The Duchess Of Windsor (47 page)

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Authors: Greg King

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Wallis asked Emmy Goering to show her around Karinhalle. The house was enormous, with vast rooms hung with Rembrandts and filled with an eclectic mixture of furnishings; the tall windows looked out over magnificent views of the forest beyond. She noted a gymnasium in the basement filled with weights, electric horses, and bars and inspected the servants’ rooms, which had the occupant’s names painted on the doors. Everything seemed overly picturesque; even the housemaids wore peasant dresses with pleated skirts and smocked blouses. In the barn, the women were joined by the Duke and the field marshal, who delighted in showing his guests an enormous toy train which filled the room.
18
The only jarring note came when they entered the library. David quickly turned to Wallis and pointed to a large map of Europe which hung above the fireplace. On Goering’s map, Germany and Austria had become one country, an ominous sign of the coming
Anschluss.
“Excuse me, Your Excellency
Herr
Field Marshal,” David said, pointing at the map, “but that’s rather important.” According to Sir Dudley Forwood, Goering, rather sheepishly, replied, “It must be, Your Royal Highness.” But the Duke would have none of it. He shook his head and said loudly, “Never, never, never.”
19
As he and Wallis left, David turned to the Goerings and said in German, “This was the nicest visit of all those we have made in Germany.”
20
The Duke and Duchess paid further visits to Dresden, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, and Munich. Throughout these long days, they were introduced to and escorted by various Nazi officials. The only jarring note was the continued presence of Ley himself, “a rather awful little man,” in the words of Forwood.
21
Both Wallis and David found him a boorish, brutal lout; half the time he was with the Windsors, Ley was drunk, a state which only made him more vocal in expressing his admiration of the Third Reich and disapproval of the way in which England had treated the couple. Eventually, word of this behavior reached Hitler, and midway through the visit, Ley was relieved of his duty as official host.
22
On October 15 the Duke and Duchess went to Essen, where they toured a large coal mine. To the surprise of his hosts, David insisted on climbing some fifteen hundred feet down into the shaft, accompanied by Dudley Forwood, to see for himself the conditions within. Following an afternoon visit to the Krupp’s Armaments Factory, the Windsors attended a reception given in their honor by the president of the Rhine province. The next day, they visited Düsseldorf, where they attended an industrial exhibit. Wallis found the display boring, but David was fascinated. A visit to a miners’ hospital followed, where both the Duke and Duchess toured the wards and took time to sit down on the beds of several patients for impromptu chats.
On the twentieth, David’s cousin Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, gave a dinner party in their honor at the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg. As the Windsors stood at the head of the receiving line, the hundred guests carefully made their way past the couple. Wallis noticed that each and every lady curtsied to her and called her “Royal Highness,” gestures she deeply appreciated.
23
