CHANNEL 4'S NAZI SHAME
Michael Bloch, leading authority on the
wartime Duke of Windsor casts doubt on a TV show's sensational 'new' documentary
`HOUSE OF WINDSOR'S Nazi shame', blared a front page article in last Sunday's Observer. 'Documents and interviews revealed today expose for the first time how King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, plotted to betray his country to the Nazis — and how the royal family has spent half a century trying to cover up its shameful past.' The following day's Guardian, under the banner headline 'The Traitor King', adds that 'new evidence reveals how the Duke of Windsor aban- doned the country during the darkest days of the war and plotted with Hitler's hench- men to regain the throne. His near-treason [sic] has been covered up by the Establish- ment . . . but now the facts are out.' All this is to trail a two-part television film which is to be shown on Channel 4 this week and next. During the film, hardly five minutes go by without the announcer stressing the 'amazing lengths' to which `the Establishment' went in order to 'cover up' whatever is about to be said, which 'at last' can be 'revealed'.
Alas, these earth-shattering and hitherto covered-up 'revelations' turn out to be a plate of very cold mutton indeed. For 40 years or more, historians have been aware that Edward VIII held strongly pro-Ger- man views; that as King he argued against using force to prevent Hitler's remilitarisa- tion of the Rhineland; that, having abdi- cated to marry the woman he loved, he visited Nazi Germany with her for ten days in October 1937, and had tea with Hitler; that on the eve of war, he made various `appeals' for peace; that in 1940 he was in favour of ending the war by negotiations, and that he was sent to govern the Bahamas that year as it was thought advis- able to get him out of the way. In all this, of course, the Duke of Windsor was not alone. Large sections of the British ruling class, actuated by fear of war and commu- nism, had some sympathy with Nazi Ger- many before 1939. British public opinion as a whole was opposed to fighting Hitler over the Rhineland, and there were many prominent English men, including respectable Liberals, who visited Germany before the full horror of the Nazi regime became known. Appeasement of the dicta- tors was the official policy of the British Government up to the spring of 1939, and (as we now know) there were many in 1940 of all political shades who believed that peace talks might be necessary as a lesser evil to total defeat. Criticism of the Duke by serious historians has tended to concentrate on the fact that, while his views may have been commonplace and indeed understandable, it was his duty, as a prospective, reigning and former consti- tutional monarch, to keep his mouth shut, especially in wartime; and he was certainly indiscreet.
If there have indeed been 'sensational revelations on this subject which emerged after an attempted 'cover up', they took `What time do you call this?' place 38 years ago. In 1957, as part of the Allied publication of captured German diplomatic archives, a volume appeared containing an extraordinary telegraphic correspondence of July 1940 between Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister and his ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon. This shows that Ribbentrop urgently wished to get hold of the Duke of Windsor, who was then waiting in Portugal for the ship that was to take him to the Bahamas. What exactly he meant to do with him is not clear, but it is clear that the Foreign Minister had been encouraged by reports he had received of the ex-King's defeatist utterances and his continuing quarrel with his family in England over personal mat- ters. Ribbentrop did not imagine, however, that the Duke would simply go over to his country's enemies, and he instructed his envoys to put into operation a bizarre plan to lure the Duke into German hands by trickery: this involved getting Spanish friends of the Duke to visit him in Portugal. with the news that there was a British plot to assassinate him and that, for his safety, he ought to put himself under the protec- tion of the Spanish government. The Duke thanked the Spanish government for their offer of asylum; he made further indiscreet remarks to his Spanish friends concerning his views on the war and his family, and he asked for more details of the alleged assassi- nation plot. However, he finally sailed as planned for his colonial post. Just before he left, he was approached by other neutrals with German contacts who urged him to stay in Europe to play a role in restoring peace to the continent. The Duke replied in effect that it was his duty to go to the Bahamas, but that he must make himself available in the event of future peace negotiations.
When the question of releasing these documents first arose in 1953, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, wanted to prevent their publication to spare embar- rassment to the Duke, of whom he was an old friend. (This, so to speak, was the `cover up'.) The cabinet, however, eventu- ally decided that it would be wiser to pub- lish them. As Lord Salisbury, that staunch anti-appeaser of the 1930s, wrote to Churchill after reading the file: I must confess I find them very harmless. The Duke was subjected to heavy pressure from men, personal friends of his, who used every means of persuasion at their disposal, his personal resentment at his treatment by Eng- land, the Duchess's fears of the perils of a wartime journey across the Atlantic, and so on; yet he never allowed himself to be divert- ed from his determination to go to the Bahamas and take up an official position there. So far as the intense propaganda to which he was subjected influenced him at all, it was by skilfully flattering him into a belief that he could play an important part in restoring peace. But he never showed him- self, even in the biased reports of German agents, favourable to the victory of Germany. Personally, I should let the papers be pub- lished. I think that, by surpressing them, the
Government will only give the impression that they are more damaging than they in fact are.
