1939 – Page 4 – Old Magazine Articles

A Military Genius?
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

This is a small segment from a longer article on this site that can be read here.
Just months prior to the start of the Second World War, this anonymous correspondent asked, Is Hitler a strategic genius? For much of the following year many of Europe’s anointed would find themselves asking much the same question; but this reporter was not impressed with the man one jot and wished his readers to keep in mind that throughout the slaughterous environment provided by the Entente Powers of the 1914 – 1918 war, Hitler was entirely unable to rise above the rank of corporal – in spite of the fact that his regiment was losing a sergeant each day.

From Amazon: Hitler’s First War.

The Growth of the German Airforce
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

Published four months before Germany’s attack on Poland (September 1, 1939), this article outlines Hermann Goering’s efforts to build the Luftwaffe from scratch, the creation of various flight schools, the Luftwaffe collaboration with the Hitler Youth organization, and his aspirations to out-class the air forces of the United States and Britain. The article also addresses the business dealings of American manufacturers Boeing and Douglas Aircraft had with the German Luftwaffe.

Click here to read about the corrupt American corporations that aided the Nazi war machine during the 1930s.

Military Buildup in Germany
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

The German Army is the greatest enterprise in the world. It has a million employees on it’s payrolls, the active officers and soldiers, and, at a conservative estimate, feeds another million workers in the munitions industry. Actually the army employs all of Germany. Military needs alone determine the way of life in the besieged fortress into which 80 million Germans have more or less willingly formed themselves.

The German economist who made the rearmament possible was named Hjalmar Schacht, click here to read about him…

A Cartoonist Slams FDR
(Click Magazine, 1939)

Rube Goldberg (1883 – 1970), one of the iconic, Grand Master ink slingers from days of yore, applied his signature thought pattern to presidential politics in the creation of the attached FDR cartoon. Unlike President Roosevelt, Goldberg recognized that the New Deal was naive in their belief they could create and fund numerous government agencies that bedevil small businesses, reduce productivity, and fix prices while expecting the whole time that the national economy would bloom as a result.

The Free Speech Dilemma
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

The antisemitic radio ramblings of Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979) prompted the brain trust of the nascent radio world to ponder deeply the differences between hate speech and free speech and where their responsibilities rested in the matter.

The Free Speech Dilemma
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

1919: United Artists is Formed
(Film Cavalcade, 1939)

A printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:

[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.

The Boeing Collaboration
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

A 1939 article that concerned the rapid growth of the German Air Force, but also referred to the scandalous business dealings of American manufacturers Boeing and Douglas Aircraft had in this expansion.

It has taken Field Marshall Hermann Wilhelm Goering a little over six years to build the German Air Armada, one of the world’s most formidable offensive forces, out of a magnificent bluff.

A similar article can be read here…

The Founders of the Hollywood Film Colony Gather Together(Film Daily, 1939)

A notice from the pages of a 1939 Hollywood trade publication announced an organization for the silver-haired alumni of Hollywood’s silent film business:

Early this summer there came into existence a new organization known as Picture Pioneers, consisting of veterans who have been in the industry 25 years.

Click here to read about the movie moguls of 1919.

The Founders of the Hollywood Film Colony Gather Together(Film Daily, 1939)

A notice from the pages of a 1939 Hollywood trade publication announced an organization for the silver-haired alumni of Hollywood’s silent film business:

Early this summer there came into existence a new organization known as Picture Pioneers, consisting of veterans who have been in the industry 25 years.

Click here to read about the movie moguls of 1919.

Director Alfred Hitchcock
(Film Daily, 1939)

Now at work on his first American motion picture [since arriving in Hollywood], the glossily rotund Hitchcock, whose gelatinous appearance and jocose manner belie his sinister intent, and who brightly eyes all comers with a sort of controlled effervescence, happily declares that his first Hollywood opus will surpass anything he has yet done to keep an audience poised on the edges of its chairs.

Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.

A Very Hitler Christmas
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

Whether it was the nog, the tannenbaum or just the good ol’ spirit of the season – no one knows – but in late of December of 1938, the nice Hitler came out for some airing:

Partly as a Yuletide truce and partly because most of them were suffering from severe frostbite, 18 ‘reformed Communists’ and 7,000 Jews were released from concentration camps.

Nazi Terror at Plotzensee Prison
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

A first-hand account as to the daily goings-on at Plötzensee Prison in Nazi Germany.

Written by Jan Valtin (alias of Richard Julius Hermann Krebs: 1905 – 1951), one of the few inmates to make his way out of that highly inclusive address and tell the tale. Valtin was a communist in the German resistance movement who later escaped to New York and published his memoir about his experiences in Nazi Germany Out of the Night (1941).

…the purpose of punishment is the infliction of suffering. In the tiny, dark cells of this Nazi prison that is the Law. It breaks some men, but it tempers others to a harder steel as the underground fight against Hitler goes on…

Jokes in Germany
(Coronet Magazine, 1939)

Many of the jokes that are at present circulating the land of Hitleria cannot be told quite openly. They are whispered among friends. The traffic is great and much whispering going on. Many people want to laugh. It seems a necessary release…

– so observed one journalist fresh from his whirlwind journey through Hitler’s Germany. He could not help but notice how painfully neurotic the Reich leadership was of being the object of Teutonic derision. This article is about the underground society of whispered jokes that the Nazis created; the journalist was good enough to write-up a few so that the free-world could take place in the chuckle-fest (some were lost in translation).

Settling Hitler’s Refugees
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

In Washington, D.C. at least 1,500 delegates from 800 American communities in 44 states swarmed into the Mayflower Hotel for the annual conference of the National Council for Palestine. As one of the nation’s most important and inclusive Jewish organizations, it was natural that the Council should devote its meetings exclusively to the refugee problem.

Negotiations
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

More articles about the Winter War can be read here… – from Amazon: KEY WORDS: stalin demanded port of hango,port

American Dominance in 1930s Film
(Stage Magazine, 1939)

The editors of STAGE MAGAZINE were dumbfounded when they considered that just ten years after audiences got an earful from the first sound movies, the most consistent characteristic to have been maintained throughout that decade was the box-office dominance of American movie stars, directors and writers. After naming the most prominent of 1930s U.S. movie stars the author declares with certainty that this could not have been an accident.