The highlight of the visit came on October 22, when the Duke and Duchess accepted an invitation from Adolf Hitler to join him for tea at Berchtesgaden. No part of the Windsors’ trip to Germany would cause more controversy that this single visit, but it is difficult, in retrospect, to explain why so much ink has been spilled condemning these few hours. Only three days earlier, Edward, Viscount Halifax—the British foreign secretary—had likewise visited Hitler at the express wish of both the British government and King George VI. Chamberlain, desperate to guarantee the future peace of Europe, was willing to negotiate; on his behalf, Halifax told the Führer that England was officially prepared to recognize the preponderance of German interests in Europe. Although nothing came of the visit, it was not the first, nor would it be the last, British attempt to sound out Hitler and actively form some sort of alliance, however uneasy.
The idea for the visit originated with Hitler himself. Neither David nor Wallis had expected to meet him; when he issued the invitation, however, they were honor-bound to accept. Had they refused, their decision would undoubtedly have caused a diplomatic incident. As it was, the Windsors were private citizens; neither brought any agenda to Berchtesgaden. Nor was there anything unusual in such a meeting; high-ranking visitors to Germany were often accorded private audiences with the Führer, which were simply regarded as a matter of courtesy. Under the circumstances, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had little choice but to honor the Führer’s invitation or reason to refuse it.
Hitler dispatched a private train to collect the Duke and Duchess, who were accompanied by Rudolf Hess. When they reached Berchtesgaden, they were joined by Dr. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s personal translator. The Windsors climbed into an open-topped black Mercedes and, escorted by a contingent of SS guards on motorcycles and a host of cars filled with detectives and armed officers, were driven up the mountain at Obersalzburg to Hitler’s Berghof.
At the top of the hill, the procession rounded the drive and swung through the gates which marked the entrance court before the Berghof. Hitler, dressed in the brown Nazi Party jacket, black trousers, and black shoes, stood on the steps, waiting to greet them. “His face had a pasty pallor,” Wallis recalled, “and under his mustache his lips were fixed in a kind of mirthless grimace. Yet at close quarters he gave one the feeling of great inner force. His hands were long and slim, a musician’s hands, and his eyes were truly extraordinary—intense, unblinking, magnetic, burning with the same peculiar fire.”
24
Hitler led the Windsors into the entrance hall, past a huge painting of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and into an anteroom. There several tall, well-built young men stepped forward to remove their coats. They were then escorted through a hallway and down three steps into the immense drawing room. One wall was occupied by an enormous picture window with magnificent views of the snow-covered Alps stretching for miles in the distance. Hitler told the Duke he would like to speak with him privately, and Wallis was left with Rudolf Hess in the drawing room to await their return.
David would later recall that the ensuing conversation was utterly banal:
My ostensible reason for going to Germany was to see for myself what National Socialism was doing in housing and welfare for the workers, and I tried to keep my conversation with the Führer to these subjects, not wishing to be drawn into a discussion of politics.... In a roundabout way, he encouraged me to infer that Red Russia was the only enemy, and that it was in Britain’s interest and in Europe’s too, that Germany be encouraged to strike east and smash Communism forever.... I confess frankly that he took me in. I believed him when he implied that he sought no war with England. . . .
25
 
