CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Fight for the File

As the king, prime minister, and foreign secretary wrestled with how to deal with the embarrassing Windsor file, the man at the centre of the drama decided to make an appearance. The Duke of Windsor wrote to the king, whom he had not seen since before the war, and requested an audience at Buckingham Palace in early October. It was not a reunion the king relished, especially knowing the contents of the Windsor file, a subject he did not raise during their meeting.

He anticipated that this encounter would probably involve another acrimonious conversation about the duchess, her title, and her reception at court, as well as the duke’s demands for a prestigious diplomatic position, preferably in America. All of his requests would be met in the negative, with the resulting unpleasant emotional contretemps. It was enough to set the king off on one of his “gnashes,” the queen’s name for his outbursts of anger.

Actually the dreaded reunion with his brother went rather well, Lascelles describing the feeling after the duke had left the palace as akin to that when the all-clear sounded after a bombing raid. Even though he “persisted” in raising the issue of his mother Queen Mary and the king receiving Wallis—a non-starter—the conversation was amicable and civilized. Once again the king patiently explained that he could neither live in Britain nor work for the Crown—a position the duke refused to accept.

Afterwards he lobbied Winston Churchill, now the leader of the Opposition, about his desire to be given some honorary post with the British embassy in Washington. While Churchill dutifully championed his cause, he somewhat mournfully admitted failure in this regard while musing, too, on his own problems. “The difficulties of leading the Opposition are very great and I increasingly wonder whether the game is worth the candle.”

The duke remained undaunted, a year later personally making his case to Prime Minister Attlee about a diplomatic position in Washington. He was given short shrift, as Churchill’s wartime minister of information, Brendan Bracken, wrote to Lord Beaverbrook: “The Windsor lady must have been sadly disillusioned by her husband’s interview with Attlee. Nothing could have been more stark than his declaration that no Governmental employment will be given to the Ducal democrats. I am sorry for them.”

As much as the duke set his cap at some kind of ambassadorial position based in America, the royal couple decided to settle in France where, Lascelles noted, he had developed the bad habit of telling the French how to run their country. “A hearth rug bore” was how Lascelles described him.

Yet never in the annals of British government has so much diplomatic effort and bureaucratic energy been expended on a hearth-rug bore, and a seemingly unemployable bore at that. Ironically it was the leaders of the most radical and Socialist government in Britain’s history, an administration that introduced free health care for all, who worked diligently to quarantine the lethal Windsor file.

When Prime Minister Attlee first discussed the matter with the king that summer, there were three Windsor files in existence—the original and two copies. The original microfilm of the von Loesch file, which had been brought to London in triumph by Thomson, was now back at Marburg Castle under joint Anglo-American control. Two copies of the incriminating file, which contained the Windsor revelations, were made. One was sent to the Foreign Office, the other to the American embassy in London for onward courier to the State Department in Washington.

It was now imperative to ensure that the files were brought under sole British control. This meant consulting their American cousins and obtaining the files from Marburg and the State Department.

With regard to the files held at Marburg, it seems that Brigadier Sir James “Jimmy” Gault, the British military attaché to General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), became involved.

Brigadier Gault—Eton, Cambridge, the Scots Guards, and a close friend of Ike—then approached Eisenhower and explained the importance of extracting the file from Marburg and returning it to the British in London. Eisenhower, a great Anglophile himself, needed little persuasion, especially as there was already a precedent: The State Department’s political czar Robert Murphy had returned the file on comedy writer P. G. Wodehouse, which was discovered in the Schmidt papers. He considered it of interest only to the British.

After listening to the arguments, Eisenhower concluded of the Windsor file “that there was no possible value in them, that they were obviously concocted with some idea of promoting German propaganda and weakening Western resistance, and that they were totally unfair to the Duke.”

