Worse Than Nazis: The Royal Spy Who Traded British Secrets to the Gestapo JJ

London, September 1940. The Luftwaffa has been bombing this city for 11 consecutive nights. Entire streets have collapsed into rubble. The tempames is flickering orange from the fires. Ordinary British families are sleeping underground in subway tunnels, clutching their children, listening to the ground shake above them.

Churchill is on the radio every night, holding a nation together with words. And inside the secret files of Nazi Germany’s intelligence service, the SD, officers are writing a woman’s name. Not a general, not a politician, not a resistance fighter, an American socialite, a twice divorced woman from Baltimore, a woman who had already destroyed one king and was now, according to Nazi intelligence, potentially useful for destroying an entire country.

Her name is Wallace Simpson. Here is what the history books gave you. A forbidden romance. A king who loved too deeply. A woman who stole a crown. Here is what they left out. The FBI file. The MI5 surveillance. The 17 carnations. The secret Nazi operation built around her name. And the question that British intelligence never fully answered.

Was Wallace Simpson a fool, a victim, or something far more calculated? By the end of this video, you will never see the Windsor love story the same way again. Welcome to Nazi History, where we pull back the curtain on the most dangerous era in modern history and show you what was actually happening behind the polished official version.

If you are new here, subscribe right now and turn on notifications. We cover the operations, the people, and the secrets that mainstream history quietly buries. And this story, this one has been buried for decades. Let’s get into it. Bessie Wallace Warfield entered the world on June 19th, 1896 in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, and immediately inherited a difficult life.

Her father, Thie Wallace Warfield, died before she was old enough to remember his face. Her mother, Alice Montigue, was the daughter of a Baltimore stockbroker named William Latain Montigue. And after her husband’s death, she was left financially exposed, raising her daughter on the charity of relatives.

The Warfields had social standing in Baltimore, but limited cash. Wallace grew up in a world where appearances had to be maintained at considerable personal cost, a lesson she absorbed completely and carried for the rest of her life. She was not pretty in any conventional sense, and she knew it. Contemporary accounts describe her as angular, sharp featured, almost severe.

But every person who spent more than 10 minutes with Wallace Warfield came away saying the same thing. There was something about her. A magnetism, a precision, an intelligence that made the room feel smaller. Her uncle, Solomon Davies Warfield, arranged for her to attend Oldfield School in Maryland, the most expensive girls school in the state between 1912 and 1914.

Tuition cost roughly $500 per year at a time when the average American worker earned under $600 annually. The girls around her came from genuinely wealthy families. Wallace came from the edge of that world and she knew the difference. Teachers remembered her as driven beyond the ordinary. One classmate recalled later that Wallace simply decided where she wanted to stand in the room at the top and then worked backward from there.

She dressed with meticulous care. She was never untidy. She studied the social architecture of every room she entered. This was not charm. This was strategy. In 1916, at 20 years old, she married Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a United States Navy aviator who cut a genuinely dashing figure in his uniform. The wedding felt like a beginning.

It became instead an education and disappointment. Spencer was an alcoholic, a serious, deteriorating alcoholic whose drinking worsened with each passing year. His postings took him away for months at a time, leaving Wallace alone in naval base housing, with very little money, and even less company. She was too intelligent to sit quietly.

She filled the silence with reading, with socializing, and by multiple accounts with other men. One documented connection from this period was Argentine diplomat Felipe Despiel with whom she reportedly maintained a romantic relationship. She also lived abroad extensively spending significant time in China, particularly Beijing, between 1924 and 1925.

It was in China that the most damaging rumor of her life took root. Gossip, persistent and vicious, placed her in an intimate relationship with Count Galato Chano, an Italian diplomat who would later marry Bonito Mussolini’s daughter, Eda, and become fascist Italy’s foreign minister.

The rumor claimed she became pregnant by Chano, and that a botched illegal abortion left her permanently unable to carry children. This would explain, the gossip insisted, why she never had children with any of her three husbands. There is no verified medical evidence supporting this. No document, no named witness who was present.

