King George VI is remembered as the steady monarch who led Britain through the Second World War, supported by his wife, Queen Elizabeth, later known as the Queen Mother. Yet a secret operation ordered in his name at the end of the war raises difficult questions about how far a constitutional monarch could go to help his German relatives.
The story begins not in a royal archive but with a hunting rifle. While researching a gun once thought to have belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm II, found in a gun shop in Milton Keynes, the trail led instead to a pair of similar rifles offered at auction. The auction catalogue mentioned an intriguing operation at Blankenburg Castle in 1945. That reference eventually led to Windsor Castle and the Royal Archives.
The documents found there describe a secret mission personally ordered by George VI, using British military resources to help his German royal relatives, many of whom were Nazis or Nazi supporters. Had the operation been revealed in 1945, it would have caused serious public outrage in Britain and direct criticism of the royal family.
To understand how this happened, it helps to recall how German the British royal family remained even during the Second World War. The House of Windsor descends from George I, who was also Elector of Hanover in Germany. Later monarchs married mostly German or partly German cousins from across Europe.
George VI himself was largely German by ancestry. His father, George V, was German and Danish, and his mother, Queen Mary, was German with a touch of Hungarian blood. It was George V who renamed the family from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in 1917.
Through Queen Victoria's extensive family, George VI was closely related to most European royal houses, including the House of Hanover. Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, was his second cousin. The Duke's grandfather was the fifth son of King George III, and his father had even held the British title Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale until 1917, when George V withdrew it because the Duke was serving as a German army officer.
By the Second World War, the same problem returned. The British King's German relatives were on the wrong side, and some had close ties to Hitler. Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, had married the daughter of Britain's bitter First World War enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
A small but telling detail appears in the published memoirs of the Kaiser's daughter, Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, held at Cambridge University Library. She described a 1939 gathering at Huis Doorn, the Kaiser's home in exile in the Netherlands, for his eightieth birthday. A telegram arrived from Buckingham Palace. It said the Kaiser's father was especially happy that the King and Queen of England had remembered him.
For years the English court had ignored the Kaiser since 1914. Now, twenty-five years after the First World War began, George VI sent his warmest congratulations. Millions of Britons who lost sons fighting the Kaiser's armies, and hundreds of thousands of veterans, might have wondered at such a gesture toward a man officially classified as a war criminal.
From the perspective of royal families, however, such social courtesy reinforced the close ties between royal houses, above national politics and history. It was a sign that George VI was a prominent member of what some historians have called the royal trade union, something he demonstrated clearly six years later at the end of another bloody war against the Germans.
The Duke of Brunswick had lost his throne after the First World War but kept vast estates, several palaces and castles, and enormous wealth. These included Brunswick Palace, Cumberland Castle in Gmunden, Austria, and two castles in Germany: Marienburg near Hanover and Blankenburg near Brunswick.
The war was difficult for Ernest Augustus. In the 1930s he sought closer ties between Hitler and Britain. Hitler wanted this too and even asked the Duke to arrange a marriage between his daughter, Princess Frederica, and the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII. The Duke refused, believing the age gap was too great.
In 1936, after Edward abdicated, the new Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson stayed with the Duke at Cumberland Castle in Germany. Ernest Augustus never formally joined the Nazi Party, though it later emerged he tried to join in 1941. He donated money to the Nazis and was close to many senior Nazi leaders.
In 1999, after an investigation, the German newspaper Bild claimed Ernest Augustus had profited from the seizure of Jewish property in Germany and Austria, acquiring shares in a Jewish-owned bank and an Austrian construction company, among others. The Duke's grandson sued Bild over the claims.
The Duke's son and heir during the war, also named Ernest Augustus, joined the SS in 1933 but left after a year. During the war he fought on the Russian front as an army officer and was later imprisoned by the Gestapo after the July 1944 plot.
The Duke had married Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, daughter of the Kaiser and a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Near the end of the war, the Duke and Duchess were living at Blankenburg Castle. By April 1945, the American army was rapidly approaching Blankenburg and the Harz mountains, defended by the remnants of the German Eleventh Army.
For the first time, Blankenburg was directly threatened. American artillery shelled the town, and aircraft attacked it. Patients from the local hospital, including wounded German soldiers, were evacuated to the castle for safety. The castle was also packed with art treasures and valuables, most owned by the royal family. Other pieces had been evacuated there from museums for safekeeping.
The cellars were also filled with crates of German Foreign Ministry files from the department of Joachim von Ribbentrop, containing documentary evidence of Germany's pre-war diplomatic communications with Britain and other countries. The local military commander told the Duke the castle would not be included in his regional defence plan, hoping to spare it and its treasures from destruction.
