https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12630275/Why-Edward-VIII-visited-Hitler-Author-says-book-shed-new-light-maligned-monarchs-dalliance-Nazi-Germany-overturn-popular-image-lazy-unintelligent.htmlWhy Edward VIII visited Hitler: Author says book will shed new light on maligned monarch's dalliance with Nazi Germany and overturn his popular image as lazy and unintelligent
By Gina Kalsi
Published: 12:01, 14 October 2023 | Updated: 13:26, 14 October 2023
An author has said that her new book will overturn Edward VIII's popular image as lazy and unintelligent and shed light on his visit to Nazi Germany before the Second World War. Jane Marguerite Tippett spoke to The Telegraph about her upcoming book which will cast a 'very different light' on Edward and looks into his trip to Nazi Germany. Edward gave up the throne in 1936, a year before his trip to see Hitler, to marry the divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson. Edward and Wallis visited Germany and met the Fuhrer in 1937 despite British officials strongly advising them not to go because of tensions between the two countries at the time. Two years later, World War II began. Speaking about Edward's trip to Germany to visit Hitler, Tippett told the outlet: 'In the new material we get a better sense of why he went to Germany, something that has been misrepresented in popular culture. It introduces some nuance when we see things from his perspective around what he thought he was doing in Germany. That was not quite how his actions have been translated.'
The author added that the set of pictures of him with Hitler in 1937 'hasn't served him well.' Whilst in Germany, Edward was infamously photographed giving a Nazi salute and later also toured industrial facilities and even a concentration camp, whose guard towers were said to have been explained to him as meat stores. The former king was reported to have said as late as 1941 that Hitler was the 'right and logical leader of the German people'.
This comes as prominent royal historian has claimed classified documents from The Royal Archives suggest the exiled Duke of Windsor was a Nazi sympathiser who gave up detailed plans of Buckingham Palace allowing it to be bombed in World War Two. Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival yesterday, royal expert Alexander Larman said that whilst he had been given access to the archives for a book on the royal family during the war he had been surprised at the level of condemnation thrown at the Duke, revealing a Royal archivist had told him: 'We are not in the business of protecting the Duke of Windsor's reputation.'
He said: 'The Nazi's knew what they were doing and that's because they had inside information [from the duke]. I don't think he wanted to see him [his brother King George VI] dead but he was in a position where he knew exactly where everyone was in Buckingham Palace.'
During the conflict the Palace suffered nine direct bomb hits and one death PC Steve Robertson, a policeman on duty there who was killed by flying debris in 1941. Tippett's book, Once a King, will also challenge the stereotypes that surrounded the former monarch. Commenting on Netflix's The Crown, Tippett also told The Telegraph: 'That series was the apotheosis of that view of him as lazy, not intelligent, someone who he didn't ever think critically about his life.'
In contrast, she says that her book casts a different light on Edward's time as the Prince of Wales before he became King. She said that in this time period he 'wasn't lazy at all,' drawing upon the fact that he spent a year on tour in India and the East in 1919 and then went to Canada for four months. Tippett said that nowadays, royal tours only last a couple of days and she called Edward 'the hardest working British royal' at the time. The author added that because the former Monarch abdicated, the impact he had on the the Firm and its development over the last century 'has been erased.'
