HRH The Prince of Wales No 1 (HS85-10-36413) original

On 10 December 1936, Edward VIII executed an Instrument of Abdication. The following day, Edward gave Royal Assent to His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act, by which Edward VIII and any children he might have were excluded from succession to the throne. The official account is that King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in December 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite. Up until it was changed to “Windsor” during World War I, the British royal family’s name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha made clear their strong German origins. The future King Edward VIII, known as David to his friends and family, was close to his German cousins, and strongly embraced German culture. When Edward became king following his father’s death in January 1936, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin stepped in, ordering Mi5 surveillance of the king. Edward's phones were tapped, and members of the Scotland Yard security team were required to provide information about the king they were charged with protecting. Hoover's FBI too began its own file on the couple, closely monitoring their visits to the United States and several memos of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s pro-German allegiances were sent to Franklin Roosevelt. After the abdication, Edward and his wife styled the Duke and Duchess of Windsor went to a decades-long semi-exile in continental Europe. When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party began its rise to power in the late 1920s and early 1930s, many in Europe, Edward included, applauded the economic recovery of war-torn Germany. Documents, including recently declassified, suggest that the couple had pro-Nazi sympathies and were involved in a failed plot to overthrow the British crown during World War II. Edward purportedly told a German relative in 1933 that it was “no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re Jews or re anything else... Dictators are very popular these days. We might want one in England before long.” Wallis Simpson also was rumored to have long-term affair with Joseph von Ribbentrop while he served as Germany’s ambassador to Britain in the mid-1930s passing confidential British government secrets gleaned from personal dispatches. In his memoirs, the Duke of Windsor would dismiss Hitler as a “somewhat ridiculous figure, with his theatrical posturings and his bombastic pretensions.” But in private, he claimed that Hitler was “not such a bad chap,” and frequently blamed any number of groups, including the British government, America, and even Jews themselves for causing World War II.

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