Second World War
In May 1939, Edward was commissioned by NBC to give a radio broadcast (his first since abdicating) during a visit to the First World War battlefields of Verdun. In it, he appealed for peace, saying: "I am deeply conscious of the presence of the great company of the dead, and I am convinced that could they make their voices heard they would be with me in what I am about to say. I speak simply as a soldier of the Last War whose most earnest prayer it is that such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind. There is no land whose people want war." The broadcast was heard across the world by millions. It was widely regarded as supporting appeasement, and the BBC refused to broadcast it. It was transmitted outside the United States on shortwave radio and was reported in full by British broadsheet newspapers.
On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Edward and Wallis were brought back to Britain by Louis Mountbatten on board HMS Kelly, and Edward, although he held the rank of field marshal, was made a major-general attached to the British Military Mission in France. In February 1940, the German ambassador in The Hague, Count Julius von Zech-Burkersroda, claimed that Edward had leaked the Allied war plans for the defence of Belgium, which he later denied. When Germany invaded northern France in May 1940, the Windsors fled south, first to Biarritz, then in June to Francoist Spain. In July they moved to Portugal, where they lived initially in the home of Ricardo Espírito Santo, a Portuguese banker with both British and German contacts. Under the code name Operation Willi, Nazi agents, principally Walter Schellenberg, plotted unsuccessfully to persuade Edward to leave Portugal and return to Spain, kidnapping him if necessary. Lord Caldecote wrote a warning to Winston Churchill, now prime minister, that "[the Duke] is well-known to be pro-Nazi and he may become a centre of intrigue." Churchill threatened Edward with a court-martial if he did not return to British soil.
In July 1940, Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas. Edward and Wallis left Lisbon on 1 August aboard the American Export Lines steamship Excalibur, which was specially diverted from its usual direct course to New York City so that they could be dropped off at Bermuda on the 9th. They left Bermuda for Nassau on the Canadian National Steamship Company vessel Lady Somers on 15 August, arriving two days later. Edward did not enjoy being governor and privately referred to the islands as "a third-class British colony". The British Foreign Office strenuously objected when Edward and Wallis planned to cruise aboard a yacht belonging to Swedish magnate Axel Wenner-Gren, whom British and American intelligence wrongly believed to be a close friend of Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. Edward was praised for his efforts to combat poverty on the islands. He was "considerably more enlightened in his attitudes than the majority of Bahamian whites, or either of his predecessors", and had an "excellent relationship" with Black individuals such as jazz musician Bert Cambridge (later elected to the Bahamian House of Assembly, to Edward's delight) and valet Sydney Johnson, whom Edward retained for thirty years and was said to have "loved as a son". Edward maintained a long-standing dispute with Étienne Dupuch, the editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune, writing privately at one point that Dupuch was "more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium". But even Dupuch praised Edward for his resolution of civil unrest over low wages in Nassau in 1942, though Edward blamed the trouble on "mischief makers – communists" and "men of Central European Jewish descent, who had secured jobs as a pretext for obtaining a deferment of draft".
While Edward was governor, Sir Harry Oakes, a wealthy entrepreneur who was the richest man in the Bahamas and possibly the British Empire and a friend of his, was violently murdered on 8 July 1943. Instead of using the usual Bahamian or British procedures, Edward brought in two American detectives from Miami whom he knew personally to handle the investigation. Within 36 hours, Oakes's son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, was charged with the murder after a single fingerprint was reported at the scene. The preliminary investigation was described as "botched", and the fingerprint was found to have been planted. Edward absented himself from the island for the period of de Marigny's trial. De Marigny was eventually acquitted, and the case was closed.
Many historians have suggested that Hitler was prepared to reinstate Edward as king in the hope of establishing a fascist puppet government in Britain after Operation Sea Lion. It is widely believed that Edward and Wallis sympathised with fascism before and during the Second World War, and were moved to the Bahamas to minimise their opportunities to act on those feelings. In 1940 he said: "In the past 10 years Germany has totally reorganised the order of its society ... Countries which were unwilling to accept such a reorganisation of society and its concomitant sacrifices should direct their policies accordingly." During the occupation of France, Edward asked the German Wehrmacht forces to place guards at his Paris and Riviera homes; they did so. In December 1940, Edward gave Fulton Oursler of Liberty magazine an interview at Government House in Nassau. Oursler conveyed its content to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a private meeting at the White House on 23 December 1940. The interview was published on 22 March 1941, and in it Edward was reported to have said that "Hitler was the right and logical leader of the German people" and that the time was coming for President Roosevelt to mediate a peace settlement. Edward protested that he had been misquoted and misinterpreted.
The Allies became sufficiently disturbed by German plots revolving around Edward that President Roosevelt ordered covert surveillance of him and Wallis when they visited Palm Beach, Florida, in April 1941. Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg (then a monk in an American monastery) had told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Wallis had slept with the German ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in 1936; had remained in constant contact with him; and had continued to leak secrets.
Author Charles Higham claimed that Anthony Blunt, an MI5 agent and Soviet spy, acting on orders from the British royal family, made a successful secret trip to Schloss Friedrichshof in Allied-occupied Germany towards the end of the war to retrieve sensitive letters between Edward and Hitler and other leading Nazis. What is certain is that George VI sent the Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, accompanied by Blunt – then working part-time in the Royal Library as well as for British intelligence – to Friedrichshof in March 1945 to secure papers relating to Victoria, German Empress, the eldest child of Queen Victoria. Looters had stolen part of the castle's archive, including surviving letters between mother and daughter, as well as other valuables, some of which were recovered in Chicago after the war. The papers rescued by Morshead and Blunt, and those returned by the American authorities from Chicago, were deposited in the Royal Archives.
Documents, since titled the Marburg Files, recovered by US troops in Marburg, Germany, in May 1945, include key material that relates directly to theories of Edward's Nazi sympathies. After more than a decade of suppression by the British authorities, they were published in the late 1950s.
He resigned from the post of governor on 16 March 1945. After the war, Edward admitted in his memoirs that he admired the Germans, but he denied being pro-Nazi. Of Hitler he wrote: "[the] Führer struck me as a somewhat ridiculous figure, with his theatrical posturings and his bombastic pretensions." In the 1950s, journalist Frank Giles heard Edward blame British foreign secretary Anthony Eden for helping to "precipitate the war through his treatment of Mussolini ... that's what [Eden] did, he helped to bring on the war ... and of course Roosevelt and the Jews". During the 1960s, in private, Edward reportedly said to a friend, Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross, "I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap."
