Members of his staff were also making plans for their future. George and Rosa Wood, who had accompanied the Windsors on their flight from the South of France in June 1940 to the Bahamas, now wished to leave the islands. Their request was seen as a personal betrayal.
‘Our goodbye unfortunately was a very unpleasant one,’ wrote Rosa to her friend Edith Lindsay:
The moment the Windsors knew we were leaving they both suddenly became very nasty – made out that we were letting them down and only used them while it suited us. Almost funny when George worked for the Duke for four years without one penny pay, and I certainly did ALL to help Wallis. A very unpleasant ending and undeserved . . . it has somehow left us with a bitter and disillusioned feeling.31
On 15 March 1945, the Duke resigned as Governor of the Bahamas, several months before his term was officially up, but neither he nor Wallis could face another humid summer. It was dubbed the ‘Second Abdication’.32 Reviewing his tenure two days later, the Nassau Tribune wrote: ‘We know of many views held by His Royal Highness in which we are in strong disagreement, but we have grown to respect him because he is no politician – he doesn’t bluff and he is no hypocrite . . . We were sorry to see the Duke come to the Colony as its Governor. We are more sorry to see him leave.’33
The Duke’s record was mixed. Much of his time in his final months had been spent dealing with a commission into the behaviour of the unpopular police commissioner, Colonel Lancaster, and poor morale, pay and working conditions in the police.34 He had introduced various programmes that had brought employment, but had failed to introduce income tax, though London had supported such a measure, and there had been little political, economic or social reform. His own views on self-government and race are clear in a report he sent to Churchill in November 1942:
Those with experience of regions where the population is predominately coloured, realize that negroes in the mass are still children both mentally and morally and that while these liberal socialistic ideas of freedom and equality regardless of race or colour may sound fine theoretically, the forcing of these theories are to my way of thinking, both premature and dangerous so far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned . . .35
Wallis had done better, improving conditions whether the need for birth control, clinics for syphilitics, or canteens for soldiers, but there had been no official recognition in any Honours List.
‘Should it ever be considered that there was any sphere in which my experience could still be appropriately utilised, my services will be available,’ the Duke wrote to Churchill.36 But the offers were not forthcoming and the couple faced an uncertain future.
Their past would now catch up with them with a discovery in the Harz mountains.
1 Wallis to Bessie, 6 January 1944, Bloch, Secret File, p. 211.
2 Oliver Stanley to Churchill, 6 January 1944, CHAR 20/148/1, Churchill College Archives.
3 Alan Lascelles to John Martin, 30 May 1944, CHAR 20/148/37–9, Churchill College Archives.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Churchill to Lascelles, 27 June 1944, CHAR 20/148/44–5, Churchill College Archives.
8 He was succeeded by Earl Alexander of Tunis in April 1946.
9 King George VI to Churchill, 16 September 1944, Char 20/148/55, Churchill College Archives.
10 Without access to medical records, biographers have been unable to verify the type of cancer, or even if it was simply a major internal operation. Contemporary accounts refer only to her appendix being removed. In 1951 she was supposedly diagnosed with cancer of the ovaries or womb, but if so it is unlikely she would have lived to the age she did.
11 FBI report to Hoover, 4 September 1944, FBI File 62-76544-3.
12 Tamm to Hoover, 14 September, FBI file HQ 94-4-6650.
13 She did, however, make approaches to his cousin Louis Mountbatten in 1961 after the death of his wife Edwina. Doubleday died aged ninety-one in 1986.
14 American Mercury, June 1944.
15 American Mercury, June 1944.
16 Guardian, 25 September 1944.
17 Helen Worden papers, Box 79, Folder 3, Columbia University.
18 Edward Conroy to Hoover, 1 August 1944, FBI file HQ 65-311113.
19 23 November 1944, J. Donnelly, FO 371/38705, TNA.