Eisenhower spoke to his friend General Lucius Clay, military governor of Germany, and ordered him to obtain the file. Even though Clay was furious about the decision, feeling that Ike was kowtowing to the British, he obeyed the command. Recalling the incident some twenty-five years later, he was still angered by that order. “It rubbed him up the wrong way,” recalled his official biographer, Jean Edward Smith, who interviewed Clay in January 1971 about the early days of the occupation. “He felt it wasn’t right. He felt that the British had got to him [Ike] and he did not think that this was appropriate behaviour. It was certainly not something President Truman would have ever ordered. Ike was very explicit. The purpose of the order was to remove anything pertaining to the Duke’s activities before he went to the Bahamas in 1940.”

While there remains some ambiguity about whether the palace or Downing Street or both initiated the process, Clay carried out Eisenhower’s decision, deputing Brigadier General Edward C. Betts, then the deputy director for war crimes, to make the arrangements to bring the file to Eisenhower’s headquarters. Military courier Lieutenant Hans F. Scheufele was dispatched to Marburg and duly signed out the 490-page dossier on September 5, 1945.

Shortly after reading a one-page summary of the folder, Eisenhower ordered the file be sent to John Winant, the American ambassador in London, who eventually passed it on to the Foreign Office.

Such was the secrecy surrounding the handover that even Sir William Strang, Britain’s political advisor in Germany, was unaware of Eisenhower’s decision. On September 11, 1945—a week after the file had been transferred to Eisenhower’s keeping—he wrote a memo to his American counterpart, Robert Murphy, opposing his decision to move the German Foreign Office files from Marburg Castle to Kassel, where their other partners in the European Advisory Commission—the Russians and French—could gain easier access to the files.

Access to German documents, especially by the Soviets, was a consistent concern of the British, and inevitably the Windsor file, which Strang did not even name, formed the cornerstone of his argument. As mentioned previously, it seems, from the undated files held at the Sonder Archiv in Moscow, that the Russians already had a sketchy outline of the Nazi plot to encourage the duke and duchess to stay in Spain and to collaborate with the Axis powers.

Clearly unaware of recent developments, Strang wrote:

A further argument which occurs to me is derived from the case which I discussed with you the other day, and which I need not mention directly, in which we were anxious to secure the withdrawal from the German archives of a certain dossier. It seems to me, given the German talent for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick, that certain documents may well turn up which would be embarrassing to both or either of us, although representing a complete distortion of the facts. If these were accessible to our colleagues on the Commission, which sooner or later seems inevitable at Kassel, we might find them given to the world in a way that suggested that they represented true statements.

By then, the Windsor file was under lock and key in the office of Brigadier Betts, pending its secret transfer to London. The microfilm copy held on the other side of the Atlantic proved rather more difficult to capture. At first, British efforts to quietly extract the microfilm copy from the State Department in Washington seemed to go smoothly. During a meeting to discuss the inauguration of the United Nations in San Francisco, Lord Halifax took Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius to one side and persuaded him of the necessity of keeping the number of copies of the von Loesch file to an absolute minimum. It was later agreed between the two diplomats “that neither government would make additional copies or otherwise reveal information on activities in Spain of a member of the Royal family.”

This verbal agreement was followed by a top secret aide-mémoire sent to the State Department by British embassy chargé d’affaires John Balfour. His note was sent on August 6, 1945, only a few days after historian Rohan Butler had first identified the duke’s “curious” statements and while Blunt and Morshead were in Germany. This rapid response by the normally dilatory Foreign Office was a sign of how seriously the matter was being taken.

These documents have no bearing on the general history of the war or on war crimes, which His Majesty’s Government take to be the subjects for which German archives should be primarily used. On the other hand owing to the personalities concerned and the type of German and Spanish intrigues involved the documents would clearly have the highest publicity value.

Given the enthusiasm inside the Foreign Office that first greeted incriminating statements made by, among others, Franco and Molotov, Balfour’s note was somewhat disingenuous. He further asked that the State Department place special restrictions on the file.

Just two weeks later, on August 20, 1945, the British sent a further aide-mémoire, formally asking the State Department to destroy the Windsor file or hand it over to the British government for “safekeeping.” Once again they emphasized: “It will be appreciated that the documents in question have no bearing on war crimes or on the general history of the war.”

