Wednesday, June 29, 2022

“It’s a shame he is no longer king,” Goebbels wrote...

Britain got a very good king in 1936, especially compared to his older brother. I always find interesting books about the period leading up to World War II. This one is about the former King Edward VIII after his abdication:
Andrew Lownie’s Traitor King begins on Dec. 11, 1936, with the last act of Edward’s 326-day reign. As he read his abdication speech into a BBC microphone at Windsor Castle, Wallis listened in the South of France, muttering “the fool, the stupid fool.” Throwing over a kingship was only the beginning of his folly. Edward and Wallis soon had a new shared goal: To undo his error and her humiliation by returning to Britain, ideally as king and queen (and definitely without paying income tax). ....

Edward was not quite a man without qualities—he had a dim, paternalist care for “the workers,” and he looked great in plus-fours—but he was profoundly shallow. “Did that Mozart chap write anything else?” he was overheard asking after a concert. Wallis was harder and smarter, a Lady Macbeth on Benzedrine. Both were early admirers of Hitler.

Abdication freed them to mix more freely with the wrong sort of people. In June 1937, they married at the French castle of their wealthy friend Charles Bedaux, who held “extensive business interests in Nazi Germany” and had long been suspected as a German spy. It was Bedaux who arranged their German tour that October. The Windsors visited a Nazi youth camp, an SS training school, the Krupp arms factory and a concentration camp. No one knows what was discussed at their private Berchtesgaden tea, but, the New York Times reported, Hitler gave them both a fulsome goodbye before firing off a Nazi salute, which Edward reciprocated. “It’s a shame he is no longer king,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “With him we would have entered into an alliance.” ....

In neutral Madrid, the Windsors set up at the Ritz, where, the British ambassador said, “every word” was recorded by Nazi spies. The Spanish foreign minister reported that Edward blamed “the Jews and the Reds” for the war, wanted to put anti-Nazi British politicians “up against a wall,” and “seemed very much to hope” that Germany would bomb England “effectively,” to precipitate peace talks. ....

In the Bahamas, Edward and Wallis continued to socialize with pro-Nazi figures, including the Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren, who...was involved in moving German money into South America. But their last chance had passed. The rest of their story, and the rest of Mr. Lownie’s narrative, descends into freeloading, snobbery and irrelevance. They never paid for anything, treachery included. (the review)
Dominic Green, "‘Traitor King’ Review: A Royal Without Honor'," The Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2022.

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