One of the most discussed events of the 1930s was the abdication of England’s King Edward VIII in 1936. The official reason given for the abdication was the King’s infatuation with the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. At that time, a divorced woman could not become queen but there were other reasons behind the drive to force Edward to abdicate.
Q You once spoke of papers or files you had on the Duke of Windsor. How extensive are these files? Are they originals or filmed copies and could we look at them?
M They are extensive. A number of papers are original. Many are on film and, of course, you can look at them. I said “look,” however, not take away.
Q The Duke is no longer a figure of any importance except in society, but there is some interest in his connections with your side before and during the war.
M It was intended that the Duke become an object of interest before and during the war. The Duke’s real power ceased the day he abdicated, but Hitler considered him a person that could be used to create a certain impression with the British. The Duke was forced off the throne, not because of his lady friend but because there were powerful people in England who viewed his pro-Hitler attitude with real anger and some fear. Crystal Night had not happened yet, but it became very obvious to Jewish groups both in England and your country, that their co-religionists in Germany were being mistreated and forced out of the country. I would imagine that this created quite a bloc of anti-Hitler persons in the British banking and finance community. Couple this unpleasant anti-Semitism with Hitler’s barter system that bypassed the British banking system with its high-interest international loans, and you can understand the anger and fear directed at the new King. He didn’t help matters at all by his pro-Hitler statements and the machinations of his German relatives. After all, the Windsor family had been Saxe-Coburgs until the 1914 war and were related to all the ruling families of Europe.
Q The Battenbergs changed their names to Mountbatten at the same time, as I recall.
M Oh yes, that was another matter. The Battenbergs were left-handed relatives of the Prince of Hesse. You see, Prince Alexander of Hesse married a Jewess in the 19th century and the family could not allow their descendants to be Hessens so they created the title of Battenberg. That’s why I called them left-handed Hessens. If I recall, the current head of their house married the granddaughter of Ernst Cassel, the banker of Edward the Seventh. Also a Jew. But the Mountbattens are not important at all, although they too helped push their cousin off the throne, and for the same reason that the London bankers did. The Simpson woman was only an excuse. The new King was as feebleminded as the rest of the family and could barely speak. If it wasn’t for his wife, I doubt if he would have enough sense to remove his clothes before he took a bath. I must say that I have very little regard for royalty. They mostly seem to be inbred imbeciles who marry their cousins and produce children with the intellects of chickens.
Q The Queen is Scots.
M Yes, and a change from the idiots. Her uncle, by the way, was in touch with us before the war and was even more interested in Hitler than the King. A bit of history for you to chew on.
Now to get back to the Duke. Although as King he had very little actual power, he could and did see all the important political dispatches and could and did pass much of this on to our ambassador in London. I don’t think you could consider this as treasonable, but was from the King’s view, helpful to his German friends. We, of course, were most helpful to him, but rumors that we pushed the present Duchess into his bed are nonsense. In the first place, the Duke preferred soldiers, and in the second, I doubt if he and the Duchess ever slept together. From observing them and from reading many pages of reports, it appears that she was his husband but not in a sexual sense.
I met both of them at a reception in Berlin in October of 1937 and actually had an interesting conversation with the Duke. The wife, of course, could not speak German, but the Duke spoke it fluently, if a little stilted. He was actually a good and entertaining conversationalist and she was sitting near him, staring very intently at both of us. Someone had told the Duke that I was head of the Secret Police and he wanted to ask me some questions about the British Secret Service. The Duke felt that after his departure from England, he was constantly under surveillance by one agency or another, probably MI 6. This of course, was true, and I discussed this with him. It was not easy for the British to keep up with him in Germany because we watched their agents as closely as they watched the Duke. Of course, we used that too, and I will explain this a little later.
I found the Duke to be reasonably intelligent but not entirely normal in that he seemed to be obsessed with his rather masculine wife and quite confused in his mind about the forces that compelled him to abdicate. I was under orders from Himmler, once he found that the Duke wished to have a talk with me, to be very careful what I said. I was told that the Duke was a valuable tool and not to frighten him but to convince him that we were his real friends. That was not difficult to do because that is what the Duke really believed, so I gave him just some small background information to confirm his suspicions.
His closest associate, one Bedaux, had been on our side in 1914 and had been engaged in espionage in your country then. Later, there was a falling out with him because of some embezzlements of our funds, but then we all kissed and made up.
Q I know about him. We had him killed during the war in an internment camp. Too dangerous and he knew far too much about certain things.
M I knew that. Were you involved in that?
