#08 I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler - ep 2 of 2 May 1937: King, wife, Führer, lobster

Sunday afternoon, 2 May 1937, where in the garden of a chateau a few miles south of the town of Tour in France, a woman is being photographed standing in a flowerbed with a bunch of pussy-willow in her hand. The woman is Wallace Simpson, an American divorcee who is about to marry the ex-King of England, Edward VIII. He's just abdicated his throne for her. The photographer is Cecil Beaton. She's wearing a pure white dress with a bright pink silk lobster splashed between her legs. It was designed by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Well, all innocent enough, you'd imagine, if rather strange. But Wallace Simpson was the woman who'd introduced Edward, recently King, to Hitler's ambassador to England. The chateau was owned by a man whom we know to be a Nazi sympathizer. And Salvador Dali, the man behind the lobster, was also an open admirer of Hitler. So what on earth was going on? Hello, good to see you at the History Cafe. This is where we come to talk usually about historical stories everyone knows. I just want to try out some new ideas. I'm John Rosebank. And I'm Penelope Middlebow. At the History Cafe, we revisit stories that have got stuck in our collective memory, but just don't look quite right to us. So get yourself a coffee, pull out a chair, and let's see what happens. Actually, instead of History Cafe, this is History Kitchen Table. Since we're in the middle of the coronavirus lockdown, brother and mad, everything's just about the same. Use the right moment and they say you can explain the whole of history. Well, this moment lasts just a split second, long enough to take a photograph. It's just a trivial picture. It's supposed to be a romantic image commissioned by the X King to show his bride to be in a sympathetic light, but it's not turning out that way. The silk lobster, which stretches from Wallace Simpson's crotch and down between her legs, was intended by Salvador Dali to be a symbol of sex. Cecil Beaton, the photographer, knew that perfectly well, although it doesn't seem that Wallace Simpson did. It looks as though Beaton is having a joker to her expense. But there's much more to this photograph than that. The powerful forces of European diplomacy of peace and war are circling around us, in fact, uncomfortably close. Simpson and Charles Bedeau, the owner of the shadow, both have awkward connections with Hitler's Nazi regime, which by 1937, have very obviously consolidated its deathly grip on Germany. So too did the man behind the lobster, Salvador Dali. It's an open secret that Salvador Dali, the Spanish artist, who designed the lobster on Wallace Simpson's dress, was an admirer of Hitler. Now, it's just about possible, as historians, to give the benefit of the doubt to those people who in the early years after 1933, when the Nazis first came to power in Germany, were willing to wait and see what the new regime would be like. Hitler's anti-Semitism was frightening and ugly, but there were comparatively few Jews in Germany and hardly any outside Berlin, and what many people saw was just a country getting back to work after the dire depression that had followed the Wall Street crash. During the Berlin Olympics of 1936, the anti-Semitism had been carefully put out of sight, and the world came away with a generally favourable impression of the new German efficiency. However, nobody could possibly say the same thing by May 1937. On Saturday, the first of May that year, the day before the photograph was taken, a great exhibition had been due to open in Paris. In fact, for various reasons we'll see later, it had been postponed for a few weeks, but the Spanish perfectly would eventually have a painting by Pablo Picasso, the great Spanish Cubist artist, dolling you in well, they used to meet with the writer Federico Gathea Lorca and a house in Grenada, belonging to the composer Manuel de Fire. Well Picasso's painting of the Paris exhibition was among his most famous, it was the enormous nearly 8 m long, all painting of Gernicke. Well Gernicke was a basque town in northern Spain, and on the Monday, six days before the photograph was taken, a market day when the town was full of people, it had been viciously bombed by German planes. Picasso's masterpiece is full of the searing agony of its civilian population and their animals. The year before 1936, Spain had burst into civil war. It was a brutal, attritional and bloody conflict that destroyed the country for three terrible and still not forgotten years. This all-spanaged artist and writers supported the Rojas, the Reds, the left wing government. All the surrealists did also. On the 19th of August 1936, Federico Gathea Lorca, the writer, was seized by right wing Philanjus insurgents and summarily executed. But Salvador Dali, his old friend, broke ranks with the surrealists and never made any secret of his backing for