It was the talk of the Western world. On October 22, 1937, the headline-making Edward, Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated as King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom less than a year earlier, spent an hour meeting privately with Adolf Hitler at his mountaintop lair in the Bavarian Alps. “Apart from some appreciative words for the measures taken in Germany in the field of social welfare, the duke did not discuss political matters,” interpreter Paul Schmidt recalled. “He was frank and friendly with Hitler, and displayed the social charm for which he is known throughout the world.”
But Windsor’s cautious words hardly mattered. After the meeting, Hitler took tea with the erstwhile duke and his American-born wife, Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. As Nazi cameramen clicked away, the trio smiled at each other like old chums. “[Hitler] took both their hands in his saying a long goodbye,” a reporter recalled, “after which he stiffened to a rigid Nazi salute that the duke returned.”
Windsor seemed to leave with a profound respect for both Germany and the leader of the Third Reich. “I have travelled the world, and my upbringing has made me familiar with the great achievements of mankind, but that which I have seen in Germany, I had hitherto believed to be impossible,” the duke exclaimed, per Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by Andrew Lownie. “It cannot be grasped and is a miracle; one can only begin to understand it when one realizes that behind it all is one man and one will.”
Hilter was struck by a strong dismay for what might have been. “It’s a shame he is no longer king,” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote of the duke. “With him we would have entered into an alliance.”
This weeklong trip to Germany would haunt the Windsors for the rest of their long, aimless, unprincipled lives. The visit was a coup for the Nazi propaganda machine and fulfilled the Windsors’ shortsighted need to be fêted in grand royal style. “The couple were easy prey for someone who would show them the attention and respect they craved,” writes Alexander Larman in The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother, and a Family Divided.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were far from the only royals and ex-royals who would gravitate towards the Nazi Party during the 1930s and ’40s. Lost in a new world that cared little for their lineage and generational privilege, the Nazis represented a way to recapture proximity to power and respect, which, for royals and aristocrats, had dissipated greatly after the first World War.
Some members of royal houses including those from Italy, Spain, Denmark, and England would become card-carrying Nazis or enthusiastic sympathizers. Even members of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which had been forced out of power by the German revolution in 1918, would become part of the Nazi machine. These included German Prince August Wilhelm, son of the deposed Emperor Wilhelm II, who was derisively nicknamed “Auwi the Little Brown Shirt.” In Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany, Jonathan Petropoulos describes August’s rise through the Nazi ranks. He eventually became a popular speaker at rallies, as well as a member of the German Reichstag and the Prussian State Council. He did this in spite of the fact that his father, former King Wilhelm II, “thought Hitler a fool.” But the former emperor also accepted financial rewards from the German state, and did nothing to stop Hitler’s rise.
The numbers are staggering. In the definitive Royals and the Reich, Petropoulos estimated that around 270 members of German princely houses alone joined the Nazi Party. These small princely houses had had their power stripped after World War I, and some of their land confiscated. Feeling persecuted by progressive groups, no longer guaranteed advances in the army and government, they were enticed by the Nazis’ promise of “law and order” and a return to an idealized “traditional” German past.
Many of these minor royals had also been professional failures before they discovered the National Socialist Party. Petropoulos notes Hereditary Prince Ernst of Lippe as possibly the first prince to become a card-carrying Nazi, in 1928. He later became a high-ranking member of the notorious SS Race and Settlement Head Office.
Entire princely houses would give their lives to the Third Reich. No family exemplified this more than Queen Victoria’s great-grandsons the Hesse brothers: Prince Philipp, Prince Christoph, Prince Wolfgang, and Prince Richard.
According to Petropoulos, Prince Philipp transformed from a bisexual dilettante who designed aristocratic interiors into a member of the party who held positions he may not have been qualified for, including governor of his home province of Hesse-Nassau. Due to his marriage to Princess Mafalda, daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, he also became Hitler’s liaison with Benito Mussolini and the Italian royal family, as well as an important figurehead to normalize the Nazi Party for ordinary Germans.
His brother Christoph, married to Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark (the older sister of Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II), became a high-ranking SS member and a top intelligence official at the Reich Air Ministry.