In a matter of weeks, the British had performed a policy flip-flop, switching from cheerfully exploiting the German Foreign Office files for publicity and propaganda—even the official unit was named Exploitation German Archives—to destroying those documents that were embarrassing to the government and its high-ranking subjects. Their volte-face immediately impacted on their co-operation with the war crimes tribunal, the British realizing that granting other powers complete access to the files would make it likely that the Windsor file would be uncovered.

In the same August memorandum, the British finessed their official position. In order to avoid a snub to the French or Russians, the British were willing to allow the right of inspection but on condition that each of the four governments should reserve the right to withhold documents that they had found themselves from the other allies. For instance—here the consequences of the Windsor embarrassment are clearly visible—in connection with the handling of their own quislings.

The memo ended with a sentence that neatly swept the awkward Windsor file—and any other undiscovered royal ordnance—beneath the carpet of history. “His Majesty’s government have also considered the question of publishing German political documents but they take the view that the formulation of a policy should await more complete knowledge of the contents of all documents in possession of the Allies.”

Given the fact that there were approximately 1,200 tons of German documents held in the American zone alone, most of which were unexamined and untranslated, the Windsor issue seemed to have been well and truly buried under a mountain of Nazi paperwork.

There the matter might have ended, and the world would have been none the wiser, but for a maverick Texan. At the war’s end David Harris, a feisty and somewhat loquacious Stanford University history professor, was working in Berlin for the State Department as assistant chief in the Division of Central European Affairs.

A distinguished expert on modern European history, he was asked to review the secret British aides-mémoire relating to the Windsor file. It was made clear to him that the State Department had accepted the British position and that Harris’s job was simply to draft a reply rubber-stamping the agreement. Harris, slightly built and bespectacled, was the David who took on the government Goliath. Described by colleagues as a man of “quiet, genuine courage,” Harris, then forty-five, would have none of it, profoundly disagreeing with the destruction of historical documents on moral and legal grounds. Later he recalled that one of his first duties was to speak to the legal advisor and “put a stop” to the transaction over the file.

On August 27, he sent a robust memo to his immediate department boss, John Hickerson, taking issue with much of the British government’s position. Not only did he contest the assertion that the Windsor file had no historical value, it was his assessment, as an expert on modern European history, that the episode was a “significant chapter in German and Spanish maneuvers toward a negotiated peace with the United Kingdom in 1940.”

He continued:

It is undoubtedly disagreeable to the British Government that the Duke of Windsor should have been the object of German and Spanish intrigue and that the Duke’s not entirely unknown imprudence asserts itself in the papers, but nonetheless, in my judgement the documents are an essential part of the diplomatic record of 1940. There is I believe a moral responsibility resting on this government to preserve all the records in its possession, an obligation which takes precedence over a tender feeling for the ultimate reputation of the Duke of Windsor.

Perhaps his most telling argument was legal, referring to the United States statute that prevents government representatives from destroying official documents without a congressional hearing held in public. It was this legal fig leaf that the State Department ultimately used in their considered response to their allies.

A week later, on September 4, he indignantly wrote to his superior, H. Freeman Matthews, director of European affairs, about the impropriety of destroying official historical files.

Further, if you will permit the professional historian to assert himself for the moment, I consider it a moral obligation of this Government, or of any Government, to preserve all the records in its possession for the use, at the appropriate time, of responsible students. I remain perennially angry that the British government in the days of Queen Victoria destroyed precious records of the sixteenth century because they contained certain allegedly unpalatable references to the private life of Queen Elizabeth.

It seems that the force of Harris’s argument, particularly the legal pitfalls and penalties for destroying records, held sway inside the State Department. When Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson met with John Balfour in September, the legal and moral difficulties were explained. Even after Balfour reported the bad news, the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin doggedly strived for the file’s destruction. In early October, Bevin asked “if it would meet your difficulties if the passages in question were destroyed by the State Department instead of communicated to us.”

Once again the law remained an unbridgeable obstacle, State Department counsel Herbert S. Marks formally advising Acheson as to the “drastic” penalties facing government officials who tamper with official documents.

This led to a further request from Bevin a month later that the Americans at the very least destroy all duplicates of the file.

