The Windsor Plot

On Aug. 2, 1940, with the Wehrmacht at the English Channel, and beleaguered Britain waiting seemingly helpless and hopeless on the other side, Germany's Minister to Portugal sent an encouraging telegram to his boss in Berlin, Foreign Minister and ex-champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Duke of Windsor, Britain's ex-King Edward VIII, it said, was ready and eager to return home with his American wife to reclaim the throne of Britain for both of them. To bring this about, the message went on, there were two possibilities: either England would urge him to come back, which Windsor considered entirely possible, or Germany would express the desire to negotiate with him. In either case, the minister concluded, Windsor was prepared for any personal sacrifice.

This message was but one item in a fat file of captured German documents, the tenth volume of which was published last week simultaneously in the U.S. and Britain. Like many another message directed to the prancing paranoid who planned to rule the world from Berlin, it revealed not so much historical fact as the fantastic lengths of self-deception followed by Hitler's ever-toadying diplomats in their constant effort to tell the Fuehrer what he wanted to hear.

Task Force. By Nazi standards, the Duke of Windsor might prove a useful tool. (Wasn't the royal family of German descent anyway?) The Germans saw Windsor as a king forced off his throne and sent into exile for love of a woman; and the thought must still rankle. Forced to flee from his French home, unwelcome in England, probably humiliated by the offer of the governorship of one of his younger brother's most insignificant West Indies colonies, the Duke of Windsor seemed a natural for the German cause. Hitler's Ribbentrop spared no effort to snare him. Sympathetic Spaniards and Portuguese were enlisted in the effort, and Walter Schellenberg, head of the Gestapo's counter-espionage organization, was sent to Lisbon at the head of an 18-man task force to direct the operation. The mission got off to a fine start when the Windsors arrived in Portugal, en route to the Bahamas, and found the British embassy swarming with refugees seeking aid. The British ambassador, desperate for a place to bed them down, finally settled on a proffered villa in Estoril, only to find too late that it was the home of a pro-Nazi Portuguese banker, who stayed on to play host to the visitors.

Fatuous End. Careful never to mention their German connections, foreign operatives in Portugal did their best to frighten Windsor with cooked-up tales of Churchillian vengeance directed against him through Britain's intelligence service. An ominous warning was slipped into a bouquet of flowers presented to the Duchess. "A firing of shots . . . through the bedroom window," wrote the German minister to Ribbentrop, "scheduled for the night of July 30, was omitted, since the psychological effect on the Duchess would only have been to increase her desire to depart, [but] through steady undermining of their sense of security, the Duke and Duchess were strongly influenced."

In fact, Windsor was offered the Bahamas post largely because the British wanted him off the Continent, where he might have been captured and proved a valuable prisoner for the Germans. Windsor sailed to the Bahamas on the agreed date and all the German plotting came to nothing. Said the British Foreign Office last week: "His Royal Highness never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause. The German records are necessarily a much tainted source." Added the Times of London: "The German efforts range from the sinister to the fatuous and end on a note of glorious, unconscious farce."

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