|
|
 |
 |
 |
| FBI Probes Revealed British Royals were Fascist Sympathisers Wallis Simpson, the Nazi minister, the telltale monk and an FBI plot Originally appeared in London Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4451107,00.html |
| US papers shed light on efforts to spy on fascist sympathisers When the Duke and Duchess of Windsor sailed into Palm Beach, Florida, on the SS Berkshire from Nassau on April 18 1941 they were looking forward to enjoying three days of relaxation at the Everglades Club playing golf and drinking and gossiping with American high society. Little did they know that the previous night instructions had gone out from President Roosevelt to FBI chief J Edgar Hoover to launch what was to be an extraordinary covert intelligence exercise that had to fool both the exiled royals and the US secret service agent who was guarding them. The exercise was launched after the FBI had been passed intelligence that the duke and duchess were being used by the Nazis to obtain secrets which could wreck the allies' war effort. The US investigation became even more lurid when FBI agents interviewed a benedictine monk in a Franciscan monastery in the United States; Father Odo had once been the Duke of Wurttemberg, a minor German royal with connections to Queen Mary, the duke's mother, and her brother, the Duke of Athlone, then governor general of Canada. He told them that a prime suspect in the investigation - Joachim von Ribbentrop, then the Nazis' foreign minister - had been the duchess's lover when he was ambassador to Britain in 1936. The minister was already thought to have been supplied with information by the duchess during the German invasion of France in 1940. Now it was suggested that there was far closer arrangement. Father Odo told the agent: "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." He also revealed that the Duchess of Windsor had told guests at a Paris party that: "The duke is impotent and although he had tried sexual intercourse with numerous women they had been unsuccesful in satisfying his passions." He went on: "The duchess in her own inimitable and unique manner has been the only woman who had been able to satisfactorily gratify the duke's sexual desires." Exile The duke was forced into exile after he abdicated as King Edward VIII in 1936. He first went with his lover, formerly the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, to France and was only later exiled again to Bahamas to keep him out of the way. By the time the US president authorised the intelligence operation, the couple had been deserted and snubbed by the royal family and the British establishment. They were suspected of favouring the Nazis after they visited Germany in 1937 and were entertained by Hitler and other senior Nazis. A year after war broke out, the FBI sent a memo to President Roosevelt outlining the agency's worries about the couple. It stated: "It has been ascertained that for some time, the British government has known that the Duchess of Windsor was exceedingly pro-German in her sympathies and connections and there is strong reason to believe that this is the reason why she was considered so obnoxious to the British government that they refused to permit Edward to marry her and maintain the throne. "Both she and the Duke of Windsor have been repeatedly warned by representatives of the British government that in the interest of the morale of the British people, they should be exceedingly circumspect in their dealings with the representatives of the German government. The duke is in such state of intoxication most of the time that he is virtually non compos mentis. The duchess has repeatedly ignored these warnings." When war broke out, the duke, a serving officer, had been posted to France to liaise between the British and French armies. But the secret memo, on September 13 1940, reports that an informant had "established conclusively that the Duchess of Windsor has recently been in touch with Joachim von Ribbentrop and was maintaining constant contact and communication with him." "Because of their high official position, the duchess was obtaining a variety of information concerning the British and French official activities that she was passing on to the Germans." After the Germans invaded northern France in May 1940, the couple fled to Biarritz in the south. But the FBI noted that the Nazis were able to score a propaganda coup by broadcasting that the "increasing successes of the German armies" had compelled the couple to retreat to a Biarritz hotel. Within minutes of checking in, Berlin radio announced their hotel room number because the unnamed informant "had ascertained that the duchess had informed von Ribbentrop of her itinerary, schedule, etc, prior to her departure from their villa." The couple then travelled to Spain in June 1940 "but the communications between the duchess and von Ribbentrop were apparently facilitated because of the pronounced Nazi sympathies in Spain." In July 1940, the pair moved to Portugal where the duke made indiscreet remarks that Britain stood little chance of resisting a German invasion and may as well try to settle for peace with the Germans. Ribbentrop, encouraged by these remarks, hatched a plot to lure the Windsors into German hands. But Winston Churchill had arranged for the duke to become governor of the Bahamas in August 1940. "The British were and are always fearful that the duchess will do or say some thing which will