During the Duke of Windsor's lifetime, historians wanted to share Salisbury's view of the published German documents. The Duke was more sinned against than sin- ning; at worst he was a fool rather than a knave. A change of emphasis occurred after the Duke's death, with the publica- tion in 1974 of Frances Donaldson's criti- cal biography. Her description of the Lisbon episode, which contains inaccura- cies, was designed to fit in with her general portrait of her subject as a weak, stupid and selfish man. Even she did not suggest he was a 'traitor', and her account trig- gered off a flood of sensationalist pseudo- history which appeared during the following years, with titles such as The Crown and the Swastika, depicting the Duke as a sinister Nazi plotter. The thesis of the Channel 4 film, no less than the facts it contains, represents nothing new.
In the early 1980s, I spent three years trying to unravel the intricacies of the Lis- bon episode. It was an exciting quest dur- ing which I discovered much interesting new documentary material, both official and personal, and succeeded in tracking down and interviewing various surviving individuals who had been involved in the drama. My book (Operation Willi, Weide- nenfeld, 1984) was principally about the German plotters and the mentality of spies and diplomats in wartime; but my research enabled me to reconstruct an almost day- by-day picture of the Duke's doings in Por- tugal during July 1940. I was therefore intrigued to see what 'shameful' and previ- ously 'covered-up' new facts and sources touching upon this episode would be `exposed for the first time' by the Channel 4 film. It shows some picturesque footage of the pink seaside villa where the Duke had lived in Portugal, interspersed with newsreels of marching Nazis and German bombers over London; it quotes some of the more lurid extracts of the correspon- dence published in 1957, accompanied by comments from Mrs Sarah Bradford and Mr John Costello. It quotes, with much fanfare, a 'newly released' minute of George VI's private secretary (which was in, fact published by Philip Ziegler in his official biography of the Duke of Windsor in 1990); and it interviews two ancient Spaniards, saying what they had said to me 13 years ago. It does not however produce any new fact or source.
However, the Observer and Guardian both mention a sensational 'new' docu- ment which, it appears, was discovered by the film-makers (though not apparently used by them) — a report which 'reveals a man bent on revenge for being ousted from the throne, prepared to use the Nazis to foment a revolution in wartime Britain that would topple the Churchill Govern- ment, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne with Queen Wallis at his side'. Its author, we are told, was 'an unnamed PVDE [Por- tuguese secret police] agent working under cover in the Duke's household, possibly as a secretary or bodyguard'. The Observer tells us that it has 'obtained a copy' of this report, of which, however, it only quotes a single line. The secret policeman records that, when local photographers tried to take a picture of the Duke while he was playing golf, 'the Duke ordered me to stop them, because he didn't want it to be said that he was playing golf while his nation was at war'. Perhaps in next week's issue, the Observer will edify us with further extracts from this intriguing document.
As for the film, it does not dwell for long on the Lisbon episode; in fact it does not dwell much on anything, as it spins out an elaborate conspiracy theory, the gist of which is as follows. Edward VIII aimed to make himself the pro-Nazi dictator of England. It was because of this that he had to go, and the crisis over his plan to marry Mrs Simpson was merely fabricated by the government in order to get rid of him. Within a year, he and his wife were in Germany, plotting his restoration to the throne with Rudolf Hess and other Nazi leaders. After that, he did his best to help his Nazi friends, first by being a prominent supporter of appeasement, and after war had broken out, by being willing to betray allied military secrets to the enemy. When France was defeated, he made his way to the Iberian Peninsula in order to get in touch with the Germans. He would have done a deal with them had he not been whisked off to the Bahamas. He urged Hitler to begin the bombing of Britain, and even from his distant colony, he intrigued and plotted to undermine the British war effort.
One thing must be said about this rub- bish: much of it is what Hitler and Ribben- trop actually believed. It is strange to see Channel 4 peddling a Nazi fantasy to a gullible British public, and one feels sorry for the' serious historians whose names have been used to lend a veneer of respectability to this farrago of innuendo and supposition in which one searches in vain for a single new historical fact or original idea.
The author has written five books on the Duke of Windsor, including Operation Willi: the Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor, 1940, (Weidenfeld, 1984) Last week's Spectator Wine Club, the Avery's Christmas Offer, omitted to include the Access/Visa order in its form. Payment for the wine may, of course, be made by cheque or Access/Visa and for this reason we shall run the Offer again next week.
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