Q No, not personally, but one of my superiors was and he told me later.
M You people are so indiscreet after all. But then, so was the Duke. In 1937, the Duke had no access to state papers and was not wanted in England anymore. The new Queen hated him for pushing her dim-witted husband onto the throne and there was very bad blood between the brothers after that.
Q You have such a negative view of the British.
M You know that I have an even more negative view of the Soviets, but to be polite, I have said very little about your country except to discuss your habit of hanging black people, the slaughter of the red Indians and a few other small matters. At least in your country, if you get an idiot elected as President, you can always throw him out after four years. Of course, Roosevelt would still be in office if his brain hadn’t given way.
Q Roosevelt was very popular in some circles.
M Certainly, and especially in Moscow. Now the Duke was an albatross around the neck of the British and I am sure they would have killed him if it wouldn’t have been such a scandal. And they did watch him like an eagle watching a hare.
Q You said Hitler used him. Can you explain that?
M Certainly. We were reading British agent radio traffic and decided that, as the situation heated up in Europe, the British were afraid that we might invade them, and that we would use the Duke as a figurehead King to maintain order in England. That being the case, we played on that piano for quite a while. The Duke and Duchess were received in Germany with much pomp and ceremony. Why, when their train pulled into the Berlin station, there were only a few minor officials from the British embassy on the platform, but an entire regiment of our top people in full uniform. Oh yes, the Duke and his wife were given the special treatment with receptions, visits to various leaders and so on. This infuriated those in England who had forced the King out, and naturally they began to whisper and chatter to each other in their clubs that we were planning to put the Duke back on the throne someday, and his wife next to him. In those days, I had little direct contact with Hitler, not like later. But Himmler explained the matter very clearly when he said that the Fuhrer was using the Windsors as a card to be played when the time came.
Q And the time came when the war broke out?
M Yes, that is when the Windsor card was played, along with others. You should understand that Hitler was not anti-British at all. He admired England for her achievements, and in fact, did not want war with her at all. He felt that after the Polish campaign was over with such brilliant and obvious military success that England and France would negotiate with him. All he wanted was to be left alone and had no intentions of attacking either country. This was not to be and it became very obvious that no negotiations would ever be possible, especially with Churchill in power.
Q I am sure Churchill did not want to see the defeat of England or loss of her territories.
M I am sure he did not, but then Hitler had no interest in taking anything away from England or France either. He only wanted to call a halt and decide if he would have to move against Russia or not. So to force the British to the table, he went to great lengths to plan—obviously plan—an invasion of England. From a military standpoint, such an invasion would have succeeded but would have had no practical point to it. Shipping was massed in channel ports; fake stories were spread in neutral capitals about this invasion; and we even printed up thousands of operational maps and books for our troops that we leaked to known British agents and unfriendly diplomats. At the same time, we were instructed to make it appear as if the Duke would be our puppet ruler in a defeated England, and this we did. It had some effect because the royal family was making serious plans to flee to Canada. The King wanted to go at once but his wife held him back. As I said, she is a formidable woman, but then, of course, she is not a drooling Coburg cousin.
Q There have been stories that the Duke supplied your side with valuable military information he obtained while attached to the staff of the British forces in France. Comment?
M Yes he did. He supplied very important information about troop positions and joint British-French military plans. This was very vital material and permitted our successful breakthrough by Sedan in 1940. However, the Duke did not give this material to us. He went on leave to Paris and told Mr. Bedaux everything. The Duke was that way, you see. He had been raised in a hothouse with absolutely no contact with the real world and as heir to a powerful throne, felt above politics and most people. He could not understand the interaction of people and duplicity was certainly not one of his characteristics. When I spoke with him in 1937, the Duke simply had no guile at all with me and in a sense, I rather felt sorry for him because he would never be able to understand the world outside the walls of Buckingham Palace. I have known a number of lesser royalty in my career and most of them were impractical people with no knowledge of anything except court gossip and protocol.
Mr. Bedaux went straight to Holland, then neutral, and told them everything at the Embassy. In that sense, the Duke was not a traitor to his country but a totally inexperienced man with a strong anger against his family for their slights to him. To my knowledge, he never gave military information to us nor probably would ever have done so. The Duke was not anti-English, only outraged about his treatment. We were told to call his wife “Royal Highness” although this was forbidden in England. This pleased both of them very much, which after all, was the idea. And that was made public which further enraged his enemies at home.
Q And these papers prove all that?
