London, July 18: Subhas Bose was never photographed giving a Nazi salute but the British used a picture of him meeting Hitler to disparage him as not quite a pukka chap - in contrast to Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru who stood out against fascism from the start.

All this becomes relevant today because The Sun newspaper has reminded the British people of their own royal family's intimate links with the Nazis.

The paper has run a front-page story with an 82-year-old photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and her late mother giving a Nazi salute. Also in the photograph is the then Prince of Wales, Edward, the future King Edward VIII.

The photograph is taken from a family film shot in 1933. The Queen was then aged six or seven, her younger sister Margaret two or three, and their mother was the Duchess of York. The Sun has also released 17 seconds of footage.

No one for a moment thinks the Queen knew what she was doing as a girl of seven. Her mother, too, was probably "larking around".

She probably did not realise that within three years her husband, a shy man who could not speak without stammering - all laid bare in the Oscar-winning film The King's Speech - would replace his disreputable brother on the throne.

As for Bose, historians now accept that he had no great sympathy for the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy but thought, possibly naively, that he could use Hitler to push the British out of India on the basis that "the enemy's enemy is one's friend".

Hitler, too, initially calculated that Bose might be a useful tool to use against the British but in the end the Hitler-Bose meeting or meetings in 1941-42 came to nothing.

In the context of the 1933 footage, the villain of the piece is Prince Edward, who succeeded his father, King George V, on January 20, 1936.

He abdicated on December 11 the same year when the cabinet would not accept his ultimatum that he had to marry a twice-divorced American woman, Wallis Simpson, if he were to remain monarch. After his abdication he did marry Simpson, and the couple, who had to leave the UK, were styled the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Today's Sun story reopens an old wound because Edward was known to be sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis. The leaked footage found by The Sun is the only pictorial evidence of Edward doing the Nazi gesture, but he is known to have performed it at other times.

In January 1933, the year the footage was filmed, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and by August 1934, he had declared himself Fuehrer.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor spent their honeymoon in Austria before the war and visited Germany in October 1937 as Hitler's honoured guest - with the Fuehrer hoping he would become Edward the "puppet king". The Nazis even had a code name for the plot - Operation Will.

The Sun's story, gleefully run over pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 and picked up by other national newspapers, is a reminder that in the 1930s, part of British royalty and the upper classes wanted to appease Hitler as a way of avoiding war.

Winston Churchill opposed Indian independence and insulted Gandhi but, to his credit, saw the dangers in the rise of Hitler and consequently did not want Edward VIII to remain king, spotting him as a Nazi fellow traveller.

Pro-Nazi comments by Edward were "tantamount to treason", historian John Costello said. The Duke even told a reporter during the war: "It would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown. Hitler is the right and logical leader of the German people. Hitler is a very great man."

These are some of the reasons why the Sun's revelation is so embarrassing.

A Palace spokesman today said: "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."

A Palace source added: "Most people will see these pictures in their proper context and time. This is a family playing and momentarily referencing a gesture many would have seen from contemporary newsreels.

"No one at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything else is misleading and dishonest. The Queen is around six years of age at the time and entirely innocent of attaching any meaning to these gestures.

"The Queen and her family's service and dedication to the welfare of this nation during the war, and the 63 years the Queen has spent building relations between nations and peoples, speaks for itself."

Germany remains a sensitive issue for the royal family, whose roots lie in Germany. The Queen paid a state visit to Germany only last month.

In 2005, Prince Harry, then a foolish youth of 20, turned up at a friend's birthday party dressed as a Nazi. Again, The Sun splashed the story.

Dickie Arbiter, a royal commentator and the Queen's former press secretary, said there would be great interest in royal circles in finding out how the footage was made public.

"I would like to think it was released inadvertently as a bit of harmless 1933 footage without anybody really knowing what was on it. I think what they (Buckingham Palace) would probably like to know is where it came from and who gave it to The Sun."