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Newly released secret files disclose that Sir Winston Churchill tried to suppress secret Second World War documents detailing a Nazi plot to offer the throne to the abdicated king Edward and then Duke of Windsor, in the event of Britain’s defeat. The telegrams between Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, and his ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon over the summer of 1940 had been captured in Germany at the close of the war and kept secret. However Churchill learned in 1953 that they were due to be published by official historians the following year as part of an official academic programme by the victorious Allies to release key Nazi documents. The telegrams between von Ribbentrop and his emissaries apparently outlined how they might discreetly sound out the Duke on his cooperation with Nazi Germany. In the summer of 1940, following the fall of France, the Duke and Duchess had taken refuge in Lisbon, the capital of neutral Portugal. The Germans plotted to detain him in Spain, by force if necessary, to prevent British officials taking him to safety in the Caribbean to take up his new appointment as Governor of the Bahamas. A July 11 telegram from Von Ribbentrop to Lisbon explains that “the Duke must be informed at the appropriate time in Spain that Germany on her side wishes for peace with the British people, that the Churchill clique is standing in the way of this, and that it would be a good thing if the Duke were to hold himself in readiness for further developments. “Germany is determined to compel England to make peace by the use of all methods and would be prepared in such an event to pave the way to the granting of any wish expressed by the Duke, in particular with respect to the ascension of the English throne by the Duke and Duchess.” A July 25 telegram from Germany’s Madrid ambassador reports that an unnamed agent of the Spanish Minister of Interior told the Duke not to head to the Bahamas and that the Duke “might yet be destined to play large part in British politics and possibly ascend the British throne”. When the Duke replied that that the constitution ruled him out of regaining the throne after his abdication, the agent “remarked that the course of the war may produce changes even in the British constitution”. The agent reported that at that point “the duchess in particular became very thoughtful“. An August 12, 1953 memo from Mr Churchill to cabinet colleagues and marked Top Secret says he proposed “that publication be postponed for at least ten or twenty years”. He wanted the delay “on the grounds that these papers, tendentious and unreliable as they should undoubtedly be regarded, would give pain to the Duke of Windsor and leave an impression on the minds of those who read them entirely disproportionate to their historic value.” ♦️♦️♦️ Given the British pre-war flirtations and financial support of the Nazi regime in Germany, the impression those papers were giving are not disproportionate at all. Video: Their Royal Heilness 7-year-old Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother being taught Nazi salute by uncle Edward VIII at Balmoral, 1933.