The Third Reich’s emphasis on traditional manhood was a draw for insecure, striving men like Philipp and Christoph. “The association of National Socialism with sports, adventure, and modernity proved important in eliciting their support,” Petropoulos writes.
It also gave nobles, whose glamourous fame had been supplanted by liberal, upstart actors and artists, the chance to be revered, respected, and envied for their proximity to power. While the Nazis pointedly courted Germany’s former elite (constantly dangling the carrot of monarchical restoration) to legitimize themselves, the princes were once again celebrated at parties and balls. “The princes were co-opted by the Nazi leaders and joined in this new ‘high society’: an amalgamation of the traditional elite and the new men,” Petropoulos notes. “This glamorous scene helped provide the ‘beautiful face of the Third Reich.’’’
No one’s head swelled more due to his Nazi Party membership than Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A grandson of Queen Victoria, the English-raised duke, who had been deposed in 1918, was a vocal early supporter of Hitler, and made sure everyone knew of his close friendship with both Hitler and Mussolini. After one dinner party, known high-society hostess and journalist Bella Fromm wrote dismissively: “The unprepossessing Duke [Carl] Eduard strutted around with his Fascist dagger, an honor bestowed on him by Mussolini.”
Eduard, an enthusiastic eugenicist, would reap the rewards for his overt loyalty and service to the Reich. “[The] importance that Carl Eduard had for the Hitler regime was evident in the luxury of apartments befitting his rank and the amenities of a large fleet of vehicles, diligent adjutants, administrators, and servants, as well as abundant foreign currency,” historian Hubertus Büschel writes.
Royal and aristocratic women also gravitated towards the Nazi strongman. According to Petropoulos, society leaders like Elsa Bruckmann (born Princess Cantacuzène of Romania) saw Hitler as their “protégé,” encouraging him to invest in expensive evening clothes and clean up his unkempt appearance.
This surface-level, frivolous focus on optics and the fanfare that the Nazis created meant many royals who supported Hitler actually knew very little about his atrocious beliefs, or willfully turned a blind eye to the regime’s atrocities. Petropoulos notes that, during his denazification trial after the war, Prince Philipp of Hesse would admit he had never read Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf.
The Nazis did not only focus on German royals and princely houses. During the 1930s, the regime sent out emissaries to all of the social capitals of Europe, promoting fascism as an orderly antidote to a world gone mad, and a bulwark against communism. Devastated by the losses of World War I, many Europeans were increasingly isolationist and for appeasement at all costs if it meant preventing another world war.
In London, the Nazis made a full-court press, taking advantage of the fact that the English elite (including the royal family) had strong familial bonds with Germany. They dispatched emissaries like British royal cousin Prince Ludwig von Hessen-Darmstadt and the deviously charming Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a close friend of Hitler, whose salons were frequented by Edward, Prince of Wales, his brother George, Duke of Kent, and Wallis Simpson and her then husband, Ernest.
“Abroad, the German royals, by the very fact that so many joined the Nazi Party, reassured skeptical European rulers—and royals—that it was largely business as usual in the Fatherland,” Andrew Morton writes in 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis, and the Biggest Cover-Up in History.
One of the most persuasive of Hitler’s agents in England was diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop, a “snob and social climber” who assiduously courted those in positions of power. He successfully seduced (some say physically) Wallis—who was then Edward, Prince of Wales’s mistress—with overt flattery, which included sending 17 carnations every morning to her flat.
Although many blamed Wallis for the Prince of Wales’s fascist sympathies, the prince was in fact surrounded by Nazi enthusiasts. Strongly anti-Communist, he was enchanted with the pomp and ceremony of Nazi Germany. One night, a guest at Wallis’s apartment reported the prince was “wearing a German helmet and goose stepping around the living room, for what reason I cannot imagine.”
In the mid-1930s, fascism had become widely normalized in England, and was even openly celebrated and part of popular culture. In 2015, The Sun published a video of Edward VIII (Prince of Wales at the time the video was shot) encouraging his nieces Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret to do a Nazi salute.
Edward, and other royals, perhaps admired Hitler’s strongman tactics more than they wanted to admit. During his brief reign as King Edward VIII, conservative MP Henry Channon allegedly wrote in his diary that the king was “going the dictator way and is pro-German, against Russia and against too much slipshod democracy. I shouldn’t be surprised if he aimed at making himself a mild dictator—a difficult enough task for an English king.”
