King Edward VIII of Britain Wanted Peace with Adolf Hitler - but Churchill Didn't
Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower tried to suppress captured Nazi documents that showed Britain’s former King Edward VIII discussing his desire for peace with Adolf Hitler, according to files newly released in London.
The National Archives published more papers from the U.K. government’s secret basement storeroom in the Cabinet Office where papers deemed “too difficult, too sensitive” for the regular filing system were hidden away. They include a 1953 memo from Churchill, marked “top secret,” explaining the existence of a series of German telegrams carrying reports of comments by the Duke of Windsor, as Edward VIII was known after he abdicated in 1936.
“He is convinced that had he remained on throne war would have been avoided and describes himself as firm supporter of a peaceful compromise with Germany,” reported a telegram from Lisbon in neutral Portugal, where the duke was staying in July 1940. “Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.”
Edward abdicated so he could marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. The couple set up home in France, but when World War II broke out they moved to Spain. The government in Madrid, formally neutral but sympathetic to Germany, asked for guidance from Berlin as to what should be done with them. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop replied, asking if they could be kept there. Then he ordered a watch on their house.
Ribbentrop’s interest was piqued when he was told, a few days later, that in private “Windsor spoke strongly against Churchill and against this war.” While he considered what to do, the duke and duchess made their way to Portugal, where they made similar comments. The Nazis decided to act.
‘Persuaded or Forced’
“The duke should return to Spain under all circumstances,” Ribbentrop wrote, adding that they should then be “persuaded or forced” to stay there. His plan was then to offer the duke “the granting of any wish,” including “the ascension of the English throne.”
Churchill, meanwhile, was alive to the "danger" of having an alternative monarch so close to "being in Nazi hands". He appointed the duke as governor of the Bahamas. When the Windsors were reluctant to leave Europe, Churchill threatened Edward, who held honorary military rank, with court-martial. Ribbentrop, anxious not to let his prize escape, launched Operation Willi to persuade the Windsors to return to Spain, kidnapping them if necessary. But despite sabotage attempts and bomb threats, the Germans failed.
The plan was “to persuade the duke to leave Lisbon in a car as if he were going on a fairly long pleasure jaunt, and then to cross the border at a specified place, where Spanish secret police will ensure a safe crossing,” according to a note sent to Ribbentrop.
The telegrams describing their operation were found in 1945 as Hitler’s regime collapsed. When they were passed to the British government, Clement Attlee, who had replaced Churchill as prime minister, wrote to his predecessor, saying that their publication “might do the greatest possible harm.” Churchill replied, agreeing and expressing the hope that it might be possible to “destroy all traces” of the files.
Publication Plan
But after Churchill returned to power in 1951, he was horrified to learn Attlee had subsequently changed his mind, apparently at the urging of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Historians in Washington now proposed to publish the Nazi telegrams.
In 1953, Churchill wrote to President Eisenhower, expressing his concern that “they might leave the impression that the duke was in close touch with German agents and was listening to suggestions that were disloyal.” Eisenhower, who had been the allies’ supreme commander, had seen the telegrams in 1945, but believed he had successfully suppressed them, arguing they were “obviously concocted with some idea of promoting German propaganda.” He was unaware a microfilm of them had been passed to the State Department.
By the 1950s, too many people had seen the messages for them to be destroyed, and the British historian in charge of preparing the documents for publication threatened to resign if they were suppressed. They were eventually published in 1957, with the duke describing them as “complete fabrications.”
Found at https://web.archive.org/web/20210511103449/https://dailyarchives.org/index.php/archives/1317-king-edward-viii-of-britain-wanted-peace-with-adolf-hitler-but-churchill-didn-t
People don't seem to understand that Churchill was a drunk who was responsible for one of Britain's biggest historical military failures in S. Africa. His primary goal, even over the welfare of the country that he was supposed to be seeing after in its best interests, as is common among politicians, was his ego and his image.
“Germany’s unforgivable crime before WWII was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system and to build up an own exchange system from which the world-finance couldn’t profit anymore. We butchered the wrong pig!”
- Winston Churchill, The Second World War (Bern 1960)
That's funny, because that's what Trump CLAIMS to be doing when in reality he's really kowtowing to the same ilk that brought Germany down. The reality is that THEY have infinitely more control than he has, and he's bought and paid for by the same anyway.
Some might claim that he learned in the years after the war, but, 40 years earlier ...
“And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical."
"Zionism vs. Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People" Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, page 5
- Winston Churchill
Not my words, Churchill's.
Then factor in the Balfour Declaration, the nearly endless list of fruits of which include the King David Hotel bombing;
the debacle and abomination of the attack on the USS Liberty, which not only went unresponded to, but which was covered up BY OUR OWN GOVERNMENT for decades, and still would be if not for the internet;
The Lavon Affair and again, a nearly endless list of similar events;
and the takeover of the US by dual citizens of the same country serving in its Government at the highest levels under the POTUS.
Beautifully told of love/conspiracy/history of WWII. If not for Wallis, what would the world be like today?