the Philanjus and their little dictator leader, Héléralissimo Franco. More of his sympathy for Franco's Nazi backers. In fact, Dali completed at least two paintings in the late 1930s featuring Hitler himself. Although he largely proclaimed that he was not antisemitic, he attempted to explain away his fascination for the German furore by saying that he had strange sexual fantasies about him. Yes, well, of course. So all of this casts another dark shadow over the sunlit garden of the shadow Con, they on the 2nd of May 1937. By then, nobody could possibly have been in any dark that fascism was a fanatical brutal unbloody creed. Julia Boyd has analyzed accounts left by the many, indeed remarkable number, on British tourists of business people who travelled to Germany in the 1930s. She detects a significant change in 1937. Until then, most except a few journalists had come home singing hit as praises. But from 1937 the tone changes, now it became steadily clear that the Nazis were a vicious gang intent on war and genocide. Dali's continued support for, or fascination with, Hitler could no longer be brushed aside as a passing innocent or indeed sexual interest. And it gets worse. In January 1938, Cecil Beaton would be sacked from American vogue for writing antisemitic slogans in the background of a sketch for the paper. It doesn't seem to be any suggestion that Beaton had anything but contempt for the Nazis, but he and most of his wide circle of artistic and aristocratic friends were undoubtedly on the right wing of British politics. Or at least they were enthusiastic for what historian Martin Francis has called "remantic tourism". He means a patrician elitist aesthetic that glamorised bright young things who idle their time in lavish fancy dress parties. A celebrity culture that turned film stars like Leslie Howard into 20th century upper class romantic gentleman. The sunlight that dazzles in Wallace's white dress would become a regular beaten device in photographing royal women, giving them an air of the sacred and magical. So while British and French workers were striking for some relief from post-crash austerity, and while Spanish workers and their supporters were being assassinated, Beaton and his friends went on drinking their champagne and creating a culture of 18th century make believe where the rich man was in his castle and the poor man at his gate. It means that when we take another look at the photograph, what we now see is a woman who, perhaps unwittingly or perhaps not, have privately introduced the future king of England Hitler's personal envoy. She is standing in the garden of a clearly pro-Nazi French-American businessman, wearing a lobster designed by a pro-fascist painter and photograph by an antisemitic photographer whose life and work favored the privileged romantic Tory world of the rich and the powerful. Or between them all they represented a very significant streak in British, not to mention American French and Spanish, high society in 1937, that was, shall we say, at the very least sympathetic to fascism. And this was the personal circle of the man who for ten and a half months had been king of England. What starts out as an innocent photograph from May 1937 turns out to be a window into a dark world of high British American French and Spanish society which openly sympathised with Hitler's Nazi regime. Now the photograph, as we've said, was commissioned by Edward, the ex-King of England. The woman in the picture is soon to be his wife. The question is, was Edward pro-Nazi as well? Paul Sweet, a distinguished American historian who has an important part to play in this story, as we shall see, chronicles how Edward had shown a particular fondness for German language and culture from the time he was young in the years before the First World War. Well, nothing unusual about that for upper-class men before the First World War. The experience of the war left him like many others with a horror of another conflict, and he was willing to do almost anything to avoid one. Okay, nothing all that unusual about that. But continued sweet using diplomatic documents from the time, quotes his political incarnations, "lay with Hitler's Germany rather than Stalin's Russia. Better to do a deal than be overrun by the communists." In this too, he was not unlike many other upper-class Brits. but of course, Edward was not like any other upper-class Brit. He was the heir to the throne, and he was also prone to making shockingly indiscreet remarks. In July 1933, just three months after Hitler's rise to power, he told the former German Kaiser's grandson that it was "no business of ours" to interfere in Germany's internal affairs, adding ominously, "either about Jews or about anything else." The then Prince of Wales then blundered on and on, saying, "Dictators are very popular these days. We might want one in England before long." In May the next year, his equity, major Edward Fruity Meckhoff, appeared in the