20 Helen Worden papers, Box 79, Folder 3, Columbia University.
21 Helen Worden papers, Box 79, Folder 3, Columbia University.
22 Churchill to King George VI, 19 September 1944, CHAR 20/148/58, Churchill College Archives.
23 Oliver Harvey to Churchill, 8 November 1944, CHAR 20/148/64, Churchill College Archives, and FO 371/42121, TNA.
24 The Duke to Churchill, 3 October 1944, CHAR 20/148/5–7, Churchill College Archives.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Lascelles diary, 9 November 1944, Duff Hart-Davis (ed.), King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), p. 269.
28 Tommy Lascelles to John Martin, 20 December 1944, CHAR 20/148 28–9, Churchill College Archives.
29 John Martin to Churchill, 21 December 1944, CHAR 20/148 26, Churchill College Archives.
30 The Duke to Churchill, 12 February 1945, CHAR 20/202/2, Churchill College Archives.
31 Rosa Woods to Edith Lindsay, December 1944, Amory notes, CAP, Box 845, quoted Andrew Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 282
32 Lascelles noted that the Duke’s resignation letter to the Colonial Office contained ‘two bad grammatical errors’. Hart Davis, p. 299.
33 Nassau Tribune, 17 March 1945.
34 See CO 23/785, TNA.
35 The Duke to Churchill, 10 November 1942, CHAR 20/63 /84–93, Churchill College Archives.
36 The Duke to Churchill, 22 March 1945, CHAR 20/202/30, Churchill College Archives.
CHAPTER 16
The German Documents
On 12 April 1945, Captain David Silverberg, part of the American First Army, was advancing through the Harz Mountains when he came across an abandoned German vehicle with papers strewn around it. Stopping to look at the papers, he noticed that one was signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop. His interest was aroused and he quickly found whole archives located in local castles, including a copy of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact at the nearby Schloss at Degenershausen. It was the almost complete archive of the German Foreign Ministry and a verifiable treasure trove.
As the material was in the Soviet zone of occupation, it was quickly moved to Marburg Castle in the American zone – some 400 tons of documents transported in a convoy of 237 trucks in shuttles over several days – where they were examined by a team under Dr Ralph Perkins of the State Department and Colonel Robert Thomson of the Foreign Office.
There were to be other discoveries. Karl Loesch, the assistant to Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, had been captured and was now bartering his freedom for some sensational information. Loesch, who had an English mother and had been at Oxford, approached Thomson and, in return for safe passage, led him to a large country house above the village of Schönberg, twenty-five miles from Mühlhausen, telling him that a microfilm set of the ministry’s most confidential papers had been made by Ribbentrop in 1943.1
‘We had to descend, rather uncomfortably, a steep ravine banked with pine trees,’ wrote Thomson in his report. ‘Our guide halted at a certain spot where he and Captain Folkard with iron bars soon scraped the soil from a waterproof cape covering a large battered metal can. This Captain Folkard brought to the top of the declivity and placed under guard at the mansion.’2
There they found buried further microfilm files of the German Foreign Ministry in several metal suitcases. One series from State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker was entitled ‘German-British Relations’ and included a volume on the Duke of Windsor, which would come to be called the ‘Marburg File’. The material was immediately removed for safekeeping to SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). There the British, realising the sensitivity of the material, immediat
ely tried to prevent its sharing with the Americans, but two copies had already been made. One was now in the United States at the State Department.
The documents were flown to the SIS technical branch at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, where the Foreign Office’s historical adviser, Ernest Llewellyn Woodward, declared the Loesch cache authentic. On 30 May, the MI5 officer Guy Liddell noted in his diary:
Bill Cavendish-Bentinck rang me up about the case of Carl von Loesch, who was formerly attaché to Ribbentrop’s dienststelle in this country. He has come into possession of the secret archives of the German Foreign Office. They had been photographed and at the last moment it was decided to burn them. Von Loesch managed to bury them and the SD who were doing the job merely burned the empty boxes thinking they were burning the archives.3
By July 1945, the State Department had accumulated 750,000 documents and microfilm and by August, 1,200 tons of files were held under joint Anglo-American control inside the American zone. The Loesch material was especially important, showing the close collaboration between Hitler and Franco, the text of non-aggression agreements made between Germany and the Soviet Union immediately prior to the Second World War, and the revelation that Oswald Mosley had been funded by Mussolini’s government.
