Posted on 06/28/2002 6:14:57 PM PDT by Pokey78
President Roosevelt personally ordered covert surveillance on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during the second world war after receiving intelligence that the duchess had been passing secrets to a top Nazi with whom she was alleged to have had a tempestous affair, according to documents released to the Guardian by the FBI.
The damning dossier - released for the first time by the intelligence agency - shows that the main reason why the Americans thought the abdication of Edward VIII had taken place in 1936 was because the duchess fervently supported the Nazi regime and this was totally unacceptable to the then Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. The official view has always been that he abdicated to marry the person he loved but could not stay on the throne because she was a divorcee.
The papers show that the FBI was told by a minor German royal that Wallis Simpson was having an affair with Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was then German ambassador to Britain, while she was seeing the Duke of Windsor.
The minor royal, Duke Charles Alexander of Wurttemberg, who later became a Franciscan monk, said that "he knew definitely that von Ribbentrop, while in England, sent the then Wallis Simpson 17 carnations every day. The 17 supposedly represented the number of times they had slept together."
Later the FBI reported that while in exile in France, the duchess was in regular contact with von Ribbentrop, then promoted by Hitler to foreign minister, and was leaking secrets to him. They were then exiled again to the Bahamas.
The US intelligence operation began in 1941 when the couple came over from the Bahamas to spend a long weekend in Palm Beach, Florida, and were tailed by a FBI agent who had to fool both the Windsors and the US secret service on the orders of President Roosevelt. The FBI also reported that the duke was intoxicated and incapable for much of the time at the beginning of the war.
The papers also contain reports from a party in Paris that the duchess told guests that the duke was impotent and she was the only person who could satisfy his sexual desires.
The documents fuel the long-running controversy over allegations that the disloyal pair secretly admired fascism and that he was lined up to return to the throne if Hitler had conquered Britain.
The FBI first refused to release the documents to the Guardian but the paper appealed against the decision, and as a result 227 new pages - including intelligence reports of the operation and interviews with informants - have been disclosed.
The release comes at a sensitive time as the British public record office has not yet released similar documents which cover this period in deference to the sensibilities of the late Queen Mother.
"...in the U.S. National Archives we discovered a top secret American interrogation file of Joachhim von Ribbentrop, who was Hitler's Ambassador to London, before becoming German Foreign Minister. It was Ribbentrop's phone that was taped. Shortly before he was hanged at Nuremberg, Ribbentrop confirmed that he almost concluded an alliance in the 1930's with the help of two British leaders who were secret Nazi sympathisers. One was a former Prime Minister, the other the future king."
This book has more about the subject...want more info.???
It's extremely convenient that all of the principals involved, who could either confirm or deny all of these particulary interesting reports are now, unfortunately, deceased.
One wonders why the Guardian thinks this is news. Virtually every WW II historian, including Churchill himself, has written of the rumored affair and of Edward VIII's flirtation with the Nazis.
Hell, even the Germans acted upon it. The reason the Duke and Duchess were spirited out of Portugal to Bermuda by the British intelligence services was that they had arranged to rendezvous with Walter Schellenberg of the Sicherheitsdienst and possibly be taken to Germany.
That the Duke and the Duchess were an embarrassment to the crown and a serious security risk is well known. Is the Guardian just being obtuse?
Jeez,
Why go to a liberal campus to find paranoia.
Its right here on FR.
The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha monarchy changed its name in 1917 – to Windsor – so that its German origins were not apparent.
Cool site.
But all this was soon to come under pressure, because as the 1917 crisis in Britain deepened, it had an incendiary effect on the popular mind. The circle around the King was publicly referred to as an "alien and uninspiring court", with the key word being "alien". George V was incensed at this, but it did nothing to stop the rumors. And the rumors were becoming dangerous indeed with the suggestion that the King was really a German (not an Englishman), hence secretly pro-Germany, and that that was why Britain was losing the war. At the sub-text level we may read in pro-tyrant as well.The Hanover-Brunswick kings had always been German, of course, and King George I (the first Hanoverian king) did not really speak English at all, which is partly how Walpole and the Robinocracy got to do what they did. So this fuel was always there to feed the exploding flash-fire of rumors which in early 1917 completely overwhelmed the common-sense fact that is was absurd to think of George V (for goodness sake!) as pro-German.
But they did. And with German Gotha bombers doing their damage in Britain, the British royal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the name it had acquired from Prince Albert) was at the end of its rope. Something drastic had to be done.
Thus in July 1917, as we know, there came the famed royal proclamation. The British royal house would henceforth be known as the House of Windsor. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was trashed. The entire Battenberg family was made to change their name to Mountbatten. The Queen's (Mary of Teck) family name was changed from the German Teck to Cambridge. The King's other prominent continental relative, the Duke of Coburg (fighting on the German side), was disowned. And relatives cum tyrants everywhere were put on the blacklist.
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