While most of the media storm kicked up by The S*n on Saturday focused on how they obtained the footage from the royal family’s private archives, whether the tabloid should have published the footage and what could a little girl have possibly known about continental politics, there is a much more sinister undertone to the story. There is probably a very innocent explanation to Britain’s future monarchs jokingly “Heil‐Hitlering” in their backyard, but for the next few years, the family, along with much of Britain’s élite would sail perilously close to the fascist wind.

It has been said that fascism was just too theatrically ridiculous to ever take root in Britain, as it did throughout much of Europe in the 1930s. The truth is that it was never truly tested as the British Union of [F]ascists never ran in a general election before being outlawed in the early [1940s]. In its heyday, however, it attracted tens of thousands of members and the brief support of national newspapers.

And while the fascists were much too common for most of the British aristocracy, Edward was hardly unique in his sympathy for the new régime in Germany. There’s a reason why the Royal Family has not released its archives from that period — not all of Britain’s nobility were Hitler’s fans, as he was, but it wasn’t a rare trait either.

Fuelled by their fear of the communists who had only two decades earlier butchered the Russian royal family, lingering anti‐Semitism and a respect for the sense of law and order the [Fascists] had restored to Germany, where many of Britain’s senior aristocrats had relations and other connections, the early years of the Third Reich seemed like quite a good thing.

Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, has admitted that during those years there was “a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis at the time, the economy was good, we were anti‐communist and who knew what was going to happen to the régime?” and that in his sphere there were “inhibitions about the Jews” and “jealousy of their success.”

He went on to serve as a British naval officer in some of the wars fiercest battles at sea, and while his sisters were all married to Germans and some of his [Fascist] in‐laws fought on the other side, his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg risked her life in Athens saving a Jewish family for which she was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Also the narrative that The S*n presents as if once the bad king was gone, the Royal Family got behind the struggle against fascism is selective at best. George VI and his wife who were key supporters of Appeasement, along with much of the British press and public, invited Neville Chamberlain to the palace to congratulate him when he got back from meeting Hitler in Munich and allowing him to tear Czechoslovakia apart in September 1938.

King George continued to support those who were in favor of an early exit from the war and was aghast at the replacement of Chamberlain by Winston Churchill in May 1940. He preferred Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax who advocated coming to an accommodation with Hitler.