On 19 June, there was a meeting at the Foreign Office to discuss the ‘finds’ of German and Italian documents. ‘We are left with an embarrassingly large quantity of documents (far more than we expected), which throw light on every major aspect of German and Italian policy,’ stated one memo.4
‘The whole Windsor problem has recently been complicated by the discovery among the German Foreign Office archives at Marburg of a set of top-secret telegrams between Ribbentrop and Stohrer (German Ambassador in Madrid), regarding certain alleged overtures made to the Windsors by German agents when they were marooned in Portugal in May 1940,’ wrote Tommy Lascelles in his diary on 12 August:
If the Windsors’ reactions were as implied in this correspondence (which both Godfrey Thomas, to whom I showed them, and I agree cannot be wholly discounted; internal evidence indicates that there is at any rate, a substratum of truth in it), the result is, to say the least, highly damaging to themselves. Only one other copy of this set of telegrams is said to be in existence, and that is in American hands; the Foreign Office are taking steps to recover it. Meanwhile, I advised the King to discuss the whole thing with Bevin, and to urge him to let both Winston and Walter Monckton read the telegrams.5
The next day the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, advised the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee – a Labour government had just been elected – that ‘we should try to persuade the United States Government to co-operate with us in suppressing the documents concerned’ and felt ‘a disclosure would in my opinion do grave harm to the national interest.’6
On 15 August, VJ Day, Lascelles cornered Lord Halifax after the King and Queen appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace ‘and made him read the Marburg telegrams. I had actually received them from the Foreign Office the day before, but had deliberately withheld them from the King, thinking that they would certainly upset him and that he should not be troubled with them on the eve of making two major speeches.’7
Two days later, the Chiefs of Staff Joint Intelligence Sub Committee met to discuss the ‘Release of Captured German Documents’ and decided that publication should be deferred and the circulation of the documents restricted.8 On 20 August, the British sent an aide-mémoire formally asking the State Department to destroy the Windsor file or hand it over to the British for ‘safekeeping’, arguing, ‘It will be appreciated that the documents in question have no bearing on war crimes or on the general history of the war.’9
Guy Liddell of MI5 saw Lascelles at his club on 23 August, Liddell recording in his diary the next day, how he was then taken to:
look at certain papers on which he wanted advice. These papers were in fact German Foreign Office telegrams which had been found at Marburg . . . The telegrams in question were dated about June – July 1940 and sent by Stohrer and Hoyneigen-Huehne (sic), the German ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon respectively to Ribbentrop.10
He continued, ‘There were also some from Ribbentrop to the ambassadors and one I think either to or from Abetz. The fact that Abetz had something to do with the scheme subsequently revealed in the telegrams might suggest that Charles Bedaux was behind the whole thing.’11
Liddell added that ‘the Duke was staying in Lisbon as the guest of Esperito Santo Silva, the head of the bank of that name, which of course is known to us as an agency for the transmission of funds to German agents’:12
He clearly rather felt himself in the role of mediator, if his country had finally collapsed, but he did not think the moment opportune for any sort of intervention . . . Before the Duke left he fixed up, according to the telegrams, some kind of code with Espirito Santo Silva in order that he might fly back to Portugal from Florida if his intervention was required. It was further stated that about 15 August a telegram had been received from the Bahamas by Espirito Santo asking whether the moment had arrived.13
MI5 began to check telegrams sent during the period and decided to interrogate Walter Schellenberg, who was now in Allied custody. ‘Ernest Bevin is au fait with all the information given above and is endeavouring to recover the copies and films of the telegrams in question since, if by any chance they leaked to the American press, a very serious situation would be created. 14
He continued:
I gather that Censorship obtained during the early days of the war a telegram from Madame Bedaux to the Duchess in the Bahamas which seemed to be of a singularly compromising nature. There were a lot of blanks in this telegram but the sense of it seemed to be that the question of either the Duke’s mediation or of his restoration was discussed at some previous date and Madame Bedaux was anxious to know whether he was now prepared to say yes or no.15
Attlee decided to share details of the captured documents with Churchill, writing, ‘Although clearly little or no credence can be placed in the statements made, nevertheless I feel sure that you will agree that publication of these documents might do the greatest possible harm.’16 ‘I am in entire agreement with the course proposed by the Foreign Secretary and approved by you,’ Churchill replied the next day. ‘I earnestly trust it may be possible to destroy all traces of these German intrigues.’17
On 5 September, the 490-page dossier was signed out from Marburg on the orders of General Eisenhower, then the military governor of the American occupation zone, and sent to the Foreign Office. With the original at the Foreign Office and a microfilmed copy at the State Department, the only other existing copy of the Windsor file was the microfilm in British possession. It was promptly destroyed. The battle between British officialdom and American academia was about to begin.
