British archives hiding royal family’s links to anti-Semitism in 1930s, says historian

By JP O’ Malley

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Amid row over 7-year-old Elizabath’s ‘Nazi salute,’ German historian Karina Urbach says documentation on monarchy’s connections to Hitler is being withheld, may well have been destroyed

LONDON — In April 1945, code-breakers at Bletchley Park, England, intercepted the following telegram from Adolf Hitler, who was then under siege in his bunker in Berlin: “The Führer attaches importance to the President of the Red Cross, the Duke of Coburg, on no account falling into enemy hands.”

Karina Urbach, a German historian, believes that whatever information Hitler shared with Carl Edward, the Duke of Coburg — who was a grandson of Queen Victoria, and a close blood relative to the current British monarchy — it was damning enough to warrant an assassination request. Coburg, though, would manage to escape such a drastic fate and eventually died in 1954 of natural causes, aged 69.

Urbach has recently published “Go Betweens For Hitler,” a book that explores how members of the aristocratic class across Europe worked as secret negotiators for Hitler during the interwar years.

The go-betweens were unofficial, invisible actors who secretly delivered messages between heads of state to ensure that off-the-record conversations could happen at the highest levels in the murky world of international relations.

While research hitherto has focused on the support German aristocrats secretly provided Hitler within Germany, Urbach’s book discusses an additional, international dimension to this secret diplomatic back channel, most notably from members of the British royal family.

This flirting with Nazism on the part of the royal family caused a media storm Saturday as Britain’s The Sun published a cover story with the headline “Their Royal Heilnesses.” The newspaper’s front page photo showed the seven-year-old future Queen Elizabeth II performing a Nazi salute in a hitherto-secret 1933 family video.

In the 17-second video from which the still was taken, young Elizabeth is seen playing with her corgi, dancing, and also raising her right arm three times, alongside her mother, Queen Elizabeth, sister Princess Margaret, and uncle Edward VIII. Buckingham Palace announced Sunday an investigation into how the video was procured by The Sun.

The Sun’s publication has caused immense debate in the UK. Are the pictures an outrageous invasion of privacy, or a timely reminder, in the words of one commentator, that Edward VIII, briefly Britain’s king, dabbled with fascism?

Is it possible that certain British historians have consistently tried to play down anti-Semitism in the British royal family during the 1930s?

“Edward VIII was particularly attracted to the Nazis because of their social ideas,” says Urbach, an assertion that contrasts with that of the British historian Philip Ziegler. In 2012, Ziegle published a biography of Edward VIII, who was king for six months in 1936 only to voluntarily abdicate so he could marry an American divorcee. Ziegler has written that Edward VIII was only “mildly anti-Semitic.”

In her book, much of Urbach’s narrative focuses on royal relative Carl Edward and his loyalty to the Nazi movement for nearly two decades. It would appear his ties to Hitler helped to create a widespread culture of anti-Semitism among the British monarchy.

“Carl Edward’s British network was very useful for Hitler,” the German historian explains from an University of London office in the Institute of Historical Research, where she is currently a senior fellow.

“Hitler was an Anglophile, and his dream [during the early 1930s] was to have an alliance with Britain,” says Urbach.

Read more: British archives hiding royal family’s…

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