indicate her Nazi sympathies and support, and consequently it was considered absolutely essential that the Windsors be removed to a point where they would do absolutely no harm," wrote the FBI in the memo, one of a batch of 227 pages released to the Guardian under the US freedom of information act. The FBI believed that the Bahamas were selected to prevent the duchess from coming into contact with British officials and scooping up more secrets to leak and that special precautions were taken, presumably by the British, to prevent her from "establishing any channel of communication with von Ribbentrop." From their base in the Bahamas, the couple made frequent visits to the United States during the war. In April 1941, President Roosevelt ordered FBI agents to tail the Windsors discreetly when they visited Florida. But J Edgar Hoover was alarmed because bodyguards from another government department had been assigned to protect the couple. He warned that the bodyguards "would undoubtedly immediately detect the presence of any undercover agents, which might result in considerable embarrassment to all parties concerned". Deal Instead, the government arranged for the bodyguards to report back to the FBI on where the Windsors went and whom they met. An 18-page report was subsequently produced on the five-day trip. On May 2, an FBI agent wrote to Hoover, saying that an English socialite had told an informant that he had definite proof that Herman Goering, Hitler's deputy, and the Duke of Windsor had reached a deal - "after Germany won the war, Goering, through control of the army, was going to overthrow Hitler and then he would install the duke as king of England." The informant also stated that there was no doubt that "the Duchess of Windsor had had an affair with Ribbentrop, and that of course she had an intense hate for the English since they had kicked them out of England". |
 |
| The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor |
 |
| By Scott Thompson Printed in The American Almanac, August 25, 1997 One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a ``black sheep,'' an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British monarchy, and the City of London's leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer's election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain's planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia. Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links. So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be ``reincarnated as a deadly virus'' to help solve the ``population problem,'' he is just ``doin' what comes naturally'' for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy (see page 8 for more quotes from Prince Philip). To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party. Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars. The marriages of Prince Philip's sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip's four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England's Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse. Three of Philip's brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Enter Prince Bernhard His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, royal consort to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of the current Queen Beatrix, co-founded and became the first head of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in October 1961. When the Lockheed scandal forced Prince Bernhard to resign from his most important public functions in 1971, he was replaced by Prince Philip. Prince Bernhard, like Prince Philip, whom he recruited to the eco-fascist cause, had strong roots in the Nazi movement. In fact, the whole House of Orange did: Queen Wilhelmina, mother of the future Queen Juliana, married a right-wing playboy who begged for money for Hitler; Juliana married an SS man (Prince Bernhard); and, Queen Juliana's daughter Beatrix married a former member of Hitler Youth. Prince Bernhard first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labor camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS. According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials. When Bernhard left the SS to marry the future Queen Juliana, he signed his letter of resignation to Adolf Hitler, ``Heil Hitler!'' William Hoffman writes in his book Queen Juliana: ``Tensions [over the marriage] were not cooled when ... Adolf Hitler forwarded his own congratulatory message. The newspaper Het Volk editorialized that `it would be better if the future Queen had found a consort in some democratic country rather than in the Third Reich.'|'' This is the man who recruited Prince Philip to eco-facism, but Prince Philip's Nazi roots had been laid much earlier. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hitler Youth and Universal Fascism Through the influence of his sister Theodora, young Philip was sent to the German school near Lake Constantine that had been founded by Berthold's father, Max von Baden, working through his longtime personal secretary, Kurt Hahn. During World War I, Prince Max von Baden had been chancellor, while the Oxford-trained Hahn first served as head of the Berlin Foreign Ministry's intelligence desk, then as special adviser to Prince Max in the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Von Baden and Hahn set up a school in a wing of Schloss Salem, employing a combination of monasticism and the Nazis' ``strength-through-joy'' system. At first a supporter of the Nazis, Hahn, who was part Jewish, soon got into trouble with the SS, and came to support the more centrist elements of the Nazi Party. What Hahn really had become is what Henry Kissinger's friend, Michael Ledeen has termed a ``universal fascist,'' in the sense of Vladimir Jabotinsky, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Strasser brothers, and other fascists whom the hard-core Nazis would have no dealings with. Although Hahn's powerful connections permitted him to escape the concentration camps, he was forced to leave the school he founded in Germany before Philip's arrival there, and established a new school in Scotland, called Gordonstoun. It would play a major role in rearing all the male children of Queen Elizabeth II and Philip. When Philip arrived at Hahn's school in Schloss Salem, it was in control of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party, and the curriculum had become Nazi ``race science.'' Hahn became an adviser to the Foreign Office in London, urging policies of appeasement based upon appeals to the ``centrist'' Nazis. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Philip's Relatives Work for the SS The husband of Philip's sister Sophie, Prince Christoph, was embraced by the Nazis, who saw him as a channel to the appeasement faction in Britain epitomized by King Edward VIII. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, by 1935 Prince Christoph was chief of the Forschungsamt (directorate of scientific research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. The Forschungsamt used electronic intelligence-gathering methods to police the Nazi Party, while working with the Gestapo against the Catholic Church, the Jews, and labor organizations. When rumors of homosexuality spread against Capt. Ernst Roehm of the Stormtroopers, Himmler turned to the Forschungsamt's eavesdroppers, and ordered the ``Night of the Long Knives'' as a result. The eldest of Prince Christoph and Sophie's children was named Karl Adolf, after Hitler. Later, Prince Philip would promote his education. Prince Christoph's brother, Philip of Hesse, married a daughter of the King of Italy, and became the official liaison between the Nazi and Fascist regimes. Four years after Prince Philip left Schloss Salem to attend Gordonstoun Academy in Scotland, on Nov. 16, 1937, Philip learned that his sister Cecilia and her husband Georg Donatus, hereditary grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, had crashed in one of Göring's Junker aircraft on a trip to London for Georg's brother's wedding. According to the British magazine Private Eye, the funeral became a gathering point for leading Nazis and their appeasers. Prince Philip himself developed secretive ties with King Edward VIII, continuing after Edward was deposed in 1938. In fact, one of the central figures in the 1930s Nazi-British back-channel was Philip's uncle and sponsor, Lord Louis Mountbatten (originally, Battenberg, a branch of the House of Hesse). Until he was forced to abdicate, King Edward VIII enjoyed the full backing of ``Dickie'' Mountbatten. Through much of World War II, secret channels of communication were maintained between the British royal family and their pro-Hitler cousins in Germany, by Lord Mountbatten, through his sister Louise, who was crown princess of pro-Nazi Sweden. Louise was Prince Philip's aunt. Although Buckingham Palace's rumor mill has tried to depict this wartime collaboration with the enemy as mere family correspondence, the channel apparently included messages from Prince Philip's secret ally, the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII). On Nov. 20, 1995, the Washington Times reported, based on recently discovered Portuguese Secret Service files first published in the London Observer, that the Duke of Windsor had been in close collaboration with the Nazis in Spain and Portugal to foment a revolution in wartime Britain, that would topple the Churchill government, depose his brother King George VI, and allow him to regain the throne, with Queen Wallis [Simpson, the American divorcée, for whom he abdicated the throne] at his side. Portuguese surveillance revealed that Walter Schellenberg, head of Gestapo counterintelligence, was one point of contact in this plot. After Schellenberg met with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, Nicolás Franco, brother of fascist Gen. Francisco Franco, Ambassador Franco told a Portuguese diplomat: ``The Duke of Windsor, free from the responsibilities of the war, in disagreement with English politicians, could be the man to put at the head of the Empire.'' Whatever correspondence was hidden in Sophie and Prince Christoph's Kronberg Castle, King George VI, in June 1945, felt compelled to dispatch the former MI-5 officer turned ``Surveyor of the King's Pictures,'' Anthony Blunt, to gather up the correspondence. Queen Elizabeth II reportedly insisted that there be no interrogation of Blunt about his secret trip to the castle. Otherwise, it is notable that starting with an exchange between King George VI and President Eisenhower, the House of Windsor has been desperate to keep classified those documents from Kronberg Castle that fell into American Army hands, long beyond the normal length of time. Clearly, Prince Philip's patron Lord Dickie Mountbatten, Mountbatten's sister Crown Princess Louise, and Philip's brother-in-law Prince Christoph of Hesse were not just exchanging Christmas greetings. |