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Celebrity

06th Jan 2023

Prince Harry claims William and Kate made him dress as a Nazi and laughed when they saw him

Ellen Fitzpatrick

He’s not holding back.

Prince Harry has claimed that Prince William and Kate Middleton encouraged him to dress as a Nazi and “howled” laughing at him in costume in the now infamous picture.

A then 20 year old Harry made headlines across the globe in 2005 when The Sun published a front page picture of the royal wearing a swastika armband as a Nazi soldier from the Afrika Korps.

A media frenzy then ensued due to his choice to wear this costume for a “Colonials and Natives” party and it saw detrimental damage done to his reputation.

Speaking about it in his Netflix documentary, Harry described the incident as “probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life”.

The incident was so damaging that there were calls for Harry to cancel his plans to join the army, with the Anti-Nazi League describing his actions as “grossly insensitive to the many millions of people whose family members were slaughtered in the Nazis’ Holocaust”.

While he apologised for the incident in a statement at the time, Page Six reported on Thursday that he now blames William and Kate for the decision in his new memoir Spare.

Claiming that he had asked the couple whether he should wear a pilot’s uniform or a Nazi one for the fancy dress party, William and Kate encouraged him to wear the Nazi uniform and howled with laughter as Harry tried it on for them.

“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. ‘Nazi uniform’, they said,” Harry writes, adding that when he went home and tried it on for them: “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”

According to royal author Robert Lacey in his 2020 book Battle Of Brothers, it was after this event that William and Harry’s relationship began to go downhill.

Lacey wrote that Harry “chose his costume in conjunction with his elder brother” and that William “had laughed all the way back to Highgrove with the younger sibling he was supposed to be mentoring”.

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