tattler at a dinner organised by Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Fascist movement. Mosley, it turns out, was Fruity's brother-in-law. In June 1935, the Prince lectured the British Legion, an organisation for ex-soldiers, that he wanted two quits, stretched forth the hand of friendship to the Germans, and it earned him a ticking off from his father, King George. Soon after he himself became king in January 1936, Edward spent much of an official diplomatic function talking animatedly to the German foreign minister, Influent German, and ignoring everyone else. German documents show that in the following weeks had at least three conversations with the German Duke of Coburg, which the Duke properly wrote up in a strictly confidential report for Hitler. The German Duke reported that the new king declared that he was going, quotes, to concentrate the business of government in himself. Referring to the Prime Minister, he said, quotes, "Who is King here, Baldwin or I? I wish myself to talk to Hitler and I will do so here or in Germany. Tell him that please. King's only caution was that he didn't want any of this to become public too soon, at least until he got his rule securely underway." Just six weeks later, the Germans unilaterally remilitarised the Rhineland on the French border, which had been declared a demilitarized zone after the First World War. According to writer Deborah Cabri, again using German documents, Hitler's diplomats believed that the reason the British did nothing to stop him was that the king personally intervened to prevent it. All of which raises an old but still intriguing question. In August 1936, Wallace Simpson's friend Count von Ribbentrop was appointed Nazi Germany's official ambassador to Britain. After the abdication crisis had broken, Ribbentrop wrote to the führer, quotes, "The whole marriage question was a false front," he said. According to Ribbentrop, the real reason that in the photograph, Wallace Simpson was standing around in a French shadow waiting to marry the ex-King of England was because Edward had been manoeuvred off the throne by the British government. They'd got rid of him because he was too pro-Nazi. "Well, can that possibly be true?" Is it possible that the British government deliberately manoeuvred King Edward the eighth off the throne in December 1936 because he was too pro-Nazi? That was the allegation made by Hitler's ambassador to Britain Count von Ribbentrop. "Well, let's first do our history kitchen table homework. Ribbentrop is hardly a reliable witness. Even before he'd become Germany's ambassador, he'd spent years going backwards and forwards to London carefully cultivating support among the British upper class. Eventually, he told the führer, he'd even weedled his way into the affections of the future British King. Indeed, it was Wallace Simpson who'd introduced him. Though all those stories you often hear about Wallace and Ribbentrop having an affair seem to be no more than malicious rumour from the time. Say for Ribbentrop, Edward the eighth's abedication was an embarrassing disaster. The collapse of years of work, even in some measure, a result of the connection that he had and others that had encouraged between Wallace Simpson and the King. Of course, he now need to find some way to palm the blame off into someone else, such as the British government." So, let's look around the room a bit, the kitchen, and pull up some more chairs, except there's no one else here, except for us, and take in some other perspectives and see whether there's any truth in Ribbentrop's story. Relations between Britain and Germany in the 1930s are extremely complicated. You can get the full blast of just how complicated if you read the work of historians like Keith Neilsen. We'll just have to summarise as briefly as we can. The British Foreign Office conducted most, but not all, of British Foreign Policy. It also had to contend with the India Office and other departments that ran bits of the British Empire. But most German policy at least was run by the Foreign Office, and when it came to Germany, the Foreign Office was by the mid-1930s badly split. One faction was led by the permanent undersecretary, effectively head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Van Sittert, and he favored doing a deal with France and the Soviet Union, who'd signed a broad pact to work together in 1935. Together, they could all try to contain Hitler. Under Van Sittert's leadership between 1934 and 1936, relations between the British and the Soviets in particular got markedly better. But Van Sittert was opposed by a second faction, led by Orm Sargent. Now he and the Van Sittert was basically in charge of European policy. He believed that any deal with France and Russia could only make Hitler more aggressive because he would feel surrounded. Well that was certainly what Hitler was saying, lively and unmistakably. He following this foreign affairs are always very complicated. So Orm Sargent and his followers favored negotiating some kind of general agreement, which included the Soviets, the Nazis, the French and the British. Now even Sargent had to admit this was a really long shot. And you have to add that his apparent enthusiasm for this European wide agreement happened very conveniently to coincide with his strong and scarcely concealed dislike of the Soviets. Bluntly, in his friends, feared Stalin's communists more than Hitler's Nazis. Simplifying a horribly complicated situation rather a lot, Sargent wanted an effect to use Hitler to contain Stalin and not the other way around. Now this issue was becoming more and more pressing, not only because Hitler was very plainly preparing for war, but also because in March 1936 a very left-wing government had been elected in France. Orm Sargent now started saying that it was obvious that the French were, quotes in the pockets of the Bolsheviks and are playing the Russian game no doubt with the help of Russian money. Orm Sargent didn't like Hitler, but he was inclined to do a deal with him if he had to, in order to contain the communists. One of the calls of 1936, Sargent's more pro-German policy had begun to gain ground, not least because France began to fall apart. Through the summer of 1936, France was hit with serious and sometimes violent strikes. French fears of a communist revolution in turn provoked enormous violent right-wing demonstrations. Well, Cecil Beaton was galley taking jolly photographs of Mollitz Simpson and her French shadow at the start of May 1937. The French government was close to collapse, the French franken freefall and French prices rocketing. A right-wing movement and his klugul was embarking on a campaign of assassinations and bombing. A great international exhibition stretching for enormous area around the Eiffel Tower was supposed to open in Paris that same weekend, but hit by strikes, it couldn't be finished anything like on time, only opening was postponed. Meanwhile, in 1936, Spain had been plunged into civil war, with Hitler's Germany backing right-wing Philanjists against the government. And in the Soviet Union, the Apparatjiki and the Nomenclatura, its civil service, political class and secret police began being ripped apart by purges and political show trials. You could also add in the Americans, keen to sort out their own economic problems, which escalated in 1936 to 1938, were trading enthusiastically with the Germans. Meanwhile, in various parts of the Brzezember, which had backed Britain in the First World War, there were ominous noises of trouble, if Britain ever got involved in another quote "white man's war". So while Hitler's Germany got stronger and stronger, by May 1937, the chances of negotiating a Europe-wide agreement, including the French, the Soviets and the Germans, were vanishingly slim. So the British were looking for an alternative. The British Foreign Office have been trying to negotiate a Europe-wide agreement to contain Hitler's Germany. But by May 1937, this policy was in disarray, both France and the Soviet Union were in chaos. There were also those in the Foreign Office who found it distasteful to do deals with France's socialist government and the Soviet communists. Omenously, they feared them more than they feared Hitler's Nazis. So British foreign policy began to cover less around an alternative. The alternative was letting Hitler get away for the time being, with whatever he wanted to do, so long as it meant advancing into Eastern Europe, closer to the Soviets and not Western. It was the policy that has become known as appeasement, and it's something we must come back to at another history cafe. Well, in this situation, the right-wing pro-German bias of many Liberage Upper Class was just one complication among many, many, many others. One of the loudest voices supporting Germany belonged, for example, to the law cramborne, Robert Bobbite Cessil, an Etonian who was a direct salesman. and into Robert Cecil, James I almost universally to test the Chief Minister, who will be talk about in our series on the Dumpada plot. While in 1936, Bobbitti Cecil was joined parliamentary undersecretary for foreign affairs. Cecil loudly argued that the Soviet government "will remain unultrubbly militant to the British Empire and will untree against us wherever they can." His fellow undersecretary, Lord Stannup, agreed. "Given a choice of Germany, Japan, all Soviets," he said, he mistrusted the Soviets' quotes "most of the three." And several others, including laws London, Derry and Lothian, actually visited Hitler and came back with reports that he was no threat to world peace. On the day beaten was taking photographs in France, Neville Henderson, the newly arrived British ambassador in Berlin, was writing what became a notorious despatch to Downing Street, arguing that Hitler should be given quotes "economic and even political predominance in Eastern Europe." AC