In January 2005, Prince Harry, Queen Elizabeth II's second grandson and third in line to the British throne, made headlines as he was photographed attending a friend's birthday party with the theme ‘Colonials and Natives’ dressed in the shirt of the German Afrika Corps, complete with swastika armband. If his judgment was spectacularly bad, his timing was even worse: two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. ‘Harry the Nazi’ screamed the headline of the Sun the following day, the British Jewish community was stunned, and Clarence House swiftly issued a statement that the Prince apologised for any offence and embarrassment caused by his poor choice of costume. What was perhaps most offensive to the British public in this minor royal incident was that this privileged and expensively educated twenty year old, on course for officer training at the elite military academy Sandhurst, showed so little respect for the national values he was expected to embody privately and publicly. The comments this photograph provoked raise a number of important issues about fascist semiotics, national character and the transnational uses of history. On the BBC news website, former armed forces minister Doug Henderson said the incident demonstrated that the prince was ‘unfit to train as a British Army officer at Sandhurst’. Arthur Edwards, royal photographer for the Sun, commented that veterans would be sickened to see ‘the prince behaving like a drunken member of the Hitler Youth’.