EP 02 - 2 May 1937 — History Café

2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

- Episode 02 -

‘I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler’

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'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler'

Wednesday 27 April 2022

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Guernica by Pablo Picasso. 1937. Oil on canvas. Museo Reina Sophia, Madrid

Was it understandable to be pro Hitler in May 1937?

Choose the right moment and they say you can explain the whole of history. Well, maybe. But there are some moments when a whole lot of things do seem to come together. Here’s one of them. It’s Sunday afternoon, 2 May 1937. We’re in the garden of a chateau a few miles south of the town of Tours in France.

Our moment lasts just a split second, enough time for a photograph. A woman is standing rather awkwardly in a flowerbed with a bunch of pussy willow in her hand. She’s wearing a pure white dress which glows in the sunshine. The photographer is Cecil Beaton. The woman is Wallis Simpson, who, in a month’s time, is going to marry the ex-king of England.

The owner of the chateau is pro Hitler and yet by May 1937 nobody could claim they were unaware of the ugliness of Hitler’s Nazi regime.

On the Monday, six days before the photograph was taken – a market day when the town was full of people – the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain had been viciously bombed by German planes in support of Franco who was waging war against his own people. Less than 3 months later Picasso’s masterpiece - full of the searing agony of its civilian population and their animals – would fill the Spanish pavilion at the Paris Exhibition – all 8 metres of it.

Pablo Picasso, the great Spanish cubist artist had been friends with Salvador Dali the designer of the erotic lobster on Wallis Simpson’s dress. As young men they used to meet with the writer Federico García Lorca at a house in Granada belonging to the composer Manuel de Falla (go see it if you have the chance).

So why had Edward and Wallis chosen to get married on 3 June 1937 at the home of the Nazi American-French businessman?

Good friends. Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca in 1925. By 1934 Dali had been ousted by the group of surrealist painters for his views on Hitler. August 1936 Lorca was executed by Franco fascists supported by Hitler.

Salvador Dali was sexually obsessed with Hitler

The year before the photograph was taken, 1936, Spain had burst into Civil War. It was a brutal, attritional and bloody conflict that destroyed the country for three terrible and still not forgotten years. On 19 August 1936 writer and poet Federico García Lorca was seized by right-wing Falangist insurgents and summarily executed.

Almost all Spanish artists and writers supported the Rojos – the left-wing government. All the surrealists did also.

But Salvador Dali, Lorca's old friend, broke ranks with the surrealists and never made any secret of his backing for the Falangists and their little dictator leader Generalissimo Franco. Nor of his sympathy for Franco’s Nazi backers.

In fact, Dali completed at least two paintings in the late 1930s featuring Hitler himself. Although he loudly proclaimed that he was not anti-Semitic, he attempted to explain away his fascination for the German Führer by saying that he had strange sexual fantasies about him.

Read more about Dali's obsession with Nazism and Fascism, but be warned!

Episode 02 - 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler'

The story gets darker and darker

Edward reviewing SS guards with Robert Ley, in 1937. Ley headed the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945 and held many other high positions in the Party

Was Edward too pro-Nazi to remain king?

In July 1933, three months after Hitler’s rise to power, Edward (then Prince of Wales) told the former German Kaiser’s grandson, that it was ‘no business of ours to interfere in German’s internal affairs,’ adding ominously, ‘either re Jews or re anything else.’ He then blundered on and on. ‘Dictators are very popular these days,’ he said. ‘We might want one in England before long.’

Soon after he became king himself, in January 1936, German documents show that, in the following weeks, the new king had at least three conversations with the German Duke of Coburg, which the Duke promptly wrote up in a strictly confidential report for Hitler. The German duke reported to Hitler that the new king declared that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself.’ Referring to the prime minister, he asked ‘who is king here? Baldwin or I? I wish myself to talk to Hitler, and will do so here or in Germany.

The Foreign Office, many financiers in the City, senior clergy in the Church of England, the British Ambassador in Berlin, and many members of the upper class shared Edward’s view that Hitler should be allowed to do whatever he wanted to do, so long as it meant advancing into Eastern Europe, closer to the Soviets, and not western.

More info and photos here.

As Prince of Wales, David (later Edward VIII) showed no hesitation about affairs with married women, bringing them to his 19th Century Gothic Revival style 'castle' Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park. Thelma, here, the American wife of 1st Viscount Furness, was the last of his lovers before Wallis.

Did Edward abdicate for love?

'I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.' - BBC radio 11 Dec 1936

Basically Edward said he was going simply because the Church of England would not permit him to marry Wallis Simpson, on the grounds that she’d already been twice divorced. The church flatly denied the possibility of remarrying divorcees. So if Edward insisted on marrying her, it would create a constitutional crisis between church and state.

It all sounds like an innocent and reasonable explanation. But there’s something not quite right about it. After all, other British (and English) monarchs in these circumstances simply married someone else – someone acceptable - and kept their lovers as mistresses. They kept up the appearance of a traditional moral code, although they ignored it in practice. Church and state were preserved, even at the cost of some private scandal.

Edward VIII had widely made his name, before coming to the throne, as a footloose playboy. He’d famously had more than one long-standing mistresses. The question is why, in December 1936, he’d suddenly been overcome with a mood of marital morality. So much so that he insisted on marrying his current mistress, even if that meant precipitating a full-blown constitutional crisis. Or, if it was the only way to avoid such a crisis, abdicating his throne?

In our third and final podcast unpacking the iconic Beaton photo of Wallis Simpson and the lobster dress, we show how it was the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who manoeuvred Edward off the throne. It was a very quiet and very skilful coup.

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Images top and l to r: H enry VIII: the king, his wife, his lover, the French/ Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?/ The Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-18/ Slavery - did money not morality end British enslavement? / Who won the Battle of Britain?

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