British Royal-Nazi Links Go Viral; How Long Can the Monarchy Survive?

In the wake of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid publication of home movies of a 7 or 8 year old Princess Elizabeth giving a Nazi salute, the entire history of the British Monarchy’s love affair with Hitler and the Nazis has gone viral globally. Hundreds of newspaper articles have appeared in Britain, the United States (Daily Beast), Israel (Times of Israel) and as far away as Japan (Japan News), all picking up on strands of the high-level collusion between the British Crown and the Nazis throughout the 1930s, right up to the launching of the 1940 Battle of Britain bombing campaign.

While the Duke of Windsor (King Edward VIII), the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II, is one central player in the British Royals-Nazi alliance, a second central figure is Prince Philip, whose three sisters were all married to top Nazi Party and SS officials.  On July 30, British TV Channel 4 will air a documentary, “The Plot to Make a King,” documenting Philip’s own deep Nazi ties, and the campaign by Philip and his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, to arrange a marriage between Philip and Elizabeth, from the time Elizabeth was 13 years old.  According to news accounts in all of the British tabloids on July 20, the documentary will, for the first time, reveal excerpts from Philip’s older sister Sophie’s diaries, revealing her deep affection and personal ties to Hitler.

The headlines of the world’s media were full of damning and fully-documented evidence of the deep alliance throughout the 1930s between Hitler and the British Royals, much of it engineered by German aristocrats who were blood relatives of both Philip and the Windsors themselves.  Headlines in The Mirror, which was at the center of the exposés of the Royals’ role in the assassination of Princess Diana, read “Adolf Hitler ‘Tried To Arrange a Marriage’ between Germany and the British Royal Family.”  As far away as Tokyo, the Japan News (formerly the Japan Times) ran banner headlines, “‘Heil Hitler’ Salute Photo Shines Light on British Royals, Nazis.”

The Times of Israel published an extensive interview with German-British historian Karina Urbach of the University of London, under the headline “British Archives Hiding Royal Family’s Links to Anti-Semitism in 1930s, Says Historian.” Urbach is the author of a new book, Go-Betweens for Hitler, detailing the role of the Coburg family in mediating ties between Hitler and the British Royals.  The scandals go far beyond the known profile of Edward VIII.  Carl Edward, Duke of Coburg, was a Hitler intimate from 1922, and was a grandson of Queen Victoria. He remained loyal to Hitler, and was a bridge to the British Royals for decades, using his family ties to promote the Anglo-Nazi alliance—that was already an essential part of British geopolitical strategy in the interwar period.

Urbach is leading a campaign to force the Windsors to publicly release the Royal Archives, which still contain extensive evidence of the British courtship with Hitler, despite the fact that, at the end of World War II, as reported in the Daily Beast of July 19, under the headline “Britain’s Royal Nazi Cover-Up,” Churchill sent a high-level team of British intelligence officers called “The Weeders” to Germany to seize archive material of correspondence between the British Royals and the Nazis and destroy them.  Clive Irving, author of the Daily Beast story, reported that “The weeders did a fine job.  Of any damning new evidence of treachery there was no trace.  I discovered that the Weeder-in-Chief had been none other than Anthony Blunt, whom we now know had, since the outbreak of the war (and long afterward) been a Communist mole at the highest levels of British intelligence.”