Buckingham Palace has attempted to brush off the film of a young Queen giving a Nazi salute as ‘horseplay’ and insisted that the family were simply ‘messing around’ for the camera when the film was taken—apparently around 1933 when the Queen was 7 or 8.
And while there is little doubt that the Queen is absolutely not a Nazi sympathizer, it is equally true that there was widespread sympathy for Nazis and Nazism in the early and mid-1930s in the very heart of the British establishment.
As Frank McDonough, an international expert on the Third Reich whose book, The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler's Secret Police will be published later this year, told The Royalist, “The British 'Establishment', including key figures in the aristocracy, the press were keen supporters of Hitler up until the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Few were supporters of Nazism, but they admired Hitler and felt he offered the best means of preventing the spread of communism. They tended to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism and the attacks Hitler made on communists, socialists, and other internal opponents.”
While many were disgusted by Hitler’s naked anti-Semtism and his abolishment of democracy, right up until the outbreak of war in 1939, upper-class British girls were still doing ‘the season’ in Germany, attending balls, learning about art and hunting for husbands.
Intermarriage at the upper echelons of society was seen by many as a way of attempting to preserve the peace.
I myself distinctly remember hearing German being spoken by two distinguished elderly British ladies (who wished to speak without me understanding) at a British stately home in the mid-1980s.
British high society had a ’30s love affair with Nazism and Hitler which was in many cases just as profound as that which the German people experienced at the same time.
When they looked at Hitler, many who had an affection for Germany liked what they saw. Intermarriage between British and German high society goes all the way to the top; the Royal Family themselves were called the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas until they changed their name to Windsor at the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Germany seemed to be thriving under the man who had abolished democracy and declared himself dictator in 1933.
And although few could claim to have been unaware of the official German policy of anti-Semitism after the 1936 Olympics in which Jewish athletes were banned from the German team, many were prepared to turn a blind eye in the face of the country’s extraordinary economic and psychic revival from the crushed and humiliated shell of a nation state it had been for all of the 1920s.
By 1938, unemployment was virtually nil—it had been 30% when Hitler took power.
Many of the British upper classes—not, it must be said, universally famed for their racial tolerance at the best of times—were impressed.
The cultural exchange between the two countries was facilitated in large part through the medium of peers’ daughters.
For much of the 1930s, the pretty young ladies of the great houses of England were sent off to Germany for ‘finishing’—a combination of art, music, balls, and husband hunting, in reverse order.
Even as late as 1939, the tours were still taking place—Lady Elizabeth Montagu Douglas Scott, the daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, who later married the Duke of Northumberland, spent two months right before World War II in Munich.
Her time was spent learning German and getting ready to be presented in time for society’s shooting season in Scotland and hunt balls at Christmas.
Lady Elizabeth told Rachel Johnson, sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, “I’m afraid I didn’t give a thought to what was going on outside. I was sleeping, eating, chatting, dining, dancing. That was all.”
The Nazis had many friends in powerful places, but perhaps none were more influential than Harold Harmsworth, aka Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail in the 1930s.
In January 1934 Rothermere wrote a Daily Mail editorial entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, praising Oswald Mosley for his “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine.”
An editor at the Spectator responded by writing, “the Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made.”
Rothermere congratulated Hitler on his invasion of the Sudetenland, and secret papers declassified and released in 2005 showed that he also wrote to Hitler in 1939 congratulating him for the annexation of Czechoslovakia, praising his “great and superhuman work in regenerating your country,” and encouraging him to invade Romania.