The journalist who penned the attached article was in the dark as to the reasons why Reichsmarshal Herman Goring appeared in Rome during the opening weeks of January, 1937, but he wisely presumed that it had something to do with the Spanish Civil War – and he was right.
Here is one of the earliest reports from Hitler’s Germany on the the Nazi hierarchy butting-heads with the Christian churches. As the fascists forced the Catholic and Protestant clergies to coerce, the churches reminded the new government of the autonomy they have always enjoyed (more or less).
The June 1st issue of YANK MAGAZINE did a fine job of capturing the excitement that was felt in civilized quarters as the allied armies poured into Germany from all sides. As the news of Hitler’s suicide spread throughout Europe, a YANK reporter took a sampling of G.I. opinion on the subject. One G.I. in Italy opined:
Now they say Hitler is dead. Maybe he is. If he is, I don’t believe he died heroically. Mussolini died at least something like a dictator, but somehow I can’t figure Hitler dying in action…
Read an article about some bored newspaper editors who were curious to know what the headlines would look like if Hitler had been killed in 1941.
Was Adolf Hitler a follower of Jesus Christ or was he a man who saw no intelligence in the universe whatever? Today, for reasons that are quite understandable, neither the atheists or the Christians are eager to count the madman in their ranks. Hoping to diffuse this never-ending argument (that has found a home on the internet) OldMagazineArticles.com offers this page of research from a U.S. Army study on Hitler’s military that indicates Hitler’s sympathy for atheists.
Someone asks why Hitler doesn’t take a wife, as that sort of subject would be bound to come up. The German girl is incredibly shocked:
I shudder to think of any woman thinking of herself as a physical being worthy of being with the Fuhrer. It is sacrilegious to mention it!.
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.
The amiable Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. penned the attached article and it was written at a time in his life when the man simply had to know what movie was the preferred darling above all others for the hideous Adolf Hitler – so after some hard-charging investigative journalism, he discovered that Hitler would scurry-away with Herman Goering in order to yuck it up in the dark while watching his fave non-Aryan comedy team. Who do you think it was?
Hitler might have liked American movies, but there was one thing American he didn’t like: German-Americans drove him crazy.
Click here to learn about Stalin’s favorite movie.
Assorted observations from the man who operated Hitler’s elevator at Berchtesgaden can be found herein.
What you won’t find herein is a piece of Hitler trivia that I just picked-up. The story goes that the American comedian Bob Hope was given a tour of Hitler’s bunker shortly after the German surrender. Accompanied by a U.S. colonel, the two men brought lots of American cigarette cartons with them to bribe the Russian guards (the bunker was in the Soviet sector); Hope walked away with the enormous banner that was draped in the dictator’s lounge, as well as the handle off of Hitler’s toilet. The toilet handle has remained among the comedian’s possessions in Toluca Lake, California ever since.
Read about the earliest post-war sightings of Hitler: 1945-1955
YANK reporter Harry Sions listened in as sixteen Nazi officials, having known and worked with Hitler in various capacities through the years, sat back and recalled the events of Hitler’s last 365 days in power. Much was said regarding the failed assassination attempt (project Valkyrie) but some of the more interesting content refers to the closing days in the bunker with Bormann, Keitel and Jodl.
It was reported that shortly after he took up residence in the bunker, Hitler’s hair and mustache was transformed to a bright white, yet he was not the only man in Europe in need of hair dye; click here about these other fellows.
It must have been a slow news week when the CLICK MAGAZINE crew approached three of the busiest editors in the the U.S. and Britain asking them how they would break the news if Hitler were to be killed tomorrow?
Every editor we queried agreed that when it happens, the death of Adolf Hitler will sell more papers than any other news event of the Twentieth century…All agreed that Hitler’s death would not end the war; two out of three guessed he would die violently.
The leftest publisher Ralph Ingersoll knew right away that Hitler would die by his own hand.
The article is illustrated with facsimile printings of the headlines and how each paper believed the dictator would die – it was an academic exercise, but a fun read, nonetheless.
