Wenner-Gren had been busy pushing for a negotiated peace since meeting the Duke in October 1937. For the previous eighteen months he had been scuttling between Roosevelt, Goering and Chamberlain and had tried to accompany the American under-secretary of state Sumner Welles on his 1940 tour exploring peace feelers. Welles instinctively distrusted him, telling a colleague, ‘I have not a shred of evidence, but I have a very strong feeling that this man acts as a spy for the German government.’23
On 17 October, Wenner-Gren arrived in the Bahamas from South America, writing in his diary the next day about the Duke, presumably after a telephone call: ‘Extremely pleasant and interesting conversation . . . He has a good memory and remembers very well our conversation in Paris.’24
The next day Wenner-Gren called on the Duke and on 25 October, after a day together inspecting projects on Hog Island, Wenner-Gren and his wife dined with the Windsors at Government House. ‘Pity that political considerations prevent closer social intercourse. Extremely interesting discussion,’ wrote Wenner-Gren in his diary that night.25
Within a week the Wenner-Grens were back at Government House for dinner. It was the beginning of a close friendship with benefits for both parties. The Duke saw Wenner-Gren as an ally for the economic development of the island and an important employer, and someone in this backwater with whom he could discuss the state of the world. Wenner-Gren was only too pleased to have this important contact.
Wenner-Gren had first come to the Bahamas in 1938, attracted by no income tax and because it was a useful base for his operations in North and South America. He had already founded the Bank of the Bahamas – affiliated to the Stein Bank of Cologne – and developed a 700-acre estate on Hog Island, which he had named Shangri-La. Here he had entertained Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and had created gardens, modelled on those at Versailles, filled with exotic birds, flowers and trees, employing over a thousand labourers in the process. By the spring and summer of 1941, the Hog Island project employed over 15 per cent of Nassau’s total workforce.
But Wenner-Gren’s activities caused concern. There were rumours that his role was to develop links with South America on behalf of the Axis powers – in particular Mexico, which apart from its oil and mineral potential, had an important role if the United States, on its border, entered the war – and that Wenner-Gren’s new hurricane harbour was to provision German vessels.
In September 1940 an Anglo-American agreement had been signed, exchanging fifty US destroyers in return for bases in Bermuda and the Bahamas. The islands were now taking on an important strategic significance. In November 1940, Leslie Heape, the Colonial Secretary and in effect Deputy Governor, met the US consul John Dye, worried about aerial photographs being taken by Wenner-Gren’s architect of Mayaguana, an island earmarked as an American base. It was decided aerial photography should henceforth be banned.
‘Axel Wenner-Gren has since November 1, 1939 been constantly steaming in and out of Nassau Harbor on his yacht, equipped with high-powered radio antennae,’ noted Department of State official G.A. Gordon to State Department colleague Fletcher Warren on 20 November. ‘This yacht is manned by ex-Swedish Navy officers, all of whom, according to my informant, are definitely and professedly pro-Nazi.’26
It was on his yacht Southern Cross that the Windsors made their first visit to the United States after arriving in the Bahamas. The Munargo, the regular passenger boat between Miami and Nassau, had cancelled its sailings and Wenner-Gren offered to transport the couple when Wallis needed dental care for an infected tooth. They left on 9 December, almost exactly four years since the Duke had signed the Instrument of Abdication.
It was the Duke’s first visit to the country since 1924, and hers since 1933, and now possible after Roosevelt had romped to victory in the November presidential elections. A crowd of 12,000 awaited them – and their twenty-seven pieces of luggage – on the quayside, with a further 8,000 lining the streets to St Francis Hospital.