What there is is a story that attached itself to Wallace Simpson’s name like a shadow and never left, following her across decades, across continents, and into the most powerful rooms in Europe. Her marriage to Spencer ended in December 1927. The official reason was irreconcilable differences.

The real reasons had been accumulating for years. Within months of her divorce from Spencer, Wallace met Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an Anglo-American shipping executive with dual British and American citizenship. Ernest was everything Spencer had not been. Steady, educated, financially stable, and genuinely devoted to her. He divorced his first wife, Doraththa, to be with Wallace.

They married in July 1928. Together, they moved to London. This was the decision that changed everything. London in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a city of extraordinary social stratification. But it had cracks. And through those cracks, a sharp, witty, immaculately dressed American woman with perfect comic timing and zero patience for stuffiness could climb faster than the rules technically allowed.

Wallace climbed. She moved through diplomatic dinners, country house weekends, and society events with a speed that bewildered people who had spent their entire lives trying to penetrate the same circles. Ernest, meanwhile, was struggling. The shipping business was suffering. The couple was living beyond their income, maintaining a London flat, a social calendar, and a lifestyle that required more money than they had.

But Wallace had found her footing. And then through a mutual acquaintance she met the Prince of Wales. Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David known to his family simply as David was 41 years old heir to the greatest empire on earth and profoundly genuinely unhappy. He had survived the First World War while his generation died around him carrying enormous guilt about his protected status.

He found the rigid formality of royal life suffocating. He had a natural warmth and an instinct for connecting with ordinary people, but the institution surrounding him crushed spontaneity at every turn. He had a series of relationships with married women, a pattern that biographers have analyzed extensively.

And he drank more than was wise. When he met Wallace Simpson at a country house in January 1931, she did something almost nobody did with the Prince of Wales. She teased him. The story, which has been corroborated by multiple guests present that weekend, goes like this. Edward asked Wallace whether she missed central heating since American houses were famously warmer than British ones.

It was a standard piece of small talk he used with American visitors. Wallace looked at him directly and said she was disappointed. She had expected a more original line from the Prince of Wales. Edward was reportedly delighted. He laughed. He sought her out again that evening. He had never been spoken to that way in his life.

What followed over the next three years was a deepening friendship that became, by most accounts, a love affair of genuine intensity. Wallace gave Edward something no one in his royal circle could provide, complete honesty. She told him when he was wrong. She organized his domestic life with military efficiency. Former royal staff later described how she managed his household, his schedule, and his emotional state simultaneously with a competence that left professional aids astonished.

By January 1934, multiple sources, including royal household staff, placed them in a physical relationship. Edward denied this to his father, King George V, directly. The king was not convinced. When George V died on January 20th, 1936, his eldest son became King Edward V.

and within weeks, the new king told his private circle he intended to marry Wallace Simpson once her divorce from Ernest was complete. The British government went into quiet emergency mode. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin met with Edward multiple times. The position of the government was unmovable. Parliament would not approve the marriage.

The Church of England, of which the monarch was supreme governor, did not recognize the remarage of divorced persons with living former spouses. The governments of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and other dominions of the British Empire formally communicated their opposition. Edward had ruled for less than a year. He had never been crowned.

On December 11th, 1936, he abdicated. His radio broadcast that evening reached an estimated 300 million listeners worldwide, the largest radio audience in history to that point. He spoke for 4 minutes. He said he had found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of kingship without the support of the woman he loved. Romantics wept.

Realists were horrified. Britain was 3 years away from the most catastrophic war in human history and its king had just abandoned his post for an American divorce. A Wallace and Edward, now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, married in France on June 3rd, 1937. It was a quiet ceremony, deliberately small, attended by a handful of friends.

