The Crown creator Peter Morgan closes out his sumptuous six-season ode to Queen Elizabeth with a poignant storyline about the nearly 80-year-old monarch planning her funeral and a long-awaited wedding celebration for Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles—neither of which comes as a surprise. But the Prince Harry Nazi-costume storyline is less expected, even though the events line up chronologically; Harry wore the costume to a party in January of 2005, just weeks ahead of Prince Charles’s announcement of his engagement to Parker Bowles.

In the episode, we see Harry (Luther Ford), William (Ed McVey), and Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy) scan the costume shop for outfits befitting the “natives and colonials” theme of the party they’re about to attend. William and Kate, in the throes of early freshman-year romance, settle on a couple’s costume—a lion and a lion tamer—while Harry chooses a Nazi uniform. Kate is the most unsure of the choice, telling Harry, “Maybe cover the swastika.” But William defends the decision: “Oh come on. Just because he’s wearing the outfit doesn’t make him a Nazi. It’s another joke.”

Once at costume party, The Crown’s Harry removes his jacket to reveal the armband, and a fellow partygoer snaps the picture that caused a national uproar: Harry talking to another partygoer, cigarette and drink in hand, Nazi armband clearly visible.

In real life, the photo surfaced about two weeks before the royal family was due to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. On the show, Charles is furious about the headlines—enough to knock china off his table. William seems deeply annoyed with this latest PR headache. But another character, Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce)—who in real life had his own Nazi-related gaffe— seemingly makes light of the incident. “Harry was foolish to go to that party dressed in that costume. But he’s bloody unlucky that a fellow guest should go to the newspapers like that,” Philip tells her, before revealing he called the costume shop and gave its staff a piece of his mind. Not for renting Harry the costume, but for the outfit’s historical inaccuracy: “The German Africa Korps never wore swastikas,” Philip scoffs.

In The Palace Papers, former VF editor in chief Tina Brown wrote of the scandal’s immediate aftermath:

An incensed Charles, who was a nervous wreck before the ‘Big Announcement,’ demanded Harry make proper apologies to Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Prince Charles also blasted William, who’d reportedly dressed in a skin-tight black leotard with leopard-skin paws and a tail, for allowing his younger brother to make such a witless choice. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee launched an inquiry into the standards and responsibilities of Clarence House advisors.

Following the real incident, Harry apologized in a statement, saying, “I am very sorry if I caused any offense or embarrassment to anyone. It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize.”

The real Harry has spoken about the incident somewhat recently on several occasions. In Netflix’s Harry & Meghan docuseries, the prince said, “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I felt so ashamed afterwards… All I wanted to do was make it right.”

But in his bombshell memoir Spare, Harry offers more detail—describing how he had been searching for a last minute costume to fit the “cringey theme” picked by one of “Willy’s friends.” He also claims William and Kate encouraged the costume.

On the day of the party it was decided that I’d go to a nearby village, Nailsworth, where where was a well-known costume shop. [...] I went up and down the rows, sifting through the racks, seeing nothing I liked. With time running out I narrowed my options to two. A British pilot’s uniform. And a sand-colored Nazi uniform. With a swastika armband. And a flat cap. 

I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said. I rented it, plus a silly mustache, and went back to the house. I tried it all on. They both howled. [...] Off we went to the party, where no one looked twice at my costume. All the natives and colonials were more focused on getting drunk and groping each other. No one took any notice of me, which I put down as a small win. Someone, however, snapped photos. Days later this someone saw a chance to make some cash, or some trouble, and sought out a reporter. [...] A sum of five thousand pounds was agreed upon and weeks later the photo appeared in every paper in the known world, beneath titanic headlines. Heil Harry! Heir Aberrant. Royal Heil to Pay. What followed was a firestorm, which I thought at times would  engulf me. And I felt that I deserved to be engulfed. There were moments over the course of the next several weeks and months when I thought I might die of shame.

The typical response to the photos was: What could he have been thinking? The simple answer was: I wasn’t.

In 2020’s Battle of Brothers, royal historian Robert Lacey suggested that the Nazi-costume incident created the first crack in William and Harry’s relationship. “Harry chose his costume in conjunction with his elder brother—the future King William V, then 22, who had laughed all the way back to [Charles’s] Highgrove with the younger sibling he was supposed to be mentoring—and then onwards to the party together,” wrote Lacey. “The young prince began re-evaluating his elder brother’s involvement and the unfairness of William’s subsequent emergence smelling of roses.”

Though the series does not get into William and Harry’s more recent falling out—The Crown concludes in the year 2005—the queen acknowledges the potential for future sibling tension. “Be kind to” Harry, she tells the prince. “In many ways it’s harder being number two than number one. The system protects number one. Number two tends to need extra care and attention.”

From the Archive: Wild About Harry!

Previous episodes in The Crown’s sixth season touch on the central theme of Harry’s memoir Spare—the double standard with which Buckingham Palace operated in terms of protecting the Wales siblings from the press. In the final episodes, William begins university at St. Andrews after the palace has struck up a deal to help give the future heir privacy in his days as a student. Meanwhile, Harry’s use of marijuana as a teenager becomes front-page news.

During a previous conversation with Annie Sulzberger, The Crown’s head of research, she told VF why the period drama did not rely more on Harry’s memoir. As a researcher, Sulzberger says she takes autobiographies and memoirs with a grain of salt: “They provide you with [the author’s] personal perspective and intimate detail, but you have to also understand that it is a single-perspective work.” With Spare, Sulzberger points out “that it was written by a 38-year-old man [partially] about his years as a child. So those memories—especially of the bits we were interested in—may not be as pure as they would’ve been if he had been asked to write down in the moment a diary entry of what happened that day.”

“To me, that book is really an emotional history book,” says Sulzberger. “It’s a very personal perspective where you can’t separate out the events from the emotion that came with them. So even if it had come out earlier, I still would’ve been hesitant to say, ‘This is our Bible.’”