Britain’s National Archives have released records showing then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s attempts to cover up a Nazi plot to collaborate with members of the British royal family.
The elaborate plan to install the Duke of Windsor as king, should the Nazis successfully invade Britain, involved luring the abdicated king out of neutral Portugal to Spain to offer him a deal.
Top secret memos, made available on Thursday, showed how Churchill tried to stall the publication of the plot after World War II as he was worried about how the royal couple would be perceived. Churchill even asked President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 to delay publication of the memos.
The Nazi plot failed, and the memos were eventually published in 1957 when Churchill was no longer prime minister.
(AP)
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This is somewhat old news. There is some strong circumstantial evidence that the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII) was interested in getting his job back, perhaps playing a role in Britain similar to Vidkun Quisling in Norway, or Marshal Pétain in France. They ended up making him governor of a small colony of the American coast to keep him out of trouble. There wasn’t enough evidence to convict him of treason (which would have involved capital punishment), so the whole matter was largely left to be a footnote in histories, and fodder for writers of alternative histories (the “what if” the Battle of Britain went the other way genre).