In October, following three months of internal debate inside the State Department, the new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, formally informed British ambassador Lord Halifax that, for legal and historical reasons, they were not prepared to destroy the file. Byrnes was, though, able to sugar the pill. “The British Government is assured, however, that the Department of State will take all possible precautions to prevent any publicity with respect to the documents in its possession relative to the Duke of Windsor without prior consultation with the British Government.”

This was simply wishful thinking. There was now a certain cachet among the higher military, diplomatic, and political echelons to having first-hand knowledge of the “secret” Windsor file, the royal dossier rapidly gaining mythic status. There were various requests by high-ranking officers who had no direct interest in the case, either to have a summary of the file disclosed to them or to read a copy of the original.

When, for example, Colonel W. D. Hohenthal, director of political affairs in Germany, asked for a “gist of the Duke of Windsor Papers,” he was sent a top secret summary from the State Department in Washington. This State Department summary focused on the Nazi-inspired plot to lure the duke back from Lisbon to Madrid rather than the duke’s critical stance about the war.

The bait used was seemingly that the Duke would be set up as a peace mediator between England and Germany and that thereafter he would be set up as a regent for England. As justification for such a crude approach, reference appears more than once to the Duke’s alleged statements that, had he been on the throne, the War would never have been allowed to start.

They appear to have tried to play on his pride, and on his desire for his own and his wife’s prestige, by belittling the Bahamas assignment as unworthy of his background and abilities. They must have thought they were succeeding for the Madrid-Lisbon-Berlin dispatches for two or three weeks reflected a touch-and-go excitement.… What spoiled their scheme might have been a timely message to the Duke from his Prime Minister, threatening military arrest unless he carried out his orders.

Hohenthal’s colleague Robert Murphy, who had strongly objected to the fact that his political department was not sent copies of the general German Foreign Office file in the first place, was reduced to reading a three-page handwritten summary of the Windsor file. While the duke’s behaviour was at the heart of the three-page report, the duchess also got a look in. “The Duke’s wife entered the conversations at many points. She showed considerable animosity towards the royal family, especially the Queen.”

This inside knowledge in London, Washington, and Berlin became all the spicier when conflated with Blunt’s continued secret missions on behalf of the king. In the eighteen months after his visit to Kronberg with Morshead, the Soviet agent made three further trips to Germany and Holland. These top secret excursions excited much comment, especially on his own side. In December 1945, even his gossipy fellow spy Guy Burgess described Blunt’s “looting” on the king’s behalf when he flew to Westphalia to meet the Duke of Brunswick or Braunschweig, heir to the kings of Hanover, whose family have close blood ties to the Windsors.

Blunt merely added to the mystery, telling his old source Leo Long, whom he met “by chance” at the airfield where he landed, that the work he was doing on behalf of the king was very “hush-hush.” Of course this merely served to stir the pot of speculation, two of Blunt’s former pupils, now in the military and based in Germany, believing that the art historian had come “on behalf of Queen Mary to recover some documents of a private nature which she had sent her relatives, the Brunswicks.”

Actually, as Guy Liddell noted in his diary of December 1945, Blunt returned with a diplomatic sack full of Christmas presents for the king, goodies that included the diamond crown of Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III.

“Anthony has brought back on behalf of the King some very valuable miniatures and other antiques worth about £100,000 [approx. £3 million or $4.75 million today] but it has been made quite clear that these are only on loan from the Duke of Brunswick.” He went on to describe his haul of gold and silver plate as well as a unique twelfth-century illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels, which had once belonged to Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony.

Blunt and Morshead subsequently flew to Doorn in Holland, where they visited the estate of the deceased ex-Kaiser in order to secure various regal possessions, including those of Queen Victoria, Empress Friedrich, and other European royals. Their brief was to examine objects that once belonged to Queen Victoria and, as Morshead coyly noted in a letter to Tommy Lascelles, to find anything relevant “to relations between the Courts of England and Germany during the past hundred years.”

While portraits, several Garter badges, and gifts from Queen Victoria to the Kaiser were “quietly secured” by the British ambassador to Holland, no documentary material was discovered.

