Queen’s Nazi salute: who dares tell the truth about the fascist Royals?
The Sun’s photo of Her Majesty the Queen giving Nazi salute in 1933 is a scoop. “Their Royal Heilnesses,” puns the Sun.
Queen Elizabeth 2 was just seven years of age when her Nazi-loving anti-Semitic uncle, the future King George VI, encouraged her to give the stiff-armed salute at Balmoral.
The Queen,’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, is equally blameless as she too salutes the Nazis.
But what of heir mother Queen Elizabeth?
The Telegraph, says “sources close to the Queen” described the photos as “misleading and dishonest”:
The Royal Household was particularly angry at the newspaper’s decision to print the 82-year-old images, which have never been seen before, just three weeks after the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the site of the former Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany.
It takes a special kind of fool to believe the Queen in some way approves of the murder of 6 million Jews. Her Majesty has been a friend to Jews throughout her reign. Jews sings the national anthem with gusto at synagogue services. The Queen is just about the best thing ever to happen to the Royal Family. Three cheers for her!
Others, what we call ‘the sane, might wonder at the world in which Elizabeth was raised. In 1933, her mother would have been 32 or 33 years of age. In 1933, Germany had already begin to ostracise and criminalise Jews.
What was the dear old Queen Mum thinking?
The Buckingham Palace spokesman has reacted:
“It is disappointing that a film, shot eight decades ago and apparently from HM’s personal family archive, has been obtained and exploited in this manner.”
Why? We’re not disappointed. It is a terrific story. The only pity is that it took so long to surface.
The Telegraph makes a suggestion:
In a leading article, the Sun accepts that Hitler, newly installed as Germany’s Chancellor, was “a faintly comic character” at the time, but argues that the involvement of the future Edward VIII, a known Nazi sympathiser, makes the film historically significant.
It does. Even without him it would be newsworthy. Edward’s presences makes it sinister.
Edward, who feared a communist revolution following the murder of Russia’s royal family, courted Hitler when he met him three years after the film was shot.
Not only him. The Sun says the aristocracy feared the communists. Well, some of them did. People involved in the Anglo-German Fellowship, which in 1939 welcomed Gertrud Scholtz-Klink – Hitler’s “perfect Nazi woman” – to teach them the ways of Nazism did.
The Anglo-German Fellowship, of which Prunella Stack’s husband Lord David Douglas-Hamilton and brother-in-law Douglas Douglas-Hamiton MP were both members, was an upper-class and it would be fair to say a predominately right-wing organisation. In fact many of the fellowship were almost unashamedly pro-Nazi and anti-semite.
In 1931 Miss Pamela Bowes-Lyon – cousin of the Duchess of York and future Queen Consort to King George VI and Queen Mother – married Lord Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton in Beaulieu, Hampshire.
You can read all about how close Britain came to being ruled of fascists on Flashbak.
A royal source is quoted:
“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 news reels. If you watch the film it is people laughing and joking around and playing, and it was one of the things of the day. No one at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything else is misleading and dishonest. The Queen is around six years of age at the time and entirely innocent of attaching any meaning to these gestures.”
It wasn’t one of things of the day for the Jews of London’s East End, who fought the upper-class led Black Shirts.
And this:
It was unclear on Friday night how The Sun had obtained the footage, which it argued was part of a “hidden” archive of material relating to the Royal family which it said should now be released.
Over in the Sun, we learn more:
…the pictures must be seen in the context of 1933.
Elizabeth and Margaret are kids. Families of all kinds larked around apeing the stiff-armed antics of the faintly comic character with the Charlie Chaplin moustache who won power in Germany.
No one knew then what Adolf Hitler was capable of. Or that, deep in Bavaria, he was already opening his first concentration camp at Dachau.
What gives The Sun’s extraordinary images such historical significance, and the reason we believe the public has a right finally to see them, is the involvement of the Queen’s uncle Edward.
The man who briefly became our King was already a fan of Hitler — and remained so as late as 1970, long after the Holocaust’s horrors were laid bare…
Edward and a clique of anti-Semitic aristocrats were terrified of a communist revolution stripping them of power and privilege with deadly force, as it had in Russia. Fascism seemed like an answer.
But even the Sun has its limits:
His desire to appease Germany stands now in stark contrast to the courage and patriotism of the Queen Mum once Luftwaffe bombs fell. She was so inspiring to Londoners in the Blitz even the Fuhrer considered her a thorn in his side.
The Sun produces a feature entitled “Queen of the Blitz Silly salute, but a rock in country’s bleak year”.
If there was one woman determined not to let Hitler win it was the Queen Mother.
There were far more people than one woman who wanted to smash the German war machine.
It was Elizabeth who persuaded her husband King George VI that they should remain in Buckingham Palace as the Luftwaffe bombed the capital night after night in 1940.
The stories are hymned. The tales of the bad Royals bits less so.
Like this in the Mail:
…there is the tragic saga of the Queen Mother’s nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes Lyon, both born mentally deficient and unable to speak.
They were confined in the Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital at Redhill, Surrey, in 1941, where they remained for the rest of their lives.
Although the Queen Mother knew the statement in Burke’s Peerage that both women were dead (published after false information had been supplied by their mother) was untrue, she never visited either of them, and apparently saw no contradiction in her patronage of Mencap, which campaigns against families placing their mentally challenged relations in state care.
And this in the Telegraph:
…not long before the announcement of the engagement of the Duke of York to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at the beginning of 1923 the papers had carried reports that she was, in fact, to marry his brother, the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII). Hence the suggestion, half a century later, by Diana Mosley [née Mitford] that Elizabeth’s enduring antipathy to Wallis was fuelled by jealousy. In a letter to her sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, written soon after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972, Diana (Wallis’s friend and future biographer) observed: ‘the theory of their contemporaries that Cake [the Mitford sisters’ nickname for Elizabeth, derived from her sweet tooth and healthy appetite] was rather in love with him (as a girl) & took second best, may account for much.’
Good stuff, eh. Got any more?
Well, yes. There’s this:
Released by Buckingham Palace ahead of the publication this week of the first official biography of the Queen Mother, the letter is her personal account of the events of 13 September 1940 to her “darling” mother-in-law, Queen Mary.
In it she records how she was “battling” to remove an errant eyelash from the King’s eye, when they heard the “unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane” and then the “scream of a bomb”.
“It all happened so quickly that we had only time to look foolishly at each other when the scream hurtled past us and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle,” she wrote.
While her “knees trembled a little bit”, she was “so pleased with the behaviour of our servants”, some of whom were injured as one bomb crashed through a glass roof and another pulverised the palace chapel.
Hours later, after lunching in their air-raid shelter, she and the King were visiting West Ham in London’s East End. She wrote: “I felt as if I was walking in a dead city… all the houses evacuated, and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left.”
Oh, you want the juicy bits, the stuff about the Royal racists, philanderers and scumbags. Well, the Royal want those bits kept secret:
The rest of the Royal archive from that period, of similarly immense interest to historians and the public, is still hidden.
It should be released.
Agreed.
Posted: 18th, July 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews, Royal Family Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
