THE ROYAL BRITISH FAMILY'S NAZI CONNECTION

Delve into the British monarchy’s past and you’ll find a family history dotted with flirtations with fascism, covered-up German ancestry and even Nazi relatives.

EVIDENCE #1: LEAKED VIDEO. WHY WAS THE QUEEN FILMED DOING A NAZI SALUTE?

The movie is just 20 seconds long, but its effects on the Royal Family’s reputation will linger for decades, hanging over the House of Windsor like a black cloud.

The grainy black-and-white footage is shot in the gardens of Balmoral Castle, between 1933 and 1934. Frolicking around on the lawns are the Queen Mother, Prince Edward (who’d later become King Edward VIII), Princess Margaret – and a seven-year-old Princess Elizabeth.

At first, there’s nothing sinister about the video. The family are playing with the royal corgis. Then, out of the blue, it happens: the girl who one day will be Queen faces the camera and raises her arm in what appears to be a Nazi salute, followed by her mother and Uncle Edward. The two adults then encourage Margaret to follow suit.

The controversial film, first leaked by the UK newspaper The Sun in July 2015, sent shockwaves through British society. Here was a future monarch, now head of state and the Commonwealth, performing a ritual that had become Hitler's trademark as the Nazi Party rose to power during the 1930s. Even more staggering is the fact that just seven years later, the Queen Mother and her husband George VI would become symbols of wartime defiance as London was bombed during the Blitz of 1940.

Historians, though, are quick to pour water over suggestions that the Queen or the Queen Mother were ever Nazi sympathisers pointing out that the video needs to be watched in context. Respect scholar James Holland told The Sun: "They are having a laugh, there are lots of smiles, so it'a all a big joke. I don't think there was a child in Britain in the 1930s or 40s who has not performed a mock Nazi salute as a bit of a lark it just shows the Royal Family are as human as the next man"

Others historians have commented that aged seven the now-90-year old monarch couldn’t have comprehended the future implications of making a Nazi salute.

What’s not up for debate however, are the right-wing inclinations of Prince Edward, who a couple of years after the footage was shot would briefly be King before controversially abdicating. Edward’s links with Hitler’s fascism are a poorly kept secret. He once described the Führer as “a decent chap”.

“It is right that it [the fi lm] is put into the public domain,” says Dr Karina Urbach from the Institute of Historical Research. “It’s high time the Royal Archives were open for serious research on the 1930s and the issue of  Edward’s politics and their impact upon his generation within the Royal Family "These views are explored in more detail over the page...


EVIDENCE #2: EDWARD'S HITLER LINKS. WAS BRITAIN'S KING A NAZI SYMPATHISER?


To the average Brit, Edward VIII is a romanticised figure; the handsome devil of a king who abdicated from the throne in order to marry his true love, the twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson. History has proved, however, that the debonair monarch hid a darker side from the public, one which harboured far-right-wing views and a questionable relationship with Hitler.

Like most of the British Royal family, King Edward had close ties with Germany. His parents Queen Mary and George V boasted strong Germanic heritage. Edward himself was fluent in the German language, once telling his friend Diana Mosley, wife of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, that “every drop of blood in my veins is German.”

This extended to his politics. Edward, like many British aristocrats of the era, feared Communism, which at the time had a foothold in Russia under Stalin, and was spreading through both southern and eastern Europe. The only weapon to defeat the Red Menace was, Edward believed, the brand of fascism practiced by the Nazis.

After Hitler's party rose to power in 1933, one of Edward's equerries Sir Dudley Forwood, reported: "We were none of us averse to Hitler politically. We felt the Nazi regime was a more appropriate government than the Weimar Republic, which had been extremely socialist.” If Edward was drawn to Hitler, then the feeling was mutual. According to Andrew Morton’s book '17 Carnations: The Royals, The Nazis And The Biggest Cover-Up History' – a publication which Buckingham Palace tried to ban – the Führer began wooing Edward soon after becoming chancellor in 1933, encouraging teenage German aristocrat Princess Friederike to romance the then-bachelor prince. Hitler hoped to revive bygone days when English and German royalty only married each other.

Edward eventually wed Mrs Simpson but that didn’t stop Hitler from inviting Edward and his wife – now titled the Duke and Duchess of Windsor post-abdication – to visit him at his German mountain retreat October 1937. Edward and Hitler had a 50-minute private chat, the contents of which remain a mystery to this day. Infamously, Edward exchanged Nazi salutes with Hitler.

Andrew Morton seems to confirm a staggering rumour that had been circulating for years: that Hitler planned to establish Edward as a 'puppet king' if he succeeded in defeating Britain during Word War Two.

