Watch Queen Elizabeth salute der Führer

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      The early '30s were an idyllic time for our beloved Royals.

      As we can see in this exceedingly rare home movie-clip published today by UK tabloid The Sun, it was a tranquil era, when a future queen could cavort and gambol in the green and pleasant grounds of Balmoral, gently teasing the family Corgis and saluting Hitler with nary a care in the world.

      "The film shows the then Princess Elizabeth, just seven, larking about in 1933," writes The Sun. "Egging on her sister Princess Margaret, three, is their uncle Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a sympathiser towards Hitler’s Nazi Germany and became King Edward VIII."

      "The stunning film footage of the Queen performing a Nazi salute is today revealed by The Sun."

      While Edward's Hitler fetish is no secret, The Sun turns to military historian James Holland for some perspective on the other lot—including the Queen Mum, also seen in the silent black & white clip with her hand in the air.

      “It’s no secret Edward met Hitler and had right-wing sympathies. But the same cannot be said about the Queen Mother or King George VI," he says. "The two were completely steadfast from start to finish in their abhorrence of Nazism in their role as leaders of the free world and the fight against that tyranny.”

      He's echoed by Dr. Karina Urbach, of London's Institute of Historical Research, who remarked: "The Queen has a proud Second World War record and sense of duty to her country and no one would ever suggest she was sympathetic to Nazi Germany. She was a child when this film was shot, long before the atrocities of the Nazis became widely known."

      Urbach also concedes that the clip nonetheless deserves to be seen, even by that strange constituency of Hello readers and some of my relatives who don't view the British Monarchy as a family of hopelessly inbred parasites who should have been run out of the country like common pygmies long before there was a Hitler, and certainly before there was a (former) Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Glücksburg. (Sorry, too much?)

      "The film involves our monarch and is an important historical document that asks serious questions of the Royal Family," said Urbach. “It is right that it is put into the public domain. It is high time the Royal Archives were open for serious research on the 1930s and the issue of Edward’s politics and their impact upon his generation within the Royal Family.”

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Canadian

      Jul 19, 2015 at 8:09am

      That CNN article is a scream! It reads like an SNL sketch. Thanks for that.