A History that might have been - Britain aligning with Hitler

From The Sunday Express:

The Nazi King
In December 1940, as war raged in Europe and Britain battled Hitler in lonely isolation, �American journalist Fulton Oursler received an unexpected summons to the Bahamas. He had been invited to conduct a rare interview with the islands� governor, the former King Edward VIII, �officially known since his abdication four years earlier as His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor.

As an officer in the British Army as well as a dignitary of the British Empire and brother of King George VI, the Duke might have been expected to fly the flag for his embattled �country. Instead he gave Oursler a eulogy to Hitler. The former British monarch told the journalist it would be tragic for the world if the Nazi �dictator were overthrown. Hitler was not just the right and logical leader of the German people, the Duke insisted, he was also a great man.

As Oursler tried to grasp the �enormity of what he was hearing the Duke asked him: �Do you suppose that your President would consider intervening as a mediator when and if the proper time arrives?�

The American understood that he was being asked to carry a message to President Roosevelt, with whom he was on good terms, but he was not certain what it was. As he was leaving the Duke�s aide-de-camp spelt it out. He instructed Oursler: �Tell Mr �Roosevelt that if he will make an offer of intervention for peace, that before anyone in England can oppose it, the Duke of Windsor will instantly issue a statement supporting it and that will start a revolution in England and force peace.�

Fortunately Roosevelt would have no truck with the Duke�s treacherous scheme. He had already placed Edward and his American-born wife, the former Wallis Simpson, under FBI surveillance when they paid a visit to Miami. Newly declassified FBI papers revealed in a documentary this week on Channel Five show the Americans� scathing assessment of the royal figure who had once been the glam�orous darling of the British Empire.

�The British government were anxious to get rid of the Duke of Windsor, first and foremost because of his fondness for Nazi ideology,� the 227-page report concludes. �The Duchess�s political views are deemed so obnoxious to the British government that they refused to permit Edward to marry her and maintain the throne.�

The guy just did not have a clue:

In that context the abdication at the end of 1936 came as a godsend to the government. But even off the throne the Duke of Windsor posed an ongoing problem.

The FBI files show that at a party in Vienna in June 1937 � the month he married Mrs Simpson � the loose-tongued Duke told an Italian �diplomat that the Americans had cracked Italy�s intelligence codes.Four months later the Duke and Duchess paid a high-profile visit to Germany where the Nazi regime fawned on him. They met Hitler, who saw the value of �cultivating an ally once so intimately involved with British affairs. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote of the Duke: �It�s a shame he is no longer king. With him we would have entered into an alliance.�

Even the declaration of war was not enough to make the Duke sever his Nazi connections. He was made a major-general and stationed in France but he continued to �communicate with the enemy. In January 1940 the German minister in The Hague wrote that he had established a direct line of contact to the Duke.

This line of contact proved crucial to the tragic fate of France. From the Duke the Germans learned that their plans for the invasion of France had fallen into Allied hands. This intelligence allowed Hitler to change his plans and catch the Allies by surprise. France fell.

It is amazing to realize just how much rot is at the core of British politics from the founding of the Fabian Society in 1884 through the Communist groups of the 1960's through the radical environmental groups today. The insanity and delusion never ends, it just shifts its form and rebirths as a new polemic.