"The Führer hoped to install Edward back on the throne once the Nazis conquered England" writes Morton. "Hitler had ordered Spanish friends of the duke to try and convince him to stay in Europe, offering him a castle in southern Spain and more than $ 100 million as sweeteners. But the Duke and Duchess were terrified by Nazi-inspired rumours that the British intended to murder them - a reasonable assumption given Churchill's acrimonious relationship with the ex-king. Under enormous pressure, the couple fled to the Bahamas, and Hitler was left empty-handed".


EVIDENCE # 3: PALACE COVER-UP. DID THE ROYAL FAMILY DESTROY DAMNING NAZI EVIDENCE?


Under British law, government documents declared to be in the public interest must be transferred to the openly accessible National Archives after 30 years, unless they pose a threat to national security. Why, then, are the Royal Archives not subject to this kind of scrutiny? This is the question being posed by historians after the Queen’s Nazi salute footage was anonymously linked to The Sun newspaper last year . Especially since these files are believed to contain large volumes of correspondence between the royal family and various Nazi politicians and aristocrats.

“The royal family can’t suppress their own history forever,” says Karina Urbach of the Institute of Historical Research. “This is censorship. Censorship is not a democratic value. They have to face their past. I’m coming from a country, Germany, where we all have to face our past.”

Urbach, author of 'Go-Betweens For Hitler', a book about the relationship between the royals and the Nazis, has spent years trying to get her hands on documents in the Royal Archive relating to Nazi Germany – with no luck. She claims she’s seen rows of boxes containing information on the all-important 1930s era that’s off-limits to everyone, even suggesting that certain fi les belonging to this period “no longer existed”.

The Archives are a beautiful place to work but not if you want to work on 20th-century material… you don’t get any access to anything political after 1918. We know that after ’45 there was a big clean-up operation. The royals were very worried about correspondence resurfacing and so it was destroyed.”

Still, Buckingham Palace hasn’t been able to totally control the flow of information. Much of the juiciest knowledge about the link between the royals and the Nazis may have been swept under the carpet if it wasn’t for the efforts of two American academics, Professor David Harris (then working with the US State Department) and Dr Paul Sweet, who successfully campaigned for the so-called Windsor File – which among other things revealed Edward VIII’s relationship with Hitler – to finally be published in 1957, after years of legal wrangling.

EVIDENCE#4: FUNERAL PHOTOS. WHY DOES PRINCE PHILIP HAVE SO MANY NAZI RELATIVES?


You know him as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband and consort to the Queen. His full name is less familiar and rarely used in public: Philip Mountbatten. But that itself doesn’t tell the full story. Mountbatten is, in fact, an anglicised version of the dynastic name Battenberg, which Philip’s German family members adopted during World War One due to the British public’s anti-German feeling.

And here’s where it gets really interesting. The prince himself took the Mountbatten name in 1947, when he married Princess Elizabeth. The deed may have helped deflect attention away from the Prince’s lesser-known heritage, as a fully paid up member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg – a prominent German royal dynasty.

The now 94-year-old Duke of Edinburgh was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1921. He’s been described by biographers as having an unsettled, lonely childhood; his parents separatedafter his schizophrenic mother was put into a mental hospital, and he was moved from school to school, from country to country. One of these establishments was Schule Schloss Salem in southern Germany, where he arrived in the autumn of 1933, eight months after Hitler had been in power. Schloss Salem was one of the country’s most prominent schools, and the Nazis’ Hitler Youth movement quickly cemented its holdover the place, making all the boys – including Philip – perform Nazi salutes. He stayed for just two years, before being shipped to Gordonstoun school in Scotland.

While there’s no suggestion that Prince Philip – who went on to fight against the Germans in World War Two in the British Royal Navy – ever had Nazi sympathies, the same perhaps can’t be said of three of his sisters, Margarita, Cecile and Sophie, all of whom married German aristocrats with senior positions in the Nazi Party.

Last year, an English TV documentary entitled 'Prince Philip: The Plot To Make A King', broadcasted excerpts from the memoirs of one of those siblings – Princess Sophie – in which she describes Hitler as a “charming and seemingly modest man”. When she gave birth to her first son with husband Prince Christoph von Hessen, the chief of Hermann Goering’s secret intelligence service, she named him Karl Adolf in honour of the Führer.

The documentary also revealed photos of a 16-year-old Prince Philip attending a Nazi funeral in Darmstadt near Frankfurt, after his sister Cecile was killed in an air crash in 1937. Philip is dressed sombrely in a dark overcoat but he’s flanked by grieving relatives all clad in their Nazi uniforms.

