Project Description

The Nazi King

Chl 5 –  Oxford film and television  –  Director  Clive Maltby

Camera  Panasonic HDX 900  –  Location  London UK

This film explores Edward VIII’s & Mrs. Simpson association with the Nazi party, through interviews, and re-con, the program utilizes declassified FBI papers.

The film deals with how Churchill and the government dealt with the Duke and Duchess throughout the war years. In December 1940, as war raged in Europe and Britain battled Hitler in lonely isolation, American journalist Fulton Oursler received an unexpected summons to the Bahamas. He had been invited to conduct a rare interview with the islands’ governor, the former King Edward VIII, ­officially known since his abdication four years earlier as His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor.

As an officer in the British Army as well as a dignitary of the British Empire and brother of King George VI, the Duke might have been expected to fly the flag for his embattled country. Instead he gave Oursler a eulogy to Hitler. The former British monarch told the journalist it would be tragic for the world if the Nazi ­dictator were overthrown. Hitler was not just the right and logical leader of the German people, the Duke insisted, he was also a great man.