M I would say so, although an unfriendly person might take matters out of context and make a case that the Duke was a Nazi. He was not, of course, but he was very pro-Hitler, and one could say, very much proThird Reich. The other thing is that the Duke did not like Jews at all and they obviously did not like him. But, they were far more clever than he was and knew how to stay carefully in the background when weaving their plots.
You must understand that if I were a Jew, and especially a Jewish banker, in England in those days, I too, would be angry and frightened about a pro-Hitler king and certainly would want someone else on the throne. What they finally got was a human nothing on the throne and a maniac as his prime minister. In the end, the war destroyed their financial empire and I suppose our forging of their money didn’t retard the progress. Most people never think very far ahead in the end. Even if the King wore a swastika around his neck and had a picture of Hitler over his bed, he had no real power in England and would certainly have been blocked from any adventures of a real pro-German nature.
Q There has been some speculation about the Duke’s final days in Spain and Portugal. There was belief that you were going to seize him or that he was going to go to Germany so as to await his cross-Channel return to England as King.
M That was the idea, of course. We did contribute to this heavily, but I know from the top that Hitler never had any intention of invading England, and that the Duke was only a pawn on the board. Since there was to be no invasion, there was no real need to have the Duke in the meat locker to drag out when we needed him. But the British believed we were going to invade, and the British believed our planted stories that we were holding final negotiations with the Duke and acted on these beliefs. Basically, the British government warned him discreetly that if he didn’t go to the Bahamas as Governor, they would kill his wife and so he went. That was a relief in Berlin, because if the Duke had fled to Germany, what in God’s name would we have done with him? Put him in an old castle like the Belgian King and listen to his stream of complaints about the food and the service?
Q You know that the British went to great trouble to get as many of the files as they could find after the war. A grand hunt after all that material. We had some and gave it to them and so on.
M Did you ever see any of it?
Q We copied everything, even though Eisenhower forbade it, and I once looked at some of it. I would say you were correct when you say it could be taken several ways.
M I personally don’t care about the Duke one way or the other, but in my professional opinion, he was only a vain, foolish man who was angry but certainly not any kind of a deliberate traitor. An accidental one, perhaps, but not deliberate. His sun has long set in any case and the field is now open for the journalists to speculate in.
Q The British become so obsessive and secretive about such simple matters that I don’t wonder that everyone connected with them sees conspiracies around every corner. Latrine rumor, as we used to call it, credits the Duke with being a Nazi spy, but on balance, I suspect you are right.
M Of course, I am right. Naturally, if I were ordered to prepare a paper for Hitler that said the Duke was a suspected communist, I would do so without hesitation. And don’t raise your eyebrows when I say things like that. I am sure you, and especially your Mr. Dulles, have done the same thing. You say what you are told to say and forget everything else. Isn’t that correct? But in private—in private—we say what we really think, don’t we?
Q I would say so. But, not to be offensive, are you always truthful with me?
M When it suits both of us, quite naturally. I mean, my comments on Windsor have no other motivation than to recall my impressions. You aren’t going to arrest him and there is no more Hitler for him to support, so his bad judgment will pass into history suitably embellished to suit some third-rate author and his publisher.
I rather wonder what someone would do about my history? I would be depicted as a monster who rushed around Europe pulling out old women’s toenails with a hot pincer if the wrong person decided to discuss my activities. I can just imagine a communist writer discussing me in print. You ought to make some notes and do a flattering work on me. I might give you the Czar’s cigar box if you did. On the other hand, if you even mentioned my name outside of your office, they would be dragging the lake to try and find you. Or at least you would go to a very unpleasant Canossa indeed, and have to stand on the ice with your bare feet until you froze to the ground. Popes and conventional wisdom have the capacity for great cruelty.
Q I would much rather write about Monet.
M Well, you can have Monet. Give me Durer. Now, is there any more curiosity about the Duke?
Q Not on my part. But there are those who would like to review your files on him. He was forbidden entrance to the United States during the war, you know. Hoover was involved with this, but Roosevelt ordered the ban.
M What, in God’s name, could the Duke and Duchess do in your country?
Q I can’t discuss that here.
M Now here, you want all kinds of information from me—information that will take me a considerable time to locate—and you won’t mention why the Duke was forbidden to come into your country.
Q It’s nothing important. Churchill asked Roosevelt to keep the Duke and his wife out. He thought they might say things about him if he were away from the strict control he had in the Bahamas. Nothing more than that.
M You see how simple answers are in the end? Then we have finished with the Duke and the Duchess and we can stop now for some coffee and rolls.
World History