Much to Hitler’s dismay, Edward announced his abdication on December 11, 1936, to marry Wallis Simpson. Continuing their proven track record of poor judgment, the couple accepted the offer of controversial industrial millionaire Charles Bedaux to marry at Chateau de Cande, his estate in France. It was Bedaux who suggested the couple travel to Germany so that the duke could inspect workers’ conditions, an alleged philanthropic passion of his.
After their marriage, they planned a trip to Germany. Edward was warned not to go by British officials, but he was eager to show his bride what a real royal welcome was and thrilled that Wallis would be addressed as “Her Royal Highness.” Petropoulos describes the Windsors’ arrival in Germany, where they were met with cries of “heil Edward,” shouted over the strains of “God save the King.” The station was lined with alternating flags, the Union Jack and the Nazi swastika.
The tour was a whirlwind of visits to factories, housing complexes, and social events attended by Nazi elite including Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring, whose wives slavishly curtsied to the duchess. Although the duke was aware enough to know he was being paraded around like “trophies at an exhibition,” he was still impressed with what he saw. The all-important meeting with Hitler took place on the final day of the couple’s tour, which the duchess recalled in her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons:
“I could not take my eyes off Hitler…. His face had a pasty pallor, and under his moustache his lips were fixed in a kind of mirthless grimace. Yet at close quarters he gave one the feeling of great inner force…. His eyes were truly extraordinary—intense, unblinking, magnetic.”
Although the visit, Larman notes, was a “propaganda coup” for Hitler, it had immediate ramifications for the Windsors. They received so much bad press that a planned tour of America had to be canceled. The couple eventually fled to Portugal, where they lived in constant fear of being kidnapped by the Nazis as collateral and the possibility of being installed on a puppet throne in England. There, they were surrounded by Nazi agents who encouraged the loose-lipped, tipsy duke to bad mouth his family and country.
The duke held strong to the belief he could prevent a war through diplomacy. Before war between the United Kingdom and Germany was declared in 1939, he sent Hitler a telegram, imploring him to find a peaceful solution. In England, a horrified Winston Churchill decided that the Windsors’ pro-Nazi sentiments were dangerous. He eventually convinced a reluctant duke to accept the governorship of the distant Bahamas. The wayward Windsors, with their reputation permanently sullied, sailed for Nassau in the summer of 1940.
The Windsors would get off easy in comparison to other royals who were entangled with the Third Reich. As the war progressed, they learned a hard truth: If you make a deal with the devil, you end up getting burned.
By 1940, the Nazis and nobles were becoming wary and distrustful of each other, as Hitler became increasingly jealous of their popularity and wary of their motives. “Since two years my eyes have been opened,” Prince Christoph’s wife Sophie wrote in 1943. “You can imagine what feelings one has now about those criminals.”
But it was too late. The nail in the coffin came in 1944, when the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler failed. Several princes were suspected of being involved, and eventually, a large number of aristocratic men, women, and children were thrown into concentration camps, including the anti-Nazi Princess Antonia of Luxembourg and her children.
In 1943, Prince Christoph of Hesse died in a mysterious plane crash. Prince Philipp of Hesse eventually found himself in the Flossenbürg concentration camp after being arrested, according to him, “because of the suspicion of the cooperation of the Italian royal family with the overthrow of Mussolini.” Extraordinarily, Petropoulos cites that Philipp “had always believed that no one could be put into a concentration camp without a good reason. I, however, was locked up without any grounds being given.”
Even worse was the fate of his wife, Princess Malfada (who Hitler allegedly called “the trickiest bitch”). She was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where the head of the camp was the Prince of Waldeck, a distant relative of her husband. On
August 24, 1944, the princess was severely burned when the camp was bombed by Allied forces. Her arm was amputated in a botched surgery, and she died from blood loss days later.
Many royal collaborators would be arrested and tried by the Allies after the war. To this day, royal houses are still grappling with the depth of their family’s collaboration with the Nazis, as fascism attempts to seduce the Western world once again.
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