What was claimed
A picture shows the Queen as a young girl doing a Nazi salute.
Our verdict
The pictures are real, and show the Queen doing what appears to be a Nazi salute aged about seven.
This footage of the Queen doing the Nazi salute is real
31 July 2019
A post on Facebook claims a picture shows the Queen as a little girl doing a Nazi salute.
The picture is a screengrab from real footage of the young Queen and the Queen Mother performing what appears to be a Nazi salute at their Balmoral residence in 1933 or 1934. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany at the start of 1933.
The video was first published by the Sun in July 2015.
At the time, Buckingham Palace said: “It is disappointing that film, shot eight decades ago and apparently from Her Majesty’s personal family archive, has been obtained and exploited in this manner.”
The full clip also shows Edward VIII (then Prince of Wales) and Princess Margaret (then around three years-old) doing the salute. The Queen would have been around seven years-old at the time.
The Second World War started six years later, in 1939. The Queen joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which was then the women’s branch of the army, full time in 1945.
In their article, the Sun wrote that there was “clearly no suggestion that the Queen or Queen Mother were ever Nazi sympathisers”. The Sun defended publishing the images by saying they provided “a fascinating insight into the warped prejudices of Edward VIII”, who has long been accused of being sympathetic to the Nazis, and would later meet Hitler while visiting Germany in 1937 after he abdicated.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as true because the picture does show the Queen doing the salute.