Prince Harry urged to repent publicly

LONDON -- With the image of a smiling Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform and swastika armband at a costume party plastered across front pages of newspapers worldwide, pressure mounted here yesterday for the ginger-haired son of the late Princess Diana to personally and publicly apologize.

Meanwhile in France, a new controversy erupted over the published comments of the far-right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen in which he downplayed the German occupation of France and described the Nazis as "not especially inhumane."

The two episodes, which many see as outright anti-Semitism, come two weeks before ceremonies commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where an estimated 1 million of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were exterminated.

The controversy began in Britain on Thursday, when 20-year-old Prince Harry, who is third in line to the British throne, appeared on the cover of the British tabloid The Sun dressed as a Nazi soldier with a drink and cigarette in hand.

The photograph was taken at a "colonial and native dress party" at a country estate last weekend.

Harry issued a short statement Thursday through the royal press office, saying, "I am very sorry if I caused any offense or embarrassment to anyone. It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize."

But yesterday, politicians and Jewish leaders were clamoring for the prince to personally -- and publicly -- apologize.

In some corners, the incident has rekindled bitter memories of an earlier generation of the House of Windsor, as the British royal family is known. Prince Harry's great uncle, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated the throne to marry an American divorcee, visited Germany and was photographed with Adolf Hitler, expressing admiration for the rise of the Third Reich.

Before giving up the throne to his brother, his political sympathies were, according to the British historian David Cannadine "certainly pro-German, and perhaps pro-Nazi."

Most historians, however, see the former king's actions as an anomaly that was out of step with the rest of the Windsors, most prominently his brother, King George VI and his family, who vehemently opposed Hitler and remained in London during the Blitz in a show of defiance to the German threat.

These historians point out that it was not uncommon for world leaders to visit Hitler before the war.

British Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, whose grandmother died at Auschwitz, told the BBC on Thursday, "It might be appropriate [for Harry] to tell us himself just how contrite he is."

On Wednesday, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, urged Harry to join a British delegation visiting Auschwitz later this month, adding, "There he will see the results of the hated symbol he so foolishly and brazenly chose to wear."

Harry's aunt, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, defended him in an interview with the BBC yesterday, calling him a "fine young man" and telling the press to "back off."

The remarks by Le Pen, the 76-year-old founder of the far right French National Front party, may be a violation of the law, since in France denying the Holocaust is a punishable offense tantamount to a hate crime.

Yesterday, French Justice Minister Dominique Perben said there will be a criminal investigation into Le Pen's comments, which were printed in the far-right weekly publication Rivarol last Thursday and carried in yesterday's editions of the Paris newspaper Le Monde.

Le Monde quoted Le Pen as saying, "In France, at least, the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses, inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometers."

"If the Germans had carried out mass executions in all corners as the conventional wisdom has it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees," Le Pen was quoted as saying.

"It's not just from the European Union and globalization from which we need to deliver our country, but also from the lies about its history," Le Pen added.

In 1987, Le Pen described the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history."