The Queen may have all got pissy about the footage of her giving a Nazi salute when she was 6-years old being leaked, but she’s probably now even more irritated after hearing the reports that the video may have been leaked following one of Buckingham Palace’s own exhibitions.
The clip, which depicts Edward VIII leading the Queen, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in in the salute, is now being investigated by Palace aides, with it being thought that an exhibition held by the British Film Institute and the Royal Collection Trust that depicted the childhood of the Head of the Commonwealth may have caused the footage to be unearthed, with the 17-second clip then being passed over to The Sun.
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The Palace has been outspoken about the sharing of the clip, claiming that it was a “breach of the Queen’s privacy,” but fuck those guys. While it’s true that the Queen was 6-years old in the clip and therefore can hardly be accountable for her own actions, as the Royal Family are funded by the people of the UK, those people should therefore not be shielded from footage depicting their ancestors as Nazi sympathisers. It is firmly within the public’s interest that we are fully aware of the Royal Family’s history, and if some sycophants are defending the clip and protesting against it being leaked.
A statement from the Palace released after The Sun leaked the footage claimed that it depicted “a family playing and momentarily referencing a gesture many would have seen from contemporary newsreels,” adding: “No one at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything else is misleading and dishonest.” Again, fuck those guys. Adolf Hitler published the two volumes of Mein Kampf by 1926. Everyone was well aware of what the Nazi’s were about by 1933, the date that this clip was recorded. It wasn’t as if everyone was taken aback when these people who spent the majority of their time spouting their fascist rhetoric actually turned out to be fascists.
Following the leaking of the footage, there have now been calls for historians to be allowed access to the royal archives, with senior research fellow at London University’s Institute of Historical Research Karina Urbach telling The Guardian: “I find it scandalous that 80 years after the events running up to the second world war we still have no direct access to the opinions of senior members of the royal family. If we want to understand foreign policy in the run-up to world war two we need to see the files, and these files are not given to us.”
