A man at a cafe in Berlin reads the German tabloid Bild with the headline 'Nazi Harry - What would Diana have said about that?' Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty
You'd expect to find some angry reaction to the Harry Nazi saga in the German media, and most of it is to be found in Bild, the country's biggest selling tabloid. The Wagner column, in a scathing attack says Harry has the mental age of a 12-year-old and adds "you make me throw up". Wagner concedes Harry is a "traumatised child" but adds nastily "if my mother were Diana, I'd be yelling like a madman too". On a slightly more conciliatory note the column concludes: "Prince Harry is a difficult child. But we must reach out to him. If we didn't do that, we'd be Nazis."
A second article ponders whether Harry is so blinded by love that he is deliberately courting scandal with a view to surrendering his royal duties in order to spend more time with his new girlfriend Chelsy.
Elsewhere in Germany the Harry saga has fallen off the front pages today after featuring prominently on several newspaper website homepages yesterday. (In Britain, by contrast, the BBC has led its news website all day with the Duchess of York's trenchant comments on her nephew.)
However, back to Germany. The more sober Die Welt allows itself a bit of pedantry, quibbling that Rommel's Desert Foxes never wore such conspicuous swastikas. It moves on to say: "This is a scandal, not a lapse by an insensitive prince who is not exactly known to be one of the intellectual giants of his generation." Speculating that perhaps Harry is one of the 50% of Britons who apparently haven't heard of Auschwitz, the paper wonders how it is that despite this ignorance, "everything to do with the Nazis is trotted out at every opportunity like an outfit from a West End costumier, either for shock or for fun".
This is an enduring theme for Germans. They simply don't understand why Britain is still so obsessed with the war. They don't get Fawlty Towers, they don't support 'anyone but England' in international football (for them it's anyone but Holland), and they don't understand why innocent Germans in Britain are still routinely derided as Nazis. A German friend of mine who - brave woman - works as a supply teacher in inner London was greeted in one class of teenagers with a barrage of questions on the lines of "Are you a Nazi? Is Adolf Hitler your uncle?"
For a moving explanation of what it's like to be on the receiving end of this prejudice, and why it's so stupid, read this piece by William Cook.
The British education system must bear some responsibility for our ignorance. as must the British media, for all their sanctimonious horror this week at Harry's latest tasteless gaffe. The Sun itself is a prime offender, as is the Express, where anti-German bigotry clearly goes right to the top. The day before the Harry scandal broke, Carol Sarler was opining in the paper that "while it would be obviously absurd to suggest that all Germans nurture Nazism in their hearts, it is equally absurd to suggest that none of them does. Each of us learns at home, each of us is influenced by what we hear at the family table and thus are hatreds inherited, with time doing little or nothing to appease them ... Why on Earth, then, when it comes to raising his children, should a German 's hatred of Jews, or gypsies, or homosexuals, be an exception?"
Or as Germany's foreign minister Joschka Fischer put it last year, "If you want to learn how the traditional Prussian goose-step works, you have to watch British TV, because in Germany, in the younger generation - even in my generation - nobody knows how to perform it."
I'll leave the last word to Jonathan Steele, writing in the Guardian just before the 60th anniversary of D-Day. "Germany has moved on. But have we?"
