After the Sun’s 17 seconds of grainy footage showing the then future Queen doing a Nazi salute (but without the black comb as Hitler moustache part of the routine), is it safe yet to say that the royal family’s wobbly views in the 1930s have hardly been a secret? The great British public wobbled then too. No one wanted another German war.
According to Monday’s Telegraph, a still photo of the scene on a family lawn in 1933 was shown in a royal exhibition last year. But let’s not be too mean to the Sun. It’s an interesting photo, though as Kathryn Hughes wisely notes, it’s not clear what the Windsors were actually doing or thinking. They were, and still are, keen on boisterous pranks and charades. As kids growing up in the 50s we did the black-comb routine in the playground.
But that it should be a cause for outrage, real or synthetic, republican or monarchist, in 2015 is seriously daft. Everyone vaguely knows that the then Prince of Wales, briefly Edward VIII, expressed sympathetic views of the pre-war Hitler and was bundled off to be governor of Bermuda during the war to keep him out of possible mischief. One of the reasons for his views was a concern for the unemployed: Hitler got them working again. He hoped to get Edward working again too, as puppet king.
Silly, pampered boy, Edward made a mess of his life and we needn’t feel much sympathy. But the Queen has played her difficult hand well and after a shaky start so did her stammering and shy father who became George VI (1936-52).
But plenty of historians (David Cannadine, for example) and countless documentaries or articles, have noted that the King and Queen were pretty conventional upper class Brits of their time. They were more afraid of Bolshevist Russia – which had murdered their Romanov cousins – than of Hitler or the strutting Mussolini.
They probably hoped Franco would win the Spanish civil war (1936-39) which he did with great savagery. The hope that Hitler and Stalin would turn on each other was widely and understandably shared.
These were scary times and it wasn’t just the toffs who turned to extremes of left or right as the liberal democracies looked and sounded feeble. Spain popularised the idea of the “fifth column”: subversives within our own ranks, communists pretending to be Nazi sympathisers and vice versa. It was a low decade. It also produced the Cambridge Apostles’ spy ring, run by upper class anti-fascists well practised in deceit because most of them were gay.
People were still traumatised by the horrors of the first world war. They didn’t want to listen to the warnings against Hitlerism of that gadfly Winston Churchill (and even he wrote articles in the mid-30s praising Hitler as a “great contemporary”), preferring instead the reassuring tone of Stanley (“safety first”) Baldwin and his successor in No 10 after 1937, Neville Chamberlain.
The King and Queen were ardent supporters of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy: give Hitler his reasonable demands for reversing the harsh judgment of the Versailles treaty of 1919 and he would settle down. They were not alone in this.
It’s why the appeasers won elections and had the support of public opinion. The future king had been in a gun turret at the Battle of Jutland (1916) and thus knew war directly. “Hitler has a point,” people would say. Some of it was nasty, anti-semitic or reactionary, much was just wishing for a quiet life, as usual. Most of us do the same.
The Daily Mail set the picture in some context, publishing images of the England football team giving the Nazi salute at the Berlin Olympic stadium in 1938. Remember, Hitler was already doing terrible things but he had been elected to power. What is a visiting team supposed to do?
The Mail omits the enthusiasm of its then proprietor, the first Lord Rothermere, for Hitler and the “black shirts” of Sir Oswald Mosley, but that’s hardly a secret either. When Chamberlain returned from Munich with his illusory “peace in our time” deal with Hitler in September 1938, the King and Queen allowed him to appear with them on the balcony at Buckingham Palace.
Protocol should not have permitted it to a politician, but the cheering crowds in the Mall didn’t care. In 1945 the royal couple would appear there again with Churchill (whom they didn’t like because he had foolishly sided with Edward VIII over the abdication crisis). But by then they had redeemed themselves by insisting on staying both in Britain (Canada was an option) and London during the Blitz. Deliberately targeted bombs fell on the palace when they were there, a mere 80 metres away.
They didn’t, however, dodge the political fallout entirely because their gorgeous teenage daughter was by now being courted by a dashing naval lieutenant of German extraction. Because fragmented Germany had so many minor royal houses apart from Prussia’s dominant Hohenzollerns, it had been Europe’s royal sperm bank for centuries.
So when Philip Mountbatten (formerly Battenberg) married Princess Elizabeth in 1947 most of his family weren’t invited because they were compromised by associations, including marriage and war service, with the Nazi regime. That wasn’t a secret either, though Channel 4 is about to rehash it for a younger generation. No harm in that unless it’s presented as a shock revelation.
As the Guardian suggests there are still some war-time secrets in the royal archive which should get an airing. They can’t harm the Queen now.
The danger in this sort of situation is that we may be tempted to ascribe views to people based on our knowledge of what happened later, of which they could only be ignorant. When the Sun’s grainy footage was filmed, not much was understood about the enormity of the Nazi project. Hitler only came to power in March 1933; legitimately appointed chancellor. He got off to a cracking, ugly start, but politicians do not always fulfil their election promises, do they?
We do know that when Elizabeth reached 18 in 1944 she joined the armed forces, unlike her near-contemporary Margaret Thatcher, who preferred to accelerate her entry into Oxford University. Ignorance by then was no longer an excuse, as it no longer was for more ardent western supporters of Stalin and all his works as the mighty Red Army closed in on Berlin.
But then as now, human beings easily tie themselves in knots. Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform to a party, in poor taste. I suppose that doing the black comb routine in the school playground, as we once did, would be harshly judged now.
