Holocaust denial

While Europe prosecutes Holocaust deniers, America ridicules them. In the example below, a news organization is taken to task for saying Hitler persecuted six million Jews. From NewsBusters:

Actually Hitler's totalitarian leadership as Fuhrer resulted in the murder of an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust. But why get technical about accurate terminology, eh? Unbelievable.

Hitler of 'Downfall' spoofed

This bit of brilliance is from Chris Bowley in the UK. Hitler is angry about losing his gaming account with Microsoft. Very angry. Bowley is affiliated with dampowls.net. He links to other entertaining videos at his YouTube account.

News

The name "Hitler" is being used by both sides of an anti-smoking campaign in Germany. US Politics Today:

What is interesting is that Germany's ban on smoking- unlike the spurious arguments for turning the country's highways into racetracks- does actually have a connection to Germany's fascist past, and the smokers and tobacco industry have spared no costs to let this be widely known to all Germans whether they smoke or not. Since the medical evidence has abandoned the smokers' cause- as well as the rest of Europe- German smokers have turned to the great bogeyman of history: Hitler wouldn't let you smoke, either.

Adolf Hitler was a famous vegetarian, minimal drinker of alcohol and a rabid non-smoker. Accordingly, Nazi Germany pursued a cleaner and purer German race. In 1938, the Public Health Service stated that "the nervous disorders of every sort which are being reported in increasing numbers from nearly every part of Germany are for the larger part due to excessive indulgence in tobacco and alcohol." Smoking was prohibited in most of the party's organizations, and especially women were singled out as the Reich's potential carriers of baby Germans that smoking was not a female fashion statement.

Once the war broke out in 1939, the army moved forward to forbid its soldiers from smoking in public places. By 1943, teachers were recruited to kick the habit and set a good example for the young people before they headed off to the eastern front. The restrictions on smoking increased in severity in direct proportion to Germany's failed military campaigns; by 1944, smoking was no longer allowed on any public transportation, in work places or at any government building.

Same story, at the BBC:

German restaurants and pubs have strongly resisted the bans, not only because of the potential loss of income but partly because of an earlier crackdown on smoking initiated by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.

The sensitivity of the issue has prompted the authorities to allow special rooms to be set up purely for smokers.

New color photos of Hitler have been released by the French government. Telegraph:

The Nazi leader believed that traditional black and white photographs best highlighted the sinister nature of his regime, presenting dramatic images which were both powerful and menacing.

Now, however, an altogether more colourful view of the Fuhrer has emerged.

More than 62 years after his death in a Berlin bunker, images from a newly opened Paris archive show him relaxing with children in the Eagle’s Nest, his mountain top chalet in the Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.

A survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele decides to forgive him. Sydney Morning Herald:

(Eva Kor) speaks from an unenviable experience that gives her credence in such matters. When Eva was a kid of 10, her family was sent to Auschwitz by Hitler's loons. Mum and dad were "processed" while Eva and her twin sister came to the attention of the demented Dr Josef Mengele, whose quest for medical knowledge overrode every ethical consideration and fundamental respect for life.

Like sadistic gunfighters, Mengele and his minions blazed away with syringes, injecting Eva and Miriam with all manner of toxic compounds just to see what would happen. The sisters survived, but in 1993, when Miriam died, Eva felt compelled to retrace the lines of fate and found herself in