But Wenner-Gren was confined to the port as a suspected subversive and the FBI were monitoring their movements. ‘Before England and Germany became war enemies, this couple visited Hitler and are known to be the Nazi’s friends,’ ran an FBI report. ‘More recently in the Boston Transcript, its foreign correspondent Leland Stowe had a big story of their strong ties with von Ribbentrop and Hitler, especially Mrs Simpson-Windsor.’27
All this was set against continuing German peace moves. In December, Adolf Berle noted in his diary that he had seen an FBI report that ‘Sir William Wiseman and Fritz Wiedemann, the German Consulate General, were cooking up some peace moves together. Wiseman expects to do it through his contacts with Lord Halifax bypassing Lothian.’28 Also involved as an intermediary was Stephanie Hohenlohe, Wallis’s former neighbour in Bryanston Court, a close friend of Bedaux and Goering and described by Berle as ‘an old hand at international intrigue.’29
Throughout the autumn of 1940, Wiseman had held a series of meetings with James Mooney, the head of General Motors Overseas, to discuss brokering a negotiated peace with Germany. Also involved was the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman. At the beginning of December, it had even been suggested that the Duke of Windsor be brought in under cover of playing golf at Cat Cay on 6 January.30
On 12 December, the British ambassador in Washington died – as a Christian Scientist, Philip Lothian refused simple medical treatment that would have saved his life. The Duke, who had been lobbying London and Washington to succeed him, took the opportunity to hold a press conference. It was a further irritation for the British authorities.
* * *
Back on the island, the Windsors were able to move into the refurbished Government House. Until then they had been living at the twenty-room Westbourne owned by Sir Harry Oakes – the baronetcy had been given for financing the rebuilding of St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner in 1939 – the richest resident in the Bahamas. A stocky and bluff man, who had made a fortune from gold mines in Canada, he had arrived in the Bahamas in the early 1930s, attracted by the absence of income tax and a 2 per cent inheritance tax.
Oakes was the greatest property owner on New Providence – at one point it was estimated he owned a third of the island – and had been elected first to the House of Assembly and the Legislative Council.31 He owned the Moorish pink stucco British Colonial Hotel, where almost all the employees were people of colour, and he had paid for, amongst much else, the airport, a waterworks plant and botanical garden, had developed a bus line to bring workers from Grant’s Town, and given over $1 million to local charities.32 A generous benefactor, he was to be an important ally for the Duke.
A few days after returning, the Duke met Roosevelt – in Bahamian waters on board the Tuscaloosa inspecting potential naval bases in the Caribbean, as part of the Lend-Lease Act – to discuss the bases, the economic future of the islands and how the Civilian Conservation Corps, an unemployment relief programme, could be adapted for the Bahamas. It was to be the first of a dozen meetings between the two men during the war.
Almost immediately on his return from the United States, the Duke gave a two-hour interview on 20 December to the editor of the popular American weekly magazine Liberty Magazine, Fulton Oursler, who was a close friend of Roosevelt and professed isolationist. According to Oursler’s son, after the interview, Vyvyan Drury, the Duke’s ADC, asked Oursler to take a message back to the President: ‘Tell Mr Roosevelt that if he will make an offer of intervention for peace, that before any one in England can oppose it, the Duke of Windsor will instantly issue a statement supporting it and that will start a revolution in England and force peace.’33
Three days later, Oursler saw Roosevelt at the White House – White House logs show the meeting took place between 10.50 and 11.40, though no official records of the meeting exist – to pass on the message. Oursler was shocked to discover ‘that agents of the Colonial Secretary had been listening to what the Duke had said and to what Drury had said to me, and that this report had been