On 20 April 1945, Hitler's fifty-sixth and last birthday, the staff of the Eleventh Army headquarters were captured by the Americans. Blankenburg fell too. American troops reached the castle and, according to Princess Victoria Louise, were firing randomly and indiscriminately, behaving generally like Texas cowboys.
The Americans were eager to locate hiding SS men and Hitler Youth in the Harz region. They warned the Duke that any villages sheltering or helping such men would face American reprisals. The Americans allowed the Duke to go out and speak to local communities to urge resisters to surrender, using local foresters to contact the so-called werewolves.
Because of the agreed post-war occupation zones, Blankenburg fell within the British zone, and British forces arrived to take over from the Americans. Princess Victoria Louise wrote that the British authorities were very interested in the crates of German Foreign Ministry files in the castle cellar. She said the local British commander told her the files contained copies of documents distributed elsewhere and that they would not only confiscate them but take them away.
Before the British could organise the transfer of the crates, however, American officers arrived and ordered the Princess to open the cellar. The crates were loaded onto US Army trucks by a unit of Black soldiers and driven away. The British returned a few days later, and the Duke showed them the empty cellars. Princess Victoria Louise noted that great disappointment was visible on their faces.
Princess Victoria Louise worked hard in her book to discredit the British occupation forces, describing them as high-handed, until the Brunswick family began dealing with the regional military government in Hanover, whose officers were formal but hardly friendly. British troops were still under strict instructions not to fraternise with German civilians.
This leads to the discovery concerning the British King and his German royal relatives at their castle in Blankenburg. Under the 1944 London Protocol, the Free State of Brunswick was to be part of the British occupation zone. Yet a month after the Allies took Blankenburg, the British made a local border adjustment between the British and Soviet zones, one that would place Blankenburg inside the Soviet occupation zone.
The Duke was horrified to learn that his castle and all its private treasures, art and varied possessions would soon be in Soviet hands. The castle was also a collection point for other Brunswick art from regional museums. The Duke had also brought precious items from another of his estates, Herrenhausen, to protect them from Allied bombing.
An Allied centre for collecting art treasures had been set up in Celle, about thirty miles north-west of Brunswick, under the German art dealer E. J. Otto. At Blankenburg Castle, the regional conservator Karl Sedka was the general official responsible for those treasures.
Somehow news of the Brunswick family's plight reached Buckingham Palace and George VI, the Duke's cousin. An order was issued, and it was indeed an order, from George VI through the chain of command to the British 11th Armoured Division and its 159th Infantry Brigade.
Brigadier J. B. Churcher must have told the commander responsible for the 1st Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, an infantry battalion, to send a group of men, a few dozen strong, and thirty military trucks to Blankenburg Castle. Captain Paul McConnell was given command of the operation.
No mention or trace of this operation was found in the war diaries of the 1st Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, despite careful examination by the author and the regiment's historian. The operation appeared to be secret, something that becomes obvious once you begin researching it in detail.
A British member of the famous Monuments Men protection unit was sent to Blankenburg to help sort and remove items. That officer was Major Felix Harbord of the Royal Engineers. The operation involved moving museum collections from Blankenburg to the Allied art collection point at Celle, but more importantly, British soldiers used British military transport to pack and move the private treasures, property, furniture and other possessions of the Duke of Brunswick to another of his estates, Marienburg Castle.
The men of the Cheshire Regiment, just beginning occupation duties in defeated Germany, were ordered by the highest authority of all, King George VI, to act as removal men, tasked with days of hard labour moving artworks, antiques, furniture, carpets, furnishings and porcelain owned privately, along with the entire contents of the castle, safely to another private castle. This diverted them from the duties they had joined the army to perform. Moving private property was not part of the British infantry operations manual.
The fact that the operation was ordered by George VI to help his close German relative is indisputable, as is the fact that it remained secret. The war diaries of the 1st Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment say nothing about it. There is no official correspondence from any of the officers involved, and even the National Archives contain nothing at all about the operation, only a few vague references to the Brunswick art collection.
Some may ask what the problem is. Why could the King not help a close relative, and what is wrong with saving beautiful things from the Soviets? Saving art and historical items is not the issue. The problem lies in a king issuing orders that used British soldiers to carry out the operation.
The British monarch is a constitutional monarch and cannot act in this way. They are not supposed to interfere in affairs of state, and certainly not in the military chain of command, to obtain services for relatives and use state resources to do so. Despite the greatest respect for George VI and his wartime performance, this action is hard to defend.
