Let's talk Nazis.
It's not our favorite subject, since in today's political discourse the specter of Nazism is too easily raised. Latest example: Taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina is, like, something out of 1933. "I feel very much like the Jews must have felt in the very beginning of the Nazi Germany takeover," said an idiot rebel flag supporter in Alabama last month.
To which we cats say, oh, please. There's only one family in world government right now that has a Nazi issue. And we're talking about real Nazis — not just some extrapolation of "Gosh, this must have been what the Third Reich was like" from people whose only experience is multiple viewings of "The Sound of Music."
Yep, we're talking House of Windsor.
The Queen and her family are in a bit of a Nazi snit just now, thanks to the anti-monarchist (and devoted Republican) Rupert Murdoch's Sun tabloid. People are calling for Buckingham Palace to release their archives on the Windsors' complicated relationship with all things Third Reich-y — all due to the Sun's publication of a 17-second home movie showing the late Queen Mother and the present Queen, then a child of six or seven, goofing around with Nazi salutes while at Balmoral on holiday.
Egging them on is the unsurprising villain of the piece, the present Queen's Uncle David, later known as King Edward VIII — at least until he abdicated two or three years later, in December 1936.
What we're not sure is getting mentioned in all the coverage is the fact that Uncle David was not only a source of embarrassment but a real worry to his brother and successor, George VI (father of the present Queen), and Prime Minister Winston Churchill — both heroes to Britain in the Second World War.
After war broke out, King George and Churchill decided to hasten the abdicated former King and his American Duchess to the Bahamas, where they could serve as Governor-General and Mrs. Governor-General and hopefully be prevented from any further forays into treason. (The Nazis had ideas of invading England and setting Edward up as a puppet king, something that the former Edward VIII, possibly regretting his abdication and having had a pleasant visit to Germany in 1937, did not exactly discourage.)
"For the King and Churchill...the removal of the Duke of Windsor to the safe distance of the Bahamas was...a sentence of banishment and bitterly accepted as such by the Windsors, 'the St. Helena of 1940' was how the Duchess referred to it," writes Sarah Bradford in her biography of George VI, The Reluctant King. "Churchill himself explicitly referred to it as such at dinner at Lambeth Palace a few weeks later: 'The Duke of Windsor's views on the war,' he said, ' are such as to render his banishment a wise move.'"
Since we are avid readers of Sarah Bradford, the former king's Nazi sympathies — and his family's and government's battles against them — are already well known to us cats. And while we'd be interested in any further light that the palace's archives might shed on this episode, we have no doubt that Uncle David was the primary, if not the only, transgressor. In short, let's all move along — not much to see here.
And Rupie Murdoch? Nice try, bud. We cats HISS.
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