sent to the British Embassy and the embassy had sent it to Roosevelt. Roosevelt knew exactly what I had come to tell him before I opened my mouth.’34
The Duke’s friendship with Wenner-Gren was causing increasing alarm in both British and American official circles. ‘Mr Hopkins mentioned the deplorable effect which the Duke’s recent cruise with Mr Wenner-Gren had had in America, and he afterwards told me that he thought Lord Lloyd ought to know that any claim by Mr Wenner-Gren to intimacy or friendship with members of the United States Administration was quite unfounded,’ Churchill’s private secretary John Colville minuted to Christopher Eastwood, the private secretary of the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs. ‘He was considered a dangerous pro-Nazi and all his activities were closely watched.’35
The Duke was warned by the Colonial Secretary to keep his distance from ‘Goering’s Pal’ and shown an MI6 report produced in November 1939 for Sir Charles Dundas, the previous Governor, himself alarmed at Wenner-Gren’s activities. ‘He may not be impressed by it, but he will at least have been given a further warning!’36 The Duke refused to believe his officials, replying, ‘He is a very prominent and important resident of the Bahamas engaged in various development schemes most beneficial to this Colony and giving vast amount of employment. I regard him as deserving of all possible encouragement.’37
The Colonial Office began to accumulate large files on Wenner-Gren and his plans. One entitled ‘Development and Wenner-Gren Bahamas 1941’ stated: ‘Material about Mr Wenner-Gren is contained in 13131/39/40 Defence (Secret) from which it will be seen that there are considerable misgivings about Mr W’s attachment to our cause and indeed some hints that he may sub rosa be engaged in acts of economic warfare directed against the Allied cause.’38
A State Department memo now drew attention to the fact that both Wenner-Gren and the Duke were:
seeing a great deal of prominent and influential American businessmen, particularly from the mid-Western states, where a strictly commercial point of view would appear to prevail in business circles with regard to relations between the United States and Germany. There would appear to be certain indications that Wenner-Gren, as well as the Duke of Windsor, is stressing the need for a negotiated peace at this time on account of the advantages which this would present to American business interests. This angle, I think, should be closely observed.39
The MI5 officer Guy Liddell discussed Wenner-Gren with his opposite number in the American embassy in London on 17 January 1941. ‘I had a talk with Herschel afterwards about Axel Wenner-Gren. He said that if I would give him a note, he would send it over to Washington DC by bag and made the suggestion that somebody should say something privately to the Duke of Windsor.’40
A few days later Christopher Eastwood, Lord Lloyd’s private secretary, wrote to Churchill’s private secretary, John Martin, in a letter marked ‘Secret’, ‘that the Americans should arrange for a hint to be dropped to the Duke from the American side. They could probably arrange for one of their agents to visit the Bahamas.’41 Churchill immediately agreed to this, but the friendship continued. ‘Long confidential discussions with Windsor; in many respects we share the same opinions,’ wrote Wenner-Gren in his diary on 3 February 1941.42
One of the concerns was that the brother of the new President of Mexico, General Maximino Ávila Camacho, was due to arrive in Nassau early in February to discuss with Wenner-Gren a huge investment project in Mexico. The State Department were suspicious of the Swede’s intentions. ‘I think it is highly important that we have more than the customary routine reports of Mr Wenner-Gren’s activities,’ minuted Sumner Welles to Fletcher Warren.43
Camacho, as governor of the province of Puebla, was officially associated with the Mexican government, with whom diplomatic relations had been broken in 1938 over the expropriation of British oil properties. The Duke, as a representative of the British government, should not have met him but, as a favour to Wenner-Gren, he entertained the Mexican for two hours at Government House.
