People: Queen’s Nazi salute – at age 7 – surfaces

Buckingham Palace expressed its disappointment Saturday with a tabloid newspaper for publishing images of a young Queen Elizabeth II performing a Nazi salute with her family in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power.

The palace took the unusual step of commenting on the report in The Sun newspaper, which shows the queen – then about 7 years old – at the family home in Balmoral, with her uncle Edward, mother and sister. The grainy footage also shows Elizabeth’s mother making the salute as the family laughs.

“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 palace said.

The images, posted on the newspaper’s website under the headline “Their Royal Heilnesses,” shows the young girls prancing on the grass. A dog runs underfoot. The girls jump up and down.

The queen’s former press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, said the royals would be relaxed about the release of the film given the context in which it was shot – and given that the monarch’s parents took a fierce anti-Nazi stand during World War II. But he said they would be angry about how the newspaper obtained what is essentially a home movie.

The Sun’s managing editor, Stig Abell, said the footage was obtained legitimately. He told the BBC that the story was “not a criticism of the queen or the Queen Mum.”

President, daughters take in ‘Hamilton’

The current American president took a trip back in time Saturday to visit some of the country’s early leaders in the hip-hop musical “Hamilton” on Broadway, leaving the young cast jazzed and beaming.

Barack Obama and his daughters caught a Saturday matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s celebrated show about the first four presidents, the Founding Fathers and especially the nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

Renie Elise Goldsberry, who plays Angelica Schuyler, told herself to try to slow down. “My breath at the start of the show was in my neck,” she said, laughing. “Fortunately, there was a lot of prayer happening before.”

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama loved the play and pronounced it “fabulous.” Added Schultz: “He said it lived up to the hype.”

The musical focuses on the orphan, immigrant roots of “the $10 Founding Father without a father,” his vices and ambition, and his almost Greek tragedy of a death at the hands of Aaron Burr.

The birthday bunch

Rock singer-musician Alan Gorrie (Average White Band) is 69. Actor Campbell Scott is 54.