``England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity''. Anyone who heard that in childhood as a wise saying, not to be questioned, was being told their elders believed the Nazis were not all bad.
For some years, or perhaps forever for a few who went quiet after the cinema newsreels showed those pitiful heaps of bodies. Well, couldn't it have been anti-German propaganda, hadn't England lied to Ireland for centuries?
What did they know and when did they know it? Not the British Royal Family: our parents, our grandparents, the readership of this paper, the generation of northern Catholics bereft by partition who watched a war start that the Free State wanted no part of.
That film of a family giggling in the summer of 1933 as they practise the salute soon to launch German gatherings as `The Hitler Greeting', only reinforces what was already known. Uncle Edward and the woman for whom he would give up the throne were Hitler fans.
For decades now, there has been no doubting the existence of Nazi sympathy among the pre-war British upper classes: the product of anti-semitism, anti-communism, fear of working-class anger roused by Thirties poverty, fellow-feeling for aristocratic English-speaking Germans. Pre-war thinking here included an extra element, with a post-war hangover.
It wasn't only Germans who told their children they knew nothing about the concentration camps. Anyone old enough to have parents who were adults in 1939 will have asked them what they thought then, what they knew and when they knew it. Yes? The Jews of Germany didn't figure much in the most honest memories some of us extracted. It probably took most of us time, and the passage of time, and a degree of growing-up, to think back and decode a share of responses.
Answers that included the words `censorship', `English propaganda' and `Lord Haw-Haw' were giveaways. But as Brian Hanley, the author of a book on the turbulent IRA of the period has noted, like others, ``the jailing and murder of opponents by the Nazis in 1933/34 was widely reported in Ireland...''
Weeks after Hitler became chancellor, on April 1 1933, the boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses began, windows and walls daubed with the Star of David and `Don't buy from Jews'. On April 7 the Nazi-dominated Reichstag passed the first (of the hundreds of anti-Semitic laws) banning `non-Aryans' from all state jobs.
In 1934 Jews were banned from sitting university exams. It took until 1935 to strip Jews of citizenship, the right to vote, to define racial identity in law and ban relationships between Jews and Aryan, non-Jewish Germans. Leaflets and posters were printed to `educate' the public on identity classifications, and the prohibitions that went with them.
If you had three or four Jewish grandparents you were a `full-blooded' Jew. You needed four non-Jewish grandparents to be a `full-blooded' German. If you fell outside both those categories you were one of the Mischlinge (`mongrels').
We know all this stuff now, don't we, well past the level of nausea, though maybe not the detail that the first Nuremburg law was entitled ``The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour.''
The innocent seven year old in that 17-second home movie clip from 1933, or 1934, grew up to be Queen Elizabeth. So of course it was right to publish the pictures of frolicsome Nazi saluting on a Balmoral lawn. The Sun is a nasty paper, but this was journalistic duty as well as sensation. Buckingham Palace `disappointment' that eight decades' old footage should have been `obtained and exploited' is guff. The man behind the camera is thought to have been the Queen's father, the future king. The film merely underlined the known Nazi sympathy of the princesses's uncle and the long-suspected sympathy of their mother, the future Queen Mother.
It revealed nothing about the saluting child and her sister – their Heilnesses, as the Sun couldn't resist calling them – except how children are putty in adult hands.
For us the shots have a further dimension. Small children imitating adults regularly figure in our most divisive public happenings: youngsters kitted out in mini-uniform, imitation rifles, flags, sashes. Babies in bibs saying `Born to be Orange' are one end of the range. More pathetic are children beside coffins, staring as masked men fire shots.
Children make great images. It takes time for most to see how they are used, to spot the guff that grown-ups spout.