The meeting, which also involved a scheme to circumvent foreign exchange rules by sending monies to Mexico City, was reported to the authorities by Montgomery Hyde, an MI6 officer, who by chance was doing a security audit of Government House. A check revealed that one of those in the sixteen-member Mexican delegation was on an FBI blacklist.44
At the end of January 1941, a British Intelligence report stated:
some sources have stated that he had shown definitely pro-German sympathies and it was also reported that he had arranged shipments of oil to Germany in the early part of this year. More recent reports have alleged that he is preparing an opposition movement in America for the overthrow of the present Swedish Government in favour of a National Socialist government which would collaborate closely with Germany. Wenner-Gren is also said to be attempting to form in America a cartel to control the wood trade . . . It is known that the United States authorities suspect Wenner-Gren of being in close touch with Nazi leaders . . .45
A further area of concern was the simultaneous arrival in the Bahamas of Alfred P. Sloan, the head of General Motors, and his colleague James D. Mooney.46 On 5 February, James B. Stewart, the American consul general in Zurich, sent a highly confidential memo to Fletcher Warren headed ‘Alleged Nazi Subversive Activities in the US of James D Mooney’:
Mr Eduard Winter, formerly General Motors distributor in Berlin, and at present this company’s representative in Paris, acts as courier in delivering communications from Mr James D Mooney, president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, to high German officials in Paris. Mr Winter has a special passport which enables him to travel freely between occupied and unoccupied France. Mr Mooney is known to be in sympathy with the German government, and the persons who supplied this information believe that the General Motors official is transmitting information of a confidential nature through Mr Winter.47
There were business, as well as ideological reasons, behind Mooney’s activities. Since Hitler had come to power in 1933, General Motors had invested over $100,000,00048 in Germany – money that had been diverted from car to tank production – with Sloan arguing ‘an international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management or the political beliefs of the country in which it is operating.’49
On 4 March, George Messersmith, now the US ambassador in Cuba, filed a report on Mooney describing him ‘as mad as any Nazi and is one of those who nourishes the hope that when the United States may turn fascist he will be our Quisling or our Laval.’50
On the same day, John Dye, the US consul in the Bahamas, sent a memo marked ‘Confidential’ to the State Department saying that, according to Mrs William Leahy, wife of the former Puerto Rican governor, Admiral Leahy, Wallis had been making secret visits to San Juan in Puerto Rico. The Windsors were told by the British embassy in Washington not to travel to the island, where its President, Rafael Trujillo, had important Nazi connections.
Meanwhile, suspicions continued about the activities of the Windsors. Valentine Lawford wrote in his diary on 19 February, ‘Charles Peake has just written to Jim Thomas from Washington to say that the Windsors are hard at work putting out propaganda against AE and working for appeasement.’51
In March, the interview given the previous December appeared in Liberty. In it, the Duke implied that Britain could not defeat Germany and would have to reach a negotiated settlement with Hitler. ‘America will help Britain more by not engaging in actual fighting but remaining a keystone for the new world which must be created when the war is over. There will be a new order in Europe, whether imposed by Germany or Britain.’52 It threatened to scupper America coming into the war.
Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘The Duke of Windsor has given an interview to a magazine in the USA in which he pretty frankly disclaims all chance of a British victory. We decide not to use it for the present, so as to avoid suffocating this tender seedling of reason.’53
<
br /> Valentine Vivian, the deputy head of MI6, immediately briefed Kenneth Robinson in the Colonial Office how it ‘infuriates heads of news services who have seen advance copy. Article contains useful ammunition for appeasement group.’54 The article was discussed with the head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies, and Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, but it was ‘decided that it was too late to act.’55
Churchill, who had been passed a press summary and had also briefed the Palace, immediately sent a telegram to the Duke marked ‘Personal and Secret’:
Exception is taken also in the United States to Your Royal Highness’s interview recently published in Liberty, of which it is said that the language, whatever was meant, will certainly be interpreted as defeatist and pro-Nazi, and by implication approving of the isolationist aim to keep America out of the war . . . I must say it seems to me that the views attributed to Your Royal Highness have been unfortunately expressed by the journalist Mr Oursler. I could wish indeed that Your Royal Highness would seek advice before making public statements of this kind. I should always be ready to help as I used to in the past.56
The Duke, who had seen and approved the article before publication, now attempted to distance himself from it, claiming to Lord Moyne, the new Colonial Secretary, that ‘many views and opinions expressed in the Liberty article were words put into my mouth as is so often the case in American journalism.’57
He now went on the attack against Churchill:
The importance you attach to American magazine articles prompts me to tell you that I strongly resent and take great exception to the article in the magazine Life of 17th March entitled ‘The Queen’ in which the latter is quoted as referring to the Duchess as ‘that Woman’. I understand that articles about the Royal Family are censored in Britain before release and this remark is a direct insult to my wife and is I can assure you no encouragement in our efforts to uphold the monarchical system in a British colony.
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