Guest Post: Puppet King

This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History.

28 May 1972 - Death of Edward VIII the "Puppet King"

On this fateful day in alternate history, pro-Nazi puppet Edward VIII, restored monarch of the United Kingdom, breathed his last in Buckingham Palace. A smoker from an early age, he had been diagnosed with throat cancer and was undergoing cobalt therapy at the time of his unlamented death.

Having reigned since the death of his father, George V, Edward had abdicated the throne after a scandalous summer forced him to make a choice between the divorced woman he loved and the official duties of the monarchy he despised. With an arrogant manner that veered between domineering and disinterested, red boxes were left unread. It was not only the king but the entire establishment that had fallen asleep at the wheel as Great Britain sleepwalked toward a devastating defeat at the hands of a reinvigorated German Third Reich.

Edward and "Mrs. Simpson" as the press referred to her despite their marriage toured the Reich the following year, socializing with prominent Nazi figures including Joseph Goebbels, Herman Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Albert Speer. Additionally, they had a tea meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden, his "eagle's nest" residence in the Bavarian Alps. It was this private meeting that fed persistent rumours that Edward was a Nazi sympathiser, apparently a discussion that set the stage for his later restoration. Ironically, it was his shortcomings in personality that made him the perfect choice for Head of State of a protectorate of the Greater German Reich when the UK fell to German forces. The most controversial aspect of the restoration was Operation Willi, the kidnapping which induced Edward to plead with the German dictator for a peace settlement with Great Britain in 1940.

Working initially with the puppet Prime Minister Samuel Hoare, Edward would reign for three more decades of continuing national decline while the Nazi rule of Europe slowly began to crumble. Counter-intuitively, what actually stabilized the Third Reich was Hitler's assassination in an early 1941 secret mission code-named Operation Foxley. Former members of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) had continued clandestine operations, discovering that the German dictator took a walk alone at around 10 am every morning to the Teehaus on Mooslahnerkopf Hill from the Berghof residence. The signal was that when Hitler was at the Berghof, a Nazi flag visible from a cafe in the nearby town was flown. SOE parachuted in a German-speaking Pole and a British sniper into Austria, and, against the odds, they successfully executed the mission. Hitler's successors trod with a great deal more caution, scrapping his crazed plans to invade the Soviet Union and instead consolidating Nazi rule of the territories that had been conquered in 1940.

Inadvertently, and despite the very best intentions, the SOE had damned the British Isles to decades of darkness. It was their preservation of the status quo that allowed Edward to continue on the throne. Childless, his likely long-term successor Elizabeth, the Windsor Pretender, lived at the British Government-In-Exile's compound in Washington, D.C. Although the British Empire retained control over its territories in Africa and Asia, the predominantly white dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand broke away, recognizing his niece as the Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth realms. Unfortunately Elizabeth "II" would die without returning to England, which remained under Nazi control until her son Charles' triumphant return in 1982. In one of his first significant actions, the Luger that killed Hitler was placed on display at the Combined Military Services Museum in Maldon, Essex.

Author's Note:

In reality, Edward abdicated and was appointed governor of the Bahamas, but, after the war, he spent the rest of his life in France. Evidence of his complicity was revealed in the Marburg Files, a series of top-secret documents that was discovered in May 1945 near the Harz Mountains in Germany but not released in full for over fifty years. It is known that the Duke had an extended private conversation with Hitler, but the specific details of their discussion remain uncertain, as the minutes of their meeting were lost during the course of the war. SOE actually feared that Hitler's assassination would extend WW2, shelving plans for Operation Foxley that had been written up. In 1969, Edward declined an invitation from Elizabeth II to attend the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales, replying that Charles would not want his "aged great-uncle" there.

Provine's Addendum:

As Winston Churchill, the prime minister of the British Government-in-Exile, described, an "iron curtain" fell across Europe between the spheres of German and Soviet influence. While the USSR and Germany stared one another down the increasingly militarized border of Eastern Europe, the British G-i-E and their American allies did much the same with a fortified Atlantic Ocean. The United States carried its own quasi-war with Japan, jockeying for superiority between the Philippines and Indonesia, though much of America's diplomatic attention was put into the Monroe Doctrine to shore up the allegiance of Latin America to keep fascism out of the Western Hemisphere.

A "Cold War" carried on with paramilitary actions to maintain the balance in Finland and Iceland as well as extensive international intrigue causing as much disruption as possible to each government's plans. Germany was kept busy trying to control its extensive gains and profit from the satellite colonies in Africa and South Asia along with their Vichy French and Italian allies. Initially economies boomed with extensive spending on military buildup and infrastructure, but the weight of the upkeep proved increasingly costly as the years went on. The rigid, government-influenced economies fell into slumps, inflation skyrocketed, and unrest turned violent so periodically it was nearly expected.

Following the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the new Spanish king Juan Carlos began transitioning the government toward democracy. This spark set off a powder keg of revolution throughout the fascist world, overthrowing one government after the next as colonies declared independence and formerly unquestionable political parties fell out of public favor. Britain's government-in-exile was cheered as it arrived back in London, prompting the British Union fascist government to flee into exile in South Africa.

Trade reopened across the Atlantic, causing a new spike in economic activity. As the millennium came to a close, the "Western World" leaders began to wonder if they might be able to wait out the USSR and Japanese Empire in a similar fashion or if a new war might start between them.