These freelance trips, which yielded priceless bounty—though not the incriminating letters between British and German royals—did concern the Foreign Office. At a time when thousands of troops, particularly American GIs, were taking home souvenirs of war, the Foreign Office were extremely concerned about how it would look if the king was seen to be “liberating”—or, as Guy Burgess pithily noted, “looting”—archives and objects, especially when Britain was lecturing the other Allies about their own corrupt behaviour.

The British were not the only ones who believed they occupied the moral high ground, their American allies increasingly believing that it was the Brits who were playing fast and loose with the truth, especially with regard to their stewardship of the German Foreign Office archives. “It is imperative,” declared one American officer, “that we have at Marburg an administration by American forces so as to ‘free’… the American elements from British rule, I dare say, tyranny.”

The lightning rod for the growing disenchantment among the allies was the Windsor file. In the months following Allied victory, it changed the day-to-day working relationship between the Americans and their British counterparts. Trust and co-operation were replaced by suspicion and resentment, the Americans now believing that every objection the British made, be it to the American decision to move the German Foreign Office records from Marburg Castle first to Kassel and then to Berlin—as suggested by US general Lucius Clay—or giving Russia, France, and neutral countries access to the files for the International Military Tribunal, was motivated by a deferential impulse to protect the Duke of Windsor or other high-ranking members of the British Establishment who were guilty of appeasement or collaboration. “All sorts of unsavoury stories are getting into circulation,” noted American attaché John T. Krumpelmann at a conference to explain the mysterious gaps in the German Foreign Office files.

The Americans had a point. The fear of disclosing the contents of the Windsor file to others, particularly the Russians, coloured every British decision. A note from Robert Currie Thomson in October concerning American plans to move the German Foreign Office archive from Marburg reflected official British thinking: “silly to flit [move] lest certain documents be seen by some parties we have in mind.”

The tone of the correspondence between the two sides, while always polite, grew chillier as winter closed in. In November 1945 the State Department explicitly refused to allow documents to be taken to the British zone of occupation. Quite simply, they no longer trusted the British, noting that “on previous occasion documents taken to England from the custody of U.S. forces in Germany had not been made available for exploitation by U.S. representatives.”

This cynicism about the duplicitous Brits was articulated in an angry memo to Secretary of State Byrnes from his director of European affairs, H. Freeman Matthews, on January 31, 1946. While he was responding to complaints from British ambassador Lord Halifax about the transfer of the files from Marburg to Berlin—a subject that also vexed the foreign secretary—his note focused on the underhand behaviour of their partner in peace.

After lamenting the illegality of destroying official records he continued:

I personally do not believe in efforts to alter historical records by the destruction or permanent withholding of official documents. Quite frankly, conditions at Marburg are such that the British are, in the opinion of some of our people, enabled thereby to play fast and loose with the documents there. I feel sure they would not hesitate to remove any which showed appeasement policies of high British personalities in an unfavourable light. We have on occasion had difficulty obtaining microfilm copies of certain documents.

The British, on one occasion, formally requested us to sanction the destruction of certain documents dealing with the Duke of Windsor’s passage through Spain and Portugal in the summer of 1940. I think that we should protect legitimate British rights and interests with respect to the German Foreign Office archives, in particular in the matter of releasing them to representatives of other powers, but that we should have in mind our large responsibility towards the security and safeguarding of these irreplaceable historical archives.

The scene was set for a conflict as the tapestry of shared beliefs began to unravel. The view of the State Department’s director of European affairs, John Hickerson, reflected the bewildered attitude of many American officials towards their British allies.

In a top secret memo he wrote:

I am convinced that the British government will adamantly resist any suggestion on our part that any of the documents relating to the Duke of Windsor be made public. There is throughout the United Kingdom an unreasoning devotion to the monarchial principle and an almost fanatical disposition to do everything possible to protect the good name of the institution of the monarchy.

He went on:

I think the British Government is wrong about this whole matter and that all of these documents, including agents’ reports, should be made public in the ordinary course of events. But I am not a British subject and I do not view the institution of the monarchy through their eyes.

It would be many years before Hickerson had his wish.