A report on what Hitler’s Bavarian retreat, Berchtesgaden, looked like after the 101st Airborne got through redecorating the place. This is an amusing article written by Yank reporter Harry Sions, who seemed to really want to know what Hitler’s taste in furnishings, books and movies truly was like. However the most entertaining parts of the article were the interviews with Hitler’s dimwitted domestic staff:
Is it true, we asked her, that the Fuhrer chewed on rugs when he became excited?
‘Only you Americans believe such nonsense,’ she replied.
Shortly after Adolf Hitler took charge in Germany, a law was passed that forbid the hiring of foreign artists, composers, writers and performers. As the attached article clarifies, there were exceptions, but all concerned recognized that it was a new day in Germany but not necessarily a better one. Writing for the New York-based magazine, MODERN MUSIC, German arts critic Hans Heinsheimer (1900 – 1993) wrote:
The aim of the National Socialist is to push us back into the Middle Ages. Their politico-culture demands are radical… They set us up as the German Superman against the ‘inferior foreigners.’
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…
Guns instead of butter! was the slogan General Hermann Goering, Commissar, sounded for the Four Year Plan destined to control production and slash imports as an aid to the Reich’s fantastic rearmament program.
For the great mass of Germans, however, the most serious food shortage since the war cast a pall over Christmas. Housewives got orders to specify their favorite dairy store, and to patronize it exclusively. By prohibiting any shopping around, officials found it possible to limit the distribution of butter and other fats. A census of of the size of families has already been taken, and, beginning January 1, every housewife must limit fat purchases to at least 80 per cent of her October buying.
Guns instead of butter! was the slogan General Hermann Goering, Commissar, sounded for the Four Year Plan destined to control production and slash imports as an aid to the Reich’s fantastic rearmament program.
For the great mass of Germans, however, the most serious food shortage since the war cast a pall over Christmas. Housewives got orders to specify their favorite dairy store, and to patronize it exclusively. By prohibiting any shopping around, officials found it possible to limit the distribution of butter and other fats. A census of of the size of families has already been taken, and, beginning January 1, every housewife must limit fat purchases to at least 80 per cent of her October buying.
Shortly after that infamous day when Hitler was sworn into power in the offices of Paul Von Hindenburg, this article hit the newsstands in North America about the new mood that was creeping across Germany:
At no time since the war – not even during the occupation of the Ruhr – it is said, has there been so much militarist and nationalist propaganda in Germany as there is now.
Anti-militarist newspapers, it appears, are afraid, in Berlin at least, to raise their voice in protest because of the continual and ruinous suspensions by the authorities…
During the summer of 1938 the Nazis allowed one of their photo journalists out of the Fatherland to wander the American roads; This is what he saw…
Here is an article about Austria’s Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg (1897 – 1977) and how the merger of Austria and Nazi Germany came about in 1838:
Behind the scenes that hard day at Berchtesgaden, revealing what Hitler said to Kurt Schuschnigg and what the Austrian public never knew about the German plot to stage in Vienna a counterpart of the Reichstag fire, as a pretext for invasion. Schuschnigg spoiled that pretext, only to furnish another one himself. Uncovering the plot in the hope of averting invasion he merely brought it on.
Attached is a profile of Hitler’s director of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and their political differences that led to his resignation.
Hitler was hard hit when Gregor Strasser
(1892 – 1934), one of his ablest and oldest supporters, broke away from him. It happened in one of the fights between rival factions in the Hitlerite movement which followed losses sustained in the November Reichstag elections.
Profound gratitude is due Strasser from Hitler because when Hitler was released from jail, there was at least a nucleus of his party left, so that its reconstruction did not have to begin in a void. Gratitude was expressed on Hitler’s part for he made Strasser chief of his propaganda work.
He was murdered in his prison cell during the Night of Long Knives (June 30, 1934).
Read about the German POWs who were schooled in virtues of democracy.