The British royal family sent no representatives. More pointedly, the palace formally denied Wallace the title of her royal highness, a studied insult that Edward took personally for the rest of his life. 4 months later in October 1937, the Windsors traveled to Germany. This was not a private holiday. They were invited by the Nazi government.

The trip was organized by Robert Lei, head of the German labor front, and the itinerary included factory tours, welfare project visits, and inspection of the new Autobond Highway network. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Gerbles tracked the visit carefully. German state media covered it extensively. The photographs were devastating.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor smiling and relaxed, moving through Nazi Germany’s showcase institutions. Edward giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute at multiple points during the visit. Both of them meeting Adolf Hitler at his private mountain retreat in Burkeisgotten, sitting across from the man who was already constructing the machinery of genocide and appearing perfectly comfortable.

Edward later claimed the visit was humanitarian and that he was exploring German social programs. Historians have found no evidence he raised any concerns about Nazi persecution of Jewish people, political prisoners or anyone else during the visit. But the deeper intelligence concern was Wallace. Yoakim von Ribbentrop had served as German ambassador to London from 1936 to 1938 before Hitler appointed him foreign minister.

During his London posting, he and Wallace had been in close social contact. Intelligence sources from multiple countries later claimed the relationship was personal. The story of 17 carnations allegedly sent by Ribbentrop to Wallace representing the number of times they had been intimate circulated among British intelligence officers and eventually appeared in declassified documents. The FBI under J.

Edgar Hoover opened a file on Wallace Simpson and noted that she maintained regular contact with Ribbentrop even after his return to Germany. MI5 assessed that she potentially had access to sensitive information through Edward’s royal and later governmental connections and that this information may have reached German intelligence.

These were not tabloid rumors. These were assessments by professional intelligence services in two separate countries. When Germany crushed France in six weeks during the summer of 1940, a military collapse that stunned the entire world, the Windsor were in the path of the German advance. They fled south through crowds of terrified refugees, reaching Franco’s Spain and eventually neutral Portugal.

German intelligence followed them every step of the way. The operation had a code name, Operation Willie. Its objective was straightforward. German agents would use existing contacts, including people already close to the Windsor, to convince Edward that Germany’s victory over Britain was inevitable, that Churchill’s government would fall, and that Edward could return to the British throne as a Germansponsored monarch.

A puppet king for a conquered country. The Marberg files, thousands of pages of captured Nazi documents processed by Allied forces after the war, confirmed Operation Willie in meticulous detail. German officers assessed Edward as genuinely sympathetic to their aims. They described Wallace as a useful channel of influence.

They believed based on specific intelligence they had gathered that the Windsors could be turned. Churchill personally intervened. He sent sharp, unambiguous warnings to Edward, essentially ordering him to disengage from German contacts. Then he solved the problem structurally. Edward was appointed governor of the Bahamas and removed from Europe entirely.

Nassau was safe. Nassau was also the middle of nowhere. The message was clear. Edward died in Paris on May 28th, 1972 from throat cancer. He was 77. Their marriage of 35 years had produced no children. Wallace deteriorated slowly after his death. Dementia claimed her mind by 1980. She lost her speech.

In her final years, she received no visitors except her physician and nursing staff, the most social woman of her generation, spending her last years in complete silence. She died on April 24th, 1986 at age 89. She was buried beside Edward at Frogmore in England. The country that had spent half a century trying to keep her out, finally taking her back.

The FBI file exists. The MI5 reports exist. The Marberg files exist. Operation Willie existed. The photographs in Burkeen exist. What the evidence cannot tell us, what historians still genuinely argue about is what Wallace Simpson actually knew, what she actually chose, and what she actually believed. Was she a spy, a manipulator, a woman in love who made catastrophically bad decisions, or something more deliberate? The files are open. The answer is still not clear.

And that perhaps is exactly how she would have wanted it. If this story forced you to rethink something, subscribe to Nazi history right now. We do this every week. Documented history, real intelligence files, real operations, real consequences. No speculation dressed up as fact. No myths repeated because they sound good.

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