German Leadership

Tea at the Berghof.

Hitler precedes the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, following a visit by the Ducal couple to the Berghof, pre-war. At this stage, the Duke had abdicated his position as King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland etc. in favour of his younger brother, the Duke of York (King George VI, Britain's wartime king), following the crisis resulting from his insistence on marrying the Duchess (Wallis Simpson, and American divorceé)/ Even before the death of his father and his accession to the British Crown, Edward, Duke of Wales (Bertie in his family) had a pretty unreliable profile. He led a playboy lifestyle, mixing in British upper class circles in which Nazi and proto-Fascist sympathies were common. Many of his posh pals were members of or sympathisers with the Oxford Groups/Moral Rearmament movement, an American pseudo-Christian cult that espoused Corporativist social principles. The Groups' founder/leader, renegade minister of the US German Lutheran Church, Frank Buchman, was a regular attender of Nazi rallies before the war, where he generally occupied a place in the honoured reviewing stands and was noted for his enthusiastic participation in the "Heil Hitlers" when called for. In the face of this, postwar claims on the part of the Moral Rearmament movement that their cult was regarded by the Gestapo as a danger to Naziism ring rather hollow; Heinrich Muller and his spooks may not have been keen on them but, apparently, their boss Himmler was. The Duke's flirtation with Fascism and - particularly - with Naziism continued up to the start of the war and, perhaps, beyond that. It is difficult to be sure, but it may be that the Duke and Duchess harboured some hope that German influence - or perhaps even German conquest - might result in his being reinstated as King. Hitler may have hoped to use their position to advance German influence in the British upper class further. Neither hopes ever seemed particularly likely to bear fruit. The British eventually forced "Bertie" and his bride from their peripathetic European exile to take up a position as Governor and First Lady in a far-away Caribbean colony; certainly far away from being able to do any mischief in collusion with the Nazis. Best regards, JR.