Prince Harry says sorry for Nazi gaffe

sweetcandy

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What was he thinking??????



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6819206/

Prince Harry says sorry for Nazi gaffe
The prince dressed up in Nazi regalia for a costume party
050112_harry_hmed_6p.hmedium.jpg
Adam Butler / AP​
News agent Roy Ottoway reads a copy of tabloid 'The Sun', whose front page shows a picture of Britain's Prince Harry wearing a Nazi soldier's uniform to a fancy dress party, early Thursday morning, Jan. 13 at King's Cross station in London.

[url="http://www.reuters.com/"][/url] Updated: 10:01 p.m. ET Jan. 12, 2005

LONDON - Britain's Prince Harry apologized on Thursday after he wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party two weeks before Queen Elizabeth is due to lead the country's holocaust memorial events. In the latest of a string of gaffes, Harry, 20, wore a red and black swastika armband and an army shirt with Nazi regalia at the party at a friend's house on Saturday.

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The incident will heap more embarrassment on the royal family and Harry, third in line to the British throne and due to train at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst this year.

Queen Elizabeth is due to host a reception for survivors of the holocaust on Jan. 27 before representing the nation at the Holocaust Memorial Day National Event.

"I am very sorry if I have caused any offense," Harry, youngest son of the late Princess Diana and heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, said in a statement. "It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize."

A picture of Harry in his Nazi outfit was taken at the private house party in Wiltshire, southwest England. It was published on the front page of the Sun newspaper under the headlines "Hitler Youth" and "Harry the Nazi." It showed him with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, surrounded by young people, including a woman wearing a native American dress and feathers in her hair.

The Sun said the party, with the theme "Native and Colonial," was at the house of Olympic horseman Richard Meade. It said among the 250 guests was Harry's older brother William, dressed as a big cat with black leggings and joke feet.

‘Incredibly stupid’
The Nazi gaffe drew immediate condemnation from religious bodies, royal commentators and legislators.

"The incident was in bad taste, especially in the run up to the Holocaust Memorial Day, which the royal family will be playing a leading role in commemorating," the Board of Deputies of British Jews said in a statement.

Former royal press officer Dickie Arbiter said the prince had been "incredibly stupid and arrogant."

"He should know by now that there is no such thing as private," he told Sky News. "He has been allowed to get away with murder."

Former armed forces minister Doug Henderson was quoted as saying by the BBC that the picture showed the prince was "not suitable" for Sandhurst.

Six million Jews and millions of other people — including Poles, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies — were killed or imprisoned in concentration camps or used as slave labor.

After being left alone by the British media for a few years following the death of his mother in a Paris car crash in 1997, Harry has earned a reputation as a royal "wild child." He has admitted smoking cannabis and underage drinking and has been forced to deny claims he cheated in a school exam. Last October, he scuffled with photographers outside a London nightclub. Pictures of the incident were splashed across newspapers under the headline "Harry Potty."

The Queen is descended from Germany's House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, although the royal family dropped the name in favor of Windsor in 1917 during World War One.

Germany has long complained that the Nazi past still blights British perceptions of the country. On a visit to Britain last year, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he was amazed at the lingering portrayal of Germany in the British media as a nation of Nazis.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
 
tangerine said:
Royal dumb***.

SO TRUE! What an idiot. I mean really. Thats just bad in general.
 
What kind of stupid do you have to be to dress up like a Nazi? My head...it reels.
 
peers

are his friends so thick or cowed that they cant tell him not to dress like that & be photo'd??

that boy lacks sense.
 
he and his friends are such rebels

although its really embaressing to the queen.......im glad that he actually has the guts to do something 'out of line' instead of being so tight lipped like the rest of them

not that a nazi badge is in good taste
 
Silly bugger. He can smoke pot or drink if he likes, but that was disrespectful.
 
This is such a sensitive issue, some people take it as an insult which is understandable and some people also understand that he wasn't delibrately doing it to anger anyone.
 
As You Like It said:
What kind of stupid do you have to be to dress up like a Nazi? My head...it reels.

... I never knew he had the idiot brains to do such a thing.
 
mdankwah said:
This is such a sensitive issue, some people take it as an insult which is understandable and some people also understand that he wasn't delibrately doing it to anger anyone.

No, that doesn't wash. Anybody who has lived in the last 70 years should know that if you dress up like a Nazi, everyone will be appalled and furious. If you don't know, you are ignorant, and if you do know but don't care, you are an ***hole.
 
It's not that he doesn't care, it's just a poor lack of judgment to wear a badge, and I'm sure that his intentions weren't that of angering anyone.
There's been a debate this morning in Lonodn already on why he did it - was it stupidity or something else
 
I think that Harry has behaved just like all other posh boys of his peer group do - they obviously think that its one rule for them and rules for the others (us peasants)
Harry is like any other chinless wonder, he thinks that he can do what he likes and obviously doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks.
A truely great role model.
I mean a Nazi - duh! :blink:
 
It was an insensitive thing to do but you can't say that Harry is abusing some kind of droit de signeur to get away with it. No-one would care if he wasn't famous. In Sweden they have parties where the boys dress up as Totenkopf-SS officers and you can buy t-shirts with the hammer and sickle on the highstreet.
 
PrinceOfCats said:
It was an insensitive thing to do but you can't say that Harry is abusing some kind of droit de signeur to get away with it. No-one would care if he wasn't famous. In Sweden they have parties where the boys dress up as Totenkopf-SS officers and you can buy t-shirts with the hammer and sickle on the highstreet.

I'd think very badly of anybody, famous or not, posh or not, whom I saw wearing Nazi insignia. That goes well beyond poor taste or poor judgement, into the territory of stupid, racist, ignorant, and just plain mean.

Also, the hammer and sickle carry an entirely different connotation, being symbols for communist Russia and other Soviet Bloc countries. Though Stalin was a bloodthirsty SOB, he wasn't quite in the same league as Hitler and his blind, racist fanaticism. While I wouldn't advocate wearing hammer & sickle insignia (especially as a misguided attempt to be "edgy" or ironic) I would certainly not have the heart-dropping, stomach-churning reaction of abject dismay and disgust as I would have if I saw the same kid wearing Nazi insignia.

Someone wearing communist symbols frivolously would be roughly analagous to the hipsters who wear Che Guevera images and have no idea of who Che Guevera was or what his ideas were. Annoying and probably ignorant and poseurish, but not nearly as offensive as somebody who wears Nazi insignia. That's one piece of history which has been so prominent, infamous, and highly publicized that even the least well-informed people should at least know it is a taboo symbol.
 
The Royals have always done stupid things - you only have to look at the history books.

Can we nominate him for upper class twit of the year, please?
 

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