It was hard at first to believe the King had indeed ordered, yes ordered, British troops to carry out what was a private property matter for the Duke of Brunswick, a man with close Nazi connections who had been an enemy of Britain until May 1945.
The transfer operation began on 25 June 1945 and involved Captain Harbord and Captain McConnell, along with dozens of soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment and three armoured cars. It continued until 23 July 1945, with successive truck convoys escorted by armoured cars carrying the treasures out of the castle.
Some went to Celle, and the Brunswick private and personal collections and property were moved to the new destination they had chosen, Marienburg Castle, to save them from the Red Army. The Soviets were due to take control of Blankenburg on 22 July, the day before the last truck left. Using different routes, Harbord managed to continue moving treasures as the Soviets began closing roads around Blankenburg.
It was a huge and highly successful operation, but a secret one for obvious reasons. The King was undoubtedly aware that helping and encouraging a former enemy of Britain shortly after the end of a horrific war would not be accepted by the British public. The proof of all this is the Brunswick family's abundant thanks to the King, which confirms the operation was carried out on his orders.
On 19 December 1945, Princess Frederica Louise, daughter of the Duke of Brunswick, wrote to George VI. She had married the Crown Prince of Greece and wrote from Cairo, where she and her husband had fled, ironically because of the German invasion of Greece in 1941. She said she felt she must thank him from the bottom of her heart for the kindness and generosity shown to her parents and siblings in Hanover.
She had heard from English officers who were there that the British authorities were very cooperative with her family when the moment came to leave Blankenburg. She had heard they were given trucks to save their private property, which was moved to Marienburg outside Hanover. She thanked God they had been able to save their most precious possessions, and for that she thanked him and the British authorities who carried out his instructions.
The phrase carrying out your instructions proves that George VI knowingly ordered the operation. The Duke himself wrote to his cousin the King on 27 December 1945 to thank him. He said it was a pleasure to receive letters from the King's dear mother. He was deeply moved that the King had thought to help them regarding their family treasures. Note the words here: family treasures. The tons of items the Duke refers to were not evacuated museum collections but privately owned art treasures, wealth and household goods of that royal family.
On 15 February 1946, Princess Frederica Louise wrote to Queen Mary, whom she knew as dear Aunt May, confirming this. She said her father wrote to say that Queen Mary had written him a most charming letter full of interest, sympathy and understanding. Apart from all the other help her family had received from the British authorities, the gesture of writing to her father had moved her most. Her parents and siblings could not find words in their letters to express the help the English had given them in saving things from Blankenburg.
One cannot help wondering whether the ordinary soldiers of the Cheshire Regiment were as pleased as these royal individuals to spend their days as removal men for a family of German aristocrats, two of whom had been fighting as soldiers in Hitler's army only minutes earlier.
Captain McConnell certainly came out of the operation with significant gains. He received a pair of fine German 16-bore hunting rifles as a gift from the Duke. When these rifles were found for sale at an online auction, this was the evidence that led to the discovery of the operation in the first place. A beautiful 7mm Mannlicher Schoenauer sporting carbine, now in the National Army Museum in London, was also given as a personal gift by the generous Duke.
Royal letters also refer to praise for Major Harbord and his actions at Blankenburg and Celle. The fact that the operation was covered up, with the only references in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, makes clear that George VI and his advisers felt the public would not have approved of such an operation.
It would not have been well received, especially as the royal family had been distancing itself strongly from its German origins since 1917 for obvious reasons. Using British fighting troops as labour for the King's German relatives, who were surrounded by political suspicions, would have drawn attention again to the royal family's German roots.
George VI died in 1952. The man at the centre of all these intrigues, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, died the following year, in 1953, and was buried in front of the royal mausoleum in the Herrenhausen gardens in Hanover.
Captain McConnell rose to become a major in the army and moved to the United States in 1969, where he became known as a prominent amateur golfer. He died in October 1995 in San Rafael near San Francisco at the age of eighty. In his long obituary, nothing was said about the operation at Blankenburg Castle, which is telling once again.
Major Harbord ended the war with a distinguished reputation for his work with the Monuments Men and later became a well-known interior and theatre designer, including work as art director on the 1960 Hollywood film The Grass Is Greener, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Harbord died in Paris in 1981 and was buried there.
The whole affair leaves one important question. What would you have done if you were George VI in 1945? The last word belongs to Princess Frederica Louise, who told George VI that it was refreshing to know that chivalry and acts of human kindness still meant something in some parts of the world.