Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Remember Prince Harry’s Nazi costume? Now he says his brother made him do it

New book says William and Kate thought Harry dressing up as a Nazi was funny

When Prince Harry wore his infamous Nazi outfit to a 2005 costume party, it was at the urging of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the wayward royal is claiming.

In an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Spare obtained by the New York Post’s Page Six column, Harry describes how he asked his brother and future sister-in-law to help him pick between two costumes for a “Native and Colonial” theme party: a pilot or a Nazi uniform.

Harry said the pair “howled with laughter” when he tried on the costume in front of them.

Photos of the younger prince’s costume were leaked to the British press, leading to a public outcry. In the third episode of the recent Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan, Harry calls the costume “one of the biggest mistakes of my life.”

“I sat down and spoke to the chief rabbi in London, which had a profound effect on me. I went to Berlin and spoke to a Holocaust survivor. I could have just ignored it and made the same mistakes over again in my life. But I learned from that.”

The costume and its fallout is just one of the incidents that led to the fractured relationship between Harry and the rest of the royal family reportedly described in Spare. Leaked passages have also described an incident in which Harry and William came to physical blows in 2019 over his relationship with Markle.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.