The hour-long interview was also recalled by the interpreter, Paul Schmidt:
Hitler was evidently making an effort to be as amiable as possible towards the Duke, whom he regarded as Germany’s friend, having especially in mind a speech the Duke had made some years before, extending the hand of friendship to Germany’s ex-servicemen’s associations. In these conversations there was, so far as I could see, nothing whatever to indicate whether the Duke of Windsor really sympathised with the ideology and practices of the Third Reich, as Hitler seemed to assume he did. Apart from some appreciative words for the measures taken in Germany in the field of social welfare, the Duke did not discuss political questions. . . .
26
 
Finally, the Duke and Hitler returned to the drawing room to join Wallis for tea. David spoke to Hitler in German, although Hitler had ordered Schmidt to translate; several times, the Duke stopped the conversation to correct the translator, saying that he had misinterpreted what he had said. Hitler addressed few words to Wallis. The one chilling remark she did later recall was in answer to her compliment on the splendid architecture she and David had observed. “Our buildings,” Hitler declared ominously, “will make more magnificent ruins than the Greeks.”
27
After the Windsors had left the Berghof, Hitler turned to Schmidt and announced, “She would have made a good Queen.”
28
The Duke and Duchess were unprepared for the avalanche of criticism which greeted their German visit. They were accused of having been taken in by the Nazis, of swallowing without question the endless propaganda parade of happy workers and beautiful Aryan youth which had greeted them at every stop. Although the Duke was a man of powerful influence, his critics would argue, he had done nothing to discover the ugly reality behind the rumors of concentration camps and imposed brutality. He and Wallis had been used by the very forces which threatened the peace of the world. British MP Herbert Morrison, leader of the London County Council, declared, “The choice before ex-kings is either to fade out of the public eye or be a nuisance. It is a hard choice, perhaps, for one of his temperament, but the Duke of Windsor will be wise to fade.”
29
In retrospect, the Duke’s decision to visit Germany, while it may be considered unfortunate for the damage it did to the reputations of him and his wife, cannot be regarded with any political significance. David knew little of the realities of the Nazi regime; in Hitler and the Third Reich he saw—as did so many others at the time—only the admirable economic and patriotic results of their achievements. It is doubtful that he was even aware of Hitler’s policies on race. Wallis knew even less than her husband. Both feared Soviet Russia far more than they did any future threat from Germany.
Then, too, Germany was the country of David’s heritage; his mother had raised him to speak the language as fluently as a native, and the walls of the royal residences of England were lined with portraits of his Hanoverian ancestors. “The Duke’s first country—England—had cut him off,” declares a friend. “It was only natural that, in his exile, he would look with misty eyes to the only other country with which he felt a close bond.”
30
Much of the criticism of the Windsors’ tour of Germany stemmed from the fact that they were shown only what the Nazis wished them to see; they were not allowed to explore the conditions of those suffering under the Nazi regime, nor did they seem inclined to ask any questions or appear in any context which might have proved controversial. But surely the responsibility for some of this criticism must be laid squarely at the doors of both King George VI and his Foreign Office. Had the British government, acting upon the King’s continued wish that his brother be marginalized, not insisted that the Duke be ignored by their own diplomats during his visit and left to misstep on his own without any advice or counsel from the embassy, almost certainly the results of the trip would have been different. At the very least, embassy officials would have been able to ensure that the Duke and Duchess avoided any appearances which might cause offense or lead to misinterpretation.
David himself later admitted that his enthusiasm during the visit had been a mistake. “I acknowledge now that, along with too many other well-meaning people, I let my admiration for the good side of German character dim what was being done to it by the bad,” he declared. “I thought that . . . the immediate task . . . of my generation
... was to prevent another conflict between Germany and the West that could bring down our civilization.... I thought that the rest of us could be fence-sitters while the Nazis and the reds slogged it out.”
31
In context, the Windsors’ trip to Germany was no more damaging either to British politics, world peace, or their own reputations than any of the numerous visits undertaken in the same period by any number of politicians and diplomats. Certainly it cannot be seen in the same light, for example, as the infamous September 1938 visit by Neville Chamberlain to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, a visit which took place with George VI’s full blessing and support. When Chamberlain returned to London with Hitler’s signature on the Munich Accord, he went straight to Buckingham Palace, where the King was overjoyed. George VI’s endorsement of this policy of appeasement with Hitler climaxed when he and Chamberlain appeared together on the balcony of the palace that evening, triumphantly proclaiming that peace, with the Führer’s cooperation, was now at hand. And yet the same voices raised in outrage against the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Germany in 1937 have not damned the far more significant overture toward the Third Reich made with the approval of his brother George VI. It is but one example of the Royal Family’s relentless circle of protective courtiers ensuring that criticism of the monarch remained buried; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, alone and without benefit of a press office or public-relations advice, were left to founder on their own before the eyes of the world.
The Windsors had hoped to visit America that fall; after their return from Germany to Paris, they continued to work on the arrangements, which were being negotiated by Charles Bedaux on their behalf. Bedaux arranged for the Duke and Duchess to travel on the German liner
Bremen
and arrive in New York on November 11. David expressed a wish to meet with President Franklin Roosevelt; tour industrial plants; make several speeches emphasizing the need for peace; and accompany Wallis to visit her relatives as well. At first, everything seemed as if it would go off without any problem. Bedaux received assurances that the president would receive the Duke and Duchess for tea at the White House. George Summerlin, chief of protocol for the U.S. State Department, would welcome the Windsors and remain with them until they left. Two weeks before the proposed tour, David delivered a speech at the Anglo-American Press Association lunch in Paris in which he touched upon both the recent visit to Germany and the forthcoming trip to America:

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