In an honest and rare interview about his German past for the 2006 book 'Royals And The Reich', the Duke of Edinburgh admitted that he found Hitler’s attempts to restore Germany’s prestige after World War One as “attractive”, and admitted his German relatives had “inhibitions about the Jews”

"There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building". said the Prince of Nazi Germany. "There was a sense of hope after the Weimar Republic. I can understand people latching on to something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was".

Philip insisted he was never "conscious of anybody in the family actually expressing anti-Semitic views" but added that there were "inhibitions about the Jews" and "jealousy of their success".


EVIDENCE #5: WINDSOR FAMILY TREE. HOW GERMAN IS THE QUEEN AND HER FAMILY?


In 1714, the British royal family was faced with a problem. Queen Anne, who famously united the kingdoms of England and Scotland into one sovereign state, died after a year-long illness. That meant her direct Stuart family line had come to a halt. Worse still, all the likely candidates for next monarch among her 50-odd closest suitable relatives were Catholic –which was forbidden by 1701’s Act of Settlement. So instead, the gig was given to a foreigner – George Ludwig, Prince Elector of Hanover: a German through and through.

In that moment, the British royal house name changed from Stuart to Brunswick-Lüneburg-Hanover. The new German throne-sitters had a good run, lasting until 1837 when Queen Victoria took over the top job. The new monarch followed a strong tradition of English royalty marrying German royalty by wedding (her first cousin) Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, another richly Germanic dynasty – taking his family name, too. And from here, it’s only four generations – Queen Victoria is Queen Elizabeth’s great-great grandmother – until we arrive at the current members of the royal family.

It’s not clear whether the average pre-20th-century Brit knew, or even gave a hoot, that their royals had so much German blood flowing through their veins, but come 1914 things had changed. The English and German royals found themselves on opposing sides in World War One, and suddenly having the family surname Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was not a good look for the Palace. In recognition of this delicate situation, reigning monarch George V changed the family name to Windsor, which remains to this day.

It’s worth nothing that of George’s 29 first cousins on his father’s side, 19 were German, the rest half-German. A look on his mother’s side reveals that of her 31 first-cousins, six were German and 25 half-German. Not a single one was British. George V’s wife Mary was the first royal consort in 400 years to speak British as a mother tongue.

While it’s clear that the Queen and her family have close blood ties with Germany, historian Dominic Selwood points out in the UK’s Guardian newspaper that Elizabeth II is also descended from a millennia’s worth of different British royal dynasties, too.

“To be honest, if we scrutinise the royal family’s connections with the Fatherland, we should take a long look at our own, too, and acknowledge that this country [the UK] has had the most profound and close genetic and cultural ties with the people of Germany and Scandinavia for over 1,500 years.”


EVIDENCE #6: THE HESS INCIDENT. WAS THERE A ROYAL/NAZI PLOT TO OVERTHROW CHURCHILL?


On the night of May 10, 1941, Germany’s deputy Führer Rudolf Hess entered British airspace over Scotland in a light aircraft piloted by himself, tracked by a pair of RAF Spitfires. At 11:06 pm, Hitler’s right-hand man realised he was low on fuel and took the decision to parachute from his plane. Hess was subsequently captured and held as a prisoner of war at the Tower of London.

The motives for Hess’s daring Scottish mission have been endlessly debated by historians. Some insist he fl ed Germany without Hitler’s permission to start peace talks. Others claim Hitler actually rubber-stamped the trip, and that Hess’s orders were to secure a military alliance with Britain against Russia.

Authors John Harris and Richard Wilbourn have a more scandalous theory. After studying more than 10,000 documents for their book 'Rudolf Hess: Treachery And Deception', the pair believe Hess’s mission was part of a coup to topple British PM, Winston Churchill – a mutiny that was organised by Prince George, the Duke of Kent, the younger brother of wartime monarch King George VI.

“The aristocracy had the most to lose from Churchill staying in power. All they knew was that Germany was bombing Britain nightly, softening the country up prior to an invasion, which would surely cost them their wealth, their status and their lives. They were also unhappy that Churchill’s strategy revolved around a US alliance, which many quite correctly saw as the end of the British Empire. A peace treaty with Germany, a country that had historic ties with the Royal Family, would have seemed like the most sensible option to them. Communism was the real enemy; particularly to those with much to lose. There were many parties involved in the plot but our research points time and again to one man who was connected to them all: Prince George.”

The historians claim that Prince George was in Scotland on the day of Hess’s arrival. When the Nazi landed, he’s believed to have immediately asked for the Duke of Hamilton, a good friend of the Prince’s. According to Harris and Wilbourn, a 30,000-strong army of allied Poles, who’d fl ed their homeland and were also based in Scotland, had been primed to support the coup.

Published in "World of Knowledge", Australia, issue 41, August 2016, excerpts pp. 8-15. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.