Britain’s royal family suffered a high-profile embarrassment on Saturday after a newspaper published images showing Queen Elizabeth II giving a Nazi salute as a young child in the 1930s.
Buckingham Palace voiced disappointment after the front page of the Sun carried a black-and-white image of the queen, then aged about six, raising her right hand in the air as her mother, the late Queen Mother, does the same.
The headline on the story read: “Their Royal Heilnesses” — a reference to the Heil Hitler greeting used in Nazi Germany.
Photo: AP
An investigation into how the Sun got the footage has been launched and the palace could take legal action against the newspaper depending on its findings, a royal source speaking on condition of anonymity told reporters.
“It is disappointing that film shot eight decades ago and apparently from HM’s [her majesty’s] personal family archive has been obtained and exploited in this manner,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman said in a statement.
While the queen would not have known the significance of the gesture at such a young age, the story will have made uncomfortable reading for the monarch, who is now 89.
Ten years ago, the Sun, a tabloid and Britain’s top-selling newspaper, published a photograph of Prince Harry wearing a swastika armband to a friend’s fancy dress party. The fifth in line to the throne later apologized.
The images showing the Nazi salute come from a 20-second home movie, which the Sun reported was shot at the royal family’s rural Balmoral estate in Scotland in 1933 or 1934 and has never been made public before.
The video shows the young future queen briefly raising her right hand in the air three times, as well as dancing around excitedly and playing with a corgi.
The group, which also included the queen’s sister Princess Margaret, were apparently being encouraged by the queen’s uncle, the future king Edward VIII.
The precise nature of Edward’s links to the Nazis are still debated in Britain, but some historians accuse him of being sympathetic to Adolf Hitler’s regime.
He met Hitler in Germany in 1937 after having abdicated as king the previous year over his desire to marry US divorcee Wallis Simpson. Many documents relating to the turbulent life of Edward, who died in 1972, are still locked away in secret royal archives.
The Sun’s managing editor, Stig Abell, defended the decision to release the images, saying they were obtained “in a legitimate fashion” and that publication was “not a criticism of the queen or the queen mum.”
“It is a historical document that really sheds some insight in to the behavior of Edward VIII,” he told BBC radio.
“I understand that they [the palace] don’t like this coming out, but I also feel, on a relatively purist basis, that the role of journalists and the media is to bring to light things that happened,” he said.
It is not clear how the newspaper obtained the images, but Buckingham Palace is scrambling to find out, the source said.
“We’re trying to ascertain where the footage came from,” the royal source told reporters. “There are questions about copyright and there may be possible questions about criminality.”
Historian Tim Stanley said that, while Hitler’s anti-Semitism would have been clear when the footage was shot, it would have been impossible to foresee World War II and the Holocaust.
“No one could have predicted the sheer scale of the evil,” he told Sky News TV.
Hitler became Germany’s leader in 1933. By the end of World War II 12 years later, millions of people had been killed in concentration camps, many of them Jews.
The queen paid a state visit to Germany last month, during which she visited Bergen-Belsen, her first visit to a former Nazi camp, where about 52,000 people died, including teenage Jewish diarist Anne Frank.
As an 18-year-old, Queen Elizabeth II trained as a reserve mechanic and military truck driver during World War II.
The affection in which many Britons still hold the Queen Mother, who died in 2002, is based on her and husband George VI’s decision to stay in London during the war and visit bomb sites caused by German aerial attacks known as the Blitz.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS