Prince Harry Blames Nazi Uniform Scandal on Laughing Prince William, Kate

Prince Harry says Prince William and Kate Middleton urged him to hire a Nazi uniform and "howled" with laughter when he tried it on, in new memoir Spare.

The Sun published a front page picture of Harry in the uniform in a saga he recently told Netflix "was one of the biggest mistakes of my life."

However, the prince's upcoming autobiography says he phoned William and Kate to ask which of two costumes he should hire for a "colonials and natives" fancy dress party in 2005.

A segment of the memoir published by Page Six reads: "I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said."

When he took it home and tried it on for them, he writes: "They both howled. Worse than Willy's leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point."

Harry recently told his Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan: "I felt so ashamed afterwards. All I wanted to do was make it right."

The revelation is just one from what is set to be an explosive memoir and also included an account of Prince William physically attacking him.

Prince Harry was publicly ridiculed after the story broke and one Labour MP suggested he was a "neo-Nazi," but William and Kate were not at the time blamed for the incident.

He met with the Chief Rabbi in London and a Holocaust survivor in Berlin in order to make things right.

Harry told Netflix: "In this family, sometimes you're part of the problem rather than part of the solution and there is a huge level of unconscious bias.

"The thing with unconscious bias is it's actually no one's fault but once it's been pointed out or identified within yourself, you then need to make it right."

He added: "I could have just ignored it and got on and probably made the same mistakes over and over again in my life. But I learnt from that."

The memoir's title, Spare, is drawn from the relationship between the first born in each royal generation, the heir who is destined to be monarch, and the second born who is a "spare," and only needed should something happen to the first.

Newsweek had anticipated that Harry might return to the Nazi uniform incident in order to outline his brother's role after historian Robert Lacey suggested there was an heir and spare dynamic at play in his book Battle of Brothers.

Lacey wrote: "The young prince began re-evaluating his elder brother's involvement and the unfairness of William's subsequent emergence smelling of roses."

He added: "Was Harry really a neo-Nazi, as one Labour MP alleged? Obviously not, since he would fall in love with and marry a woman of mixed-race origin, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone really believed it at the time. The boy was naughty, not Nazi—naughty, but reasonably nice."

In November 2022, he told Newsweek: "I am quite sure that he will honestly tackle the difficult aspects of his own life. I feel it's in his character to fill in the gaps. In a way, I feel sympathy for him.

"The book has been presented in the British media as an act of revenge on his family and it may partly be that, but I think it does the book and him a disservice. Certainly if he doesn't tackle these things I think it would discredit his project enormously."

Another leaked section of the memoir was published by The Guardian and described how Prince William manhandled Harry during an argument about Meghan in 2019.

William had described Meghan as "difficult," "rude" and "abrasive" while Harry accused his brother of "parrot[ing] the press narrative."

Harry wrote: "He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor.

"I landed on the dog's bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out."

William, Harry wrote, then said: "You don't need to tell Meg about this."