Over the weekend, the U.K. tabloid The Sun released an 82-year-old video that allegedly shows a young Queen Elizabeth II giving the Nazi salute. She was only six or seven at the time, leading some to wonder if she even knew what she was doing at the time or why the footage needed to be made public in the first place.
The Sun claims that that video shows her uncle, Prince Edward VIII, teaching Elizabeth and her late sister Princess Margaret (just three at the time) the salute. The Queen Mother, who died in 2002 at age 101, is also shown in the clip, giving the salute.
The footage had never been made public before and the Sun did not reveal how it obtained it. The Daily Mail reports that the British Film Institute and the Royal Collection Trust are investigating a possible connection to last year’s Royal Childhood exhibition at the State Rooms in Buckingham Palace.
That exhibition did include other home video clips, but not this one. There’s a theory that a researcher who saw the 20-second clip leaked it to the Sun.
“There is an inquiry going on to find the source of the footage and until that inquiry is completed we would not give out any further information,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman said in a statement.
Aside from the fact that it was leaked, The Sun still had to decide w
Should the Sun really have run a story on the footage, which it even featured on its front page? CNN notes that the Sun defended its decision in an editorial, suggesting it was important to show another side of Edward VIII.
"These images have lain hidden for 82 years. We publish them today, knowing they do not reflect badly on our Queen, her late sister or mother in any way,” the editorial reads. “They do, however, provide a fascinating insight into the warped prejudices of Edward VIII and his friends in that bleak, paranoid, tumultuous decade.”
Edward VIII did visit Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937, after he abdicated the throne. Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, then became king.
image courtesy of INFphoto.com