly objectivity” and the project entrusted to “outside scholars of the highest reputation.”

  To doubly underline the academics’ freedom to roam, readers were informed at the introduction of the first four volumes that: “The editors wish to state at the outset that they have not only been permitted, but enjoined, to make the selection on this basis [scholarly objectivity] alone.” It was envisioned that twenty volumes of between eight hundred and a thousand pages would be published in both German and English, dealing with the period 1918 to 1945.

  For historians and other academics who were hobbled by Britain’s fifty-year rule before the release of official documents—it was reduced to thirty years in 1968—the chance to investigate essentially contemporary documents, albeit of another country, was a glorious opportunity. As Dr. George Kent, a member of the American historical team, recalled: “It was a goldmine. We were able to look into the innermost secrets of German foreign policy.” Without the Nuremberg trials and the political decision to demonstrate to the German people the causes of the war, this would never have occurred. The Harvard historian William L. Langer noted: “The historian could not ordinarily expect to have access to such records in less than fifty or a hundred years, and only the fortunes of war have brought this mine of information to our shores.”

  For the British, John Wheeler-Bennett, a well-connected Establishment figure and gentleman historian, accepted, somewhat reluctantly, the position of editor in chief, and Raymond Sontag, of the University of California at Berkeley, whose Irish ancestry made him deeply sceptical towards the British, was appointed the American chief. In April 1947 Sorbonne professor Maurice Baumont joined the group as the French chief editor. So began an uneasy relationship, shot through with distrust and suspicion. For example, when a vital file from 1937—the apogee of British appeasement and the Duke of Windsor’s private conversation with Hitler during his visit to Germany—went missing, Sontag suspected that Lieutenant Colonel Robert Currie Thomson had purloined it on behalf of the British government. It was later discovered that the file had been mislabelled.

  In fact the historians had barely begun work when the explosive Windsor file, variously referred to as “the Marburg file,” “the special file,” or “the particular difficulty,” hove into view, this time thanks to an article in Newsweek in autumn 1946. It reported, in part erroneously, that the publication of German Foreign Office documents was being delayed by the State Department in deference to British wishes not only about the suppression of documents related to “the Duke of Windsor’s pre-war ideas on European politics and the Third Reich” but other subjects, too. This may have been a reference to the earlier concern over Sir Oswald Mosley.

  The Newsweek publication elicited a sharp protest from the new British ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, a friend of the queen, who was concerned about the fact that the reference to the Duke of Windsor indicated a breach of the secret agreement between the two governments.

  In a “Top Secret and Personal” letter to Dean Acheson, he wrote:

  I am at a loss to know what explanation I can give to the Foreign Office with regard to this leakage in view of the special precautions which your Department agreed to undertake.

  In his reply on November 18, 1946, Acheson expressed his regret and promised an investigation to find the source of the leak. The existence of the “unmentionable file” was naturally a source of concern for the British and American editors in chief, who were eager to track down this almost mythical document. When Wheeler-Bennett made inquiries, he was informed that the file had been extracted from Marburg on the orders of Eisenhower himself. He and Sontag agreed that their positions as independent editors would be “rendered ludicrous” if they allowed documents to be withheld. Furthermore, the resignation of distinguished historians because of perceived government interference would defeat the object of the entire exercise, as its fundamental principles were impartiality and editorial freedom.

  As Wheeler-Bennett appreciated, the Americans would want to publish this material, more so given media interest and speculation, and to resist would only make the British look “very foolish.”

  His friend Robert Bruce Lockhart recorded in his diary of November 23, 1946, that Wheeler-Bennett did not intend to “accept interference unless it came direct from King George.” A week later, Bruce Lockhart was told by Foreign Office mandarin Orme Sargent that “Jack Wheeler-Bennett has not a free hand on the documents. That is a matter for HMG [His Majesty’s Government] to decide.”

  In Wheeler-Bennett’s narrative he contacted Under-Secretary Orme Sargent at the Foreign Office, who was aware of the file’s existence but “horrified at its disappearance.” He said they must speak to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who, as has been described, had tried manfully to have the file destroyed from the moment it had been discovered at the end of the war. After listening silently as Wheeler-Bennett explained the ramifications of the file’s disappearance, Bevin said: “This is a ’ot potato. We’ve got to get the file back, and you must ’ave a look at it and decide with your American friend what to do with it.” He added that they would have to tell the palace about this matter. The next day Orme Sargent and Wheeler-Bennett went to Buckingham Palace to meet with Sir Alan Lascelles, who assured them that the king would share the position of the foreign secretary.

  As Wheeler-Bennett recalled: “The important consequence of this curious incident was that the Marburg File was speedily returned to our custody and we duly included the bulk of its contents in the Series D, Vol X.”

  In fact the file, with the approval of George VI, was returned to Berlin, where the initial sifting of the documents was undertaken, in July 1947. Before the king agreed to this measure, he warned the man at the centre of this secret wrangle, his brother the Duke of Windsor. According to Godfrey Thomas, the duke’s private secretary when he was Prince of Wales, he made light of the whole affair, “suggesting that the German Ambassador was making up a good story on the lines that he thought would please his chief, von Ribbentrop.”

  Yet the infamous file was not dispatched to Berlin without a last-minute attempt by the royal family’s unlikely champion, man of the people Ernest Bevin, to have it destroyed. The foreign secretary, with his bluff speech, ill-fitting suit, and hand firmly stuck in his pocket even when greeting the sovereign, became a familiar figure shambling along the red-carpeted corridors of Buckingham Palace. His “call a spade a spade” way of speaking was easily mocked, as in Wheeler-Bennett’s “’ot potato” but it hid a degree of guile and cunning.

  In March 1947, according to George VI’s biographer Sarah Bradford, Bevin quixotically tilted at this diplomatic windmill once again. In Moscow for the foreign ministers’ meeting, he sent an urgent
request to his opposite number, American secretary of state General George Marshall, about the Windsor file.

  In turn, Marshall sent a top secret “Personal, For Your Eyes Only” telegram to Dean Acheson in the State Department. Dated March 15, midnight, it read:

  Bevin informs me that Department or White House has on file a microfilm copy of a paper concerning the Duke of Windsor. Bevin says only other copy was destroyed by Foreign Office, and asks that we destroy ours to avoid possibility of a leak to great embarrassment of Windsor’s brother [George VI]. Please attend to this for me and reply for my eyes only.

  A search has so far failed to locate the reply, though it is known that Acheson did send a telegram two days later.

  As Bevin had already been formally informed that neither the State Department nor any government official could destroy official documents without a vote of Congress, it seems like the last vain throw of the dice, an instinctive act of deference from a loyal British subject to his sovereign.

  For the time being, British policy shifted from destroying the Windsor file to delaying or obstructing publication. This was a perfectly legitimate position to take. When Wheeler-Bennett had accepted the position of editor in chief, he had breezily told the Oxford Mail in early 1947: “We shall begin somewhere about the year 1937 and then come forward to the end of the Nazi regime. I think we shall then work backwards from 1937 to the Bismarck era.”

  Given the prodigious amount of material the historians needed to wade through for every volume, it would be several years before the Allied academics arrived at the summer of 1940, when the German ambassadors to Spain and Portugal sent von Ribbentrop potentially embarrassing reports about the duke and duchess and their defeatist views on the war.