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Could the King's Nazi links wreck Firth's Oscar dreams? Hollywood whispering campaign fuelled by disturbing new claims by historians

With nearly a week to go before the Oscars, concerns are growing that the party might come to a juddering halt for Colin Firth and The King’s Speech next Sunday night.

Despite gathering a host of pre-Oscar awards — including a clutch of Baftas last week — and a staggering 12 nominations for the big night itself, a whispering campaign is spreading across Hollywood that appears to be aimed at derailing the film’s runaway success.

Emails have been dropping into the inboxes of some of the nearly 6,000 Academy Awards voters suggesting that the tongue-tied King George VI was anti-Semitic and supported the idea of keeping Jews fleeing from Germany in 1939 out of the safe haven of Palestine....

Two books recently published — Royals and the Reich by Professor Jonathan Petropoulos and Royal Flourish by the late Christopher Rubinstein — also question Bertie’s involvement with the Nazi Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, who flew to Britain in 1941 in a bid to make peace....

According to 20th-century British history expert Tom MacDonnell: ‘George VI was haunted by the memory of the Great War and had been an enthusiastic supporter of (Prime Minister) Chamberlain’s appeasement policies.

‘Repeatedly, he offered to make his own appeal to Hitler, sharing with his brother the Duke of Windsor the idea that kings and princes still had a meaningful part to play in diplomacy — as if nothing had happened to the map of Europe since 1914 when the Continent had been the private domain of royal cousins.’...
Read entire article at Daily Mail (UK)