ROYAL ‘NAZI’
1933 Elizabeth pic stirs fuhrer
A RECENTLY uncovered home movie reveals Queen Elizabeth performing a Nazi salute as a child.
The 80-year-old piece of film, shot at Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and obtained by the British newspaper The Sun, features little Princess Elizabeth thrusting her right arm into the air, her hand extended, in the infamous Adolf Hitler gesture.
The grainy, blackand-white home footage was apparently filmed in 1933, as Hitler began his rise to power in Germany.
The Queen, now 89, would have been around 7 years old and her younger sister Margaret around 3. The two dance and wave at the camera as their mother, Elizabeth — later known as the Queen Mother — and uncle Edward look on.
The queen’s mother, who died in 2002 at the age of 101, is the first to mimic the Nazi-like salute in the video.
Her Majesty’s uncle, then Prince Edward, a known Nazi sympathizer, appears to be encouraging Elizabeth and her sister in the footage and also performs the salute.
“It is disappointing that film, shot eight decades ago and apparently from Her Majesty’s personal family archives, has been obtained and exploited in this manner,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.
A palace source told British outlets: “Most people will see these pictures in their proper context and time. This is a family playing and momentarily referencing a gesture many would have seen from contemporary newsreels.”
In 1936, King George V died and Edward was crowned King Edward VIII. His reign would last less than a year as Edward abdicated the throne in December in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
The couple visited Hitler in Germany in 1937.
Edward’s reluctant brother then became King George VI, and he and his wife Elizabeth, the parents of princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, led England through the dark years of World War II. The pair refused to leave Buckingham Palace during the German Blitz of London, even when the palace was bombed.
The Sun stressed that the images “do not reflect badly on our Queen, her late sister or mother in any way.”
But it said the home movie provides “a fascinating insight in the warped prejudices of Edward VIII and his friends in that bleak, paranoid, tumultuous decade.”
The queen visited a former Nazi concentration camp during a trip to Germany last month. She met with Holocaust survivors, British veterans, and laid a wreath at a memorial near the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.