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When It Comes to Sieg Heiling, Lord is Not Alone

A short guide to everyone’s favorite Nazi-themed blunder

by
Liel Leibovitz
August 11, 2017
Via CNN
Via CNN
Via CNN
Via CNN

Yesterday, CNN severed its ties with conservative commentator and Trump enthusiast Jeffrey Lord after the white-maned talking head responded to a critic on Twitter with a Sieg Heil. Now that the schadenfreude has subsided a bit, it’s a good time to look back at other famous people dragged down by the Nazi salute:

Queen Elizabeth

England’s The Sun caused a furor, no pun intended, in 2015 when it released a 17-second-long private family film, shot in 1933, showing the future Queen, then six years old, doing the Hitler salute with her younger sister, Princess Margaret, and her soon-to-be-king uncle, Edward VIII. The Queen, of course, was a child at the time, and had no understanding of what the gesture meant. But that didn’t stop the newspaper from dubbing the aging monarch “Her Royal Heilness.”

Tila Tequila

The reality TV star was booted from England’s Celebrity Big Brother after taking to Twitter on Hitler’s birthday, posting a picture of the tyrant wearing a cape, and swearing her love and allegiance. A while later, she was kicked off Twitter, too, after posting a photo at a white supremacist event, doing the Sieg Heil with a few fawning fans.

Richard Desmond

What do you do when a German conglomerate makes a bid for a competitor? If you’re Desmond, the publisher of such British papers as the Daily Express, you goosestep around the newsroom and salute Hitler. According to witnesses at the event, Desmond also told those present to sing “Deutschland Uber Alles” and claimed repeatedly that all Germans, then as now, were Nazis.

Dogs

Is it ever OK to teach your pup to salute Hitler? It’s one thing if the dog is a German Shepherd named Adolf, and its owner a proud neo-Nazi creep who parades around with swastikas. But what if the pooch is a cute little pug, and its owner a tattooed hipster making a joke? No matter: both men—although not, thankfully, their dogs—were arrested for hate crimes.

Take heart, Mr. Lord. You’re not alone.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.