On 27 August, David Harris, a Stanford University history professor seconded to the State Department as Assistant Chief of Central European Affairs, sent a memo to his boss John Hickerson, arguing that the Windsor file had historical value and the episode was a ‘significant chapter in German and Spanish manoeuvres toward a negotiated peace with the United Kingdom in 1940’, continuing that:
in my judgement the documents are an essential part of the diplomatic record of 1940. There is I believe a moral responsibility resting on this government to preserve all the records in its possession, an obligation which takes precedence over a tender feeling for the ultimate reputation of the Duke of Windsor.18
The arguments raged over the autumn until in October, the new American Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, informed Lord Halifax that for legal and historical reasons, the United States would not destroy the Marburg file, but provided a sop. The Windsor file would not be mentioned at the Nuremberg trials and ‘The British Government is assured, however, that the Department of State will take all possible precautions to prevent any publicity with respect to the documents in its possession relative to the Duke of Windsor without prior consultation with the B
ritish Government.’19
* * *
It was not only the Windsors whose private messages were being discussed. On 14 May, Tommy Lascelles recorded in his diary that Queen Mary, who had spent the weekend at Windsor, had sent for him ‘ostensibly to discuss the possibility of guarding against the heirs of the Duke of Cambridge making undesirable use of two boxes of his letters deposited in their names in Coutts bank.’ More importantly, he was alerted to the correspondence between the Duke of Connaught and his long-term mistress Leonie Leslie, Winston Churchill’s aunt.20
The King was exercised about what might happen to them and Sir Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian, was asked to rescue them.21 This was to be just one of several missions by members of the Royal Household during 1945 to ‘liberate’ papers and artifacts in Germany for ‘safe-keeping’.
At the beginning of August, Morshead and Anthony Blunt, recently appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and still a member of MI5, left by military plane for Germany. En route they went to Schloss Wolfsgarten, where they interviewed Prince Louis of Hesse.22 Officially, their mission was to recover correspondence at Schloss Kronberg between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who had married Frederick III of Prussia in 1858.
The 4,000 letters known as the ‘Vicky letters’ were kept at the schloss just outside Frankfurt, which was the main residence of George VI’s cousins, the von Hessen family. The letters contained details of Queen Victoria’s relationship from the age of fifteen with the Captain of the Royal Horse Guards, the 13th Lord Elphinstone, twelve years her senior, who, when the affair was discovered in 1836, was exiled to India as Governor of Madras.23
Guy Liddell noted in his diary on 15 August, ‘Anthony has returned from Germany and has brought with him Queen Victoria’s letters to the Empress Frederick. They are only on loan.’24 The 73-year-old Princess Margaret of Hesse had agreed to the transfer of the letters, but the problem was that the Americans were less keen to surrender any property. Kathleen Nash, the female American captain in charge of the castle, which had been commandeered as a social club, said she could not let any papers go as they were the property of the US Army. Whilst Blunt distracted her, the packing cases of documents were loaded onto a waiting lorry.25
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