Headlam, who was not only Bishop of Gloucester, but also chair of the Church of England Council on Foreign Affairs, so effectively the Church's Foreign Minister, was so pro-Hiddler that the Bishop of Durham publicly denounced him as quotes "the personatious apologists for the Nazi government." But Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Church, was also broadly in favour of a piecing Hitler. Even many left-wing figures agreed, including the former Labour leader George Lansbury. Many financiers in the city of London, afraid of losing their investments in Germany, were also pushing for a policy of a piecing Hitler. And that, in fact, and not any intervention by Edward's king, as Hitler believed, was the main reason the British government had done nothing when Hitler had re-meritorised the border with France in March 1936. Besides, as the historian's Norton Ripsman and Jack Levy has shown, many in government knew that Britain's armed forces were just not yet ready for a fight with Germany. And even with rap in rearmament, they wouldn't be until 1939. We could go on getting deeper and deeper into this complicated situation. But the point here is that, alongside everything else, Edward VIII's views about European diplomacy were a trivial footnote. Roman Troop's conspiracy theory was no more than an excuse to cover the failure of his policy. It was and still is shocking that the ex-King of England and his wife should go on a very public tour of Nazi Germany just five months after this photograph was taken and have tea with the dictator himself. But whatever the king boasted to the Germans, he'd never been in charge of the government and his influence over it was in practice minimal. In fact, when you read through his story's lengthy discussions of foreign policy in these months, Edward is noticeable only by his complete absence. When it came to the corridors of the foreign office and the small cadre, mostly of all detonians who were industriously forging British foreign policy, Edward's unconsealed Nazi sympathies were embarrassing but pretty much irrelevant. The foreign office Mandarin were heading towards some kind of temporary accommodation with Hitler, but for entirely their own very complicated, not to say, "converted" to reasons. So this doesn't look like a reason for the government to push the reigning king off the throne. At the time, Edward said he was going simply because the Church of England wouldn't permit him to marry Wallace Simpson on the grounds that she'd already been twice divorced. The Church flatly denied the possibility of remarrying divorces then. So if Edward insisted on marrying her, it would create a constitutional crisis between the Church and the State. Well, it all sounds like an innocent and reasonable explanation, but there's something not quite right about it. After all, other British and English monarchs in these circumstances simply married someone else, someone acceptable, and kept their lovers as mistresses. They kept up the appearance of a traditional moral code, although they ignored it in practice. That way, Church and State were preserved, even at the cost of some private scandal. Well, the last monarch to do it had been Edward VIII's own grandfather, and with the Seventh. He'd beautifully married Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein's son, Warg-Glock's Burg, who was, you would have guessed, a European princess. In fact, she was the daughter of the King of Denmark, but he notoriously kept a string of mistresses, supposedly including several English and French actresses and the wives of various English aristocrats, including the mother of Winston Churchill. Edward VIII had widely made his name before coming to the throne as a footloose playboy. He'd famously had more than one longstanding mistress. So the question is why, in December 1936, he'd suddenly been overcome with the mood of marital morality, so much so that he'd insisted on marrying his current mistress, even if that meant precipitating a full-blown constitutional crisis. Or, if it was the only way to avoid such a crisis, abdicating his throne. Now at the history cafe, we have a complete and utter horror of conspiracy theories. But having started out being intrigued by the photograph of Wallace Simpson wearing a lobster, we found ourselves being drawn into a bit of a mystery. We've already disposed of the theory that it was Edward's pro-German views that ended his reign. But there is something else. It seems to us that when Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, it was because the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had carried out a very quiet and very skillful coup. And his reasons for doing that will see you next time at the history cafe. For more on this story and others at our history cafe, go to historycafe.org. Now you'll find information about us, and also about further reading you can do. It's also a way to ask us any questions you might have.