A Prince146;s wardrobe malfunction

It has been a while since the word 8216;8216;Nazi8217;8217; was associated with a member of the British royal family. But obviously it h...

It has been a while since the word 8216;8216;Nazi8217;8217; was associated with a member of the British royal family. But obviously it has not been long enough. Thursday, London8217;s best-selling newspaper The Sun splashed a photograph of 20-year-old Prince Harry at a costume party wearing the uniform of Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel8217;s Afrika Korps, complete with the swastika armband. 8216;8216;Complete idiot8217;8217; was the epithet bandied about by one anti-Fascist group, and nobody seemed to think it remotely inappropriate. The president of Britain8217;s Holocaust Trust called the Prince8217;s actions 8216;8216;stupid and evil8217;8217;. A former armed forces minister suggested that Harry was now unfit to enter Sandhurst, Britain8217;s elite officer training school, where he is due to start later this year. And the former commander of British forces in Bosnia, Col Bob Stewart, said that if one of his men had gone to a party dressed as a Nazi he would have put him on toilet-cleaning duty for two weeks.

It8217;s hardly news that a British royal has, once again, made a prize twit of himself. But this is in a whole different category. Even a 20-year-old and particularly one in line to the throne should know that the world is still understandably sensitive about the Nazis. After all, the Third Reich came close to ripping apart the fabric of the British monarchy in the 1930s. Had history jogged just a few degrees one way or the other, Britain could have found itself either allied with Adolf Hitler or overrun by his Wehrmacht and turned into a Fascist state.

Nobody represented the flirtation with totalitarianism more than Harry8217;s great-grand-uncle, Edward VIII, the ultimate black sheep of the family, who openly sympathised with the Nazis and might have pushed Britain into an anti-Stalinist alliance with Hitler had it not been for his insistence on marrying the American divorcee8212;and equally ardent Nazi apologist8212;Wallis Simpson, an insistence that precipitated his abdication in 1936. For a long time, conventional wisdom had it that the objection to Simpson was religious and moral: that there was no tolerance of divorce in Anglican belief Recently released official papers have shown, however, that the establishment was greatly exercised by Simpson8217;s fondness for the Nazis she was believed to have been Joachim von Ribbentrop8217;s lover when he was ambassador to London, even more vexed about Edward8217;s openly pro-Nazi leanings and anxious to see him stripped of the crown.

The reverberations from the abdication crisis are still palpable among today8217;s royals. Three of Prince Philip8217;s sisters married Nazi sympathisers, and the Windsors who succeeded Edward VIII8212;his brother George VI and George8217;s daughter Elizabeth II8212;had to live it down. Edward himself continued to be a severe embarrassment, dining in Germany with Hitler and Rudolph Hess in 1937 and very possibly plotting with the Nazis to return to the throne in the event of invasion of Britain.

This is the history that Harry just brought roaring back to life. The costume party was on a 8216;8216;native and colonial8217;8217; theme, so, to add insult to injury, Harry8217;s costume also revived Britain8217;s own imperial past8212;like using poison gas on the Kurds, shooting Independence protesters in India and so on. Nostalgia still abounds in certain upper-class circles for those days.

Harry has been a mild cause for concern before8212;accused by his art teacher at Eton of cheating, caught in a bust-up with a photographer outside a London club. He spent part of his year before Sandhurst working as a ranch hand in Australia. His father and grandmother must be regretting he didn8217;t stay longer.

Gumbel is the Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent of London

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