It was the talk of the Western world. On October 22, 1937, the headline-making Edward, Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated as King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom less than a year earlier, spent an hour meeting privately with Adolf Hitler at his mountaintop lair in the Bavarian Alps. “Apart from some appreciative words for the measures taken in Germany in the field of social welfare, the duke did not discuss political matters,” interpreter Paul Schmidt recalled. “He was frank and friendly with Hitler, and displayed the social charm for which he is known throughout the world.”
But Windsor’s cautious words hardly mattered. After the meeting, Hitler took tea with the erstwhile duke and his American-born wife, Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor. As Nazi cameramen clicked away, the trio smiled at each other like old chums. “[Hitler] took both their hands in his saying a long goodbye,” a reporter recalled, “after which he stiffened to a rigid Nazi salute that the duke returned.”
Windsor seemed to leave with a profound respect for both Germany and the leader of the Third Reich. “I have travelled the world, and my upbringing has made me familiar with the great achievements of mankind, but that which I have seen in Germany, I had hitherto believed to be impossible,” the duke exclaimed, per Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor by Andrew Lownie. “It cannot be grasped and is a miracle; one can only begin to understand it when one realizes that behind it all is one man and one will.”
Hilter was struck by a strong dismay for what might have been. “It’s a shame he is no longer king,” Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote of the duke. “With him we would have entered into an alliance.”
This weeklong trip to Germany would haunt the Windsors for the rest of their long, aimless, unprincipled lives. The visit was a coup for the Nazi propaganda machine and fulfilled the Windsors’ shortsighted need to be fêted in grand royal style. “The couple were easy prey for someone who would show them the attention and respect they craved,” writes Alexander Larman in The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother, and a Family Divided.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were far from the only royals and ex-royals who would gravitate towards the Nazi Party during the 1930s and ’40s. Lost in a new world that cared little for their lineage and generational privilege, the Nazis represented a way to recapture proximity to power and respect, which, for royals and aristocrats, had dissipated greatly after the first World War.
Some members of royal houses including those from Italy, Spain, Denmark, and England would become card-carrying Nazis or enthusiastic sympathizers. Even members of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which had been forced out of power by the German revolution in 1918, would become part of the Nazi machine. These included German Prince August Wilhelm, son of the deposed Emperor Wilhelm II, who was derisively nicknamed “Auwi the Little Brown Shirt.” In Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany, Jonathan Petropoulos describes August’s rise through the Nazi ranks. He eventually became a popular speaker at rallies, as well as a member of the German Reichstag and the Prussian State Council. He did this in spite of the fact that his father, former King Wilhelm II, “thought Hitler a fool.” But the former emperor also accepted financial rewards from the German state, and did nothing to stop Hitler’s rise.
The numbers are staggering. In the definitive Royals and the Reich, Petropoulos estimated that around 270 members of German princely houses alone joined the Nazi Party. These small princely houses had had their power stripped after World War I, and some of their land confiscated. Feeling persecuted by progressive groups, no longer guaranteed advances in the army and government, they were enticed by the Nazis’ promise of “law and order” and a return to an idealized “traditional” German past.
Many of these minor royals had also been professional failures before they discovered the National Socialist Party. Petropoulos notes Hereditary Prince Ernst of Lippe as possibly the first prince to become a card-carrying Nazi, in 1928. He later became a high-ranking member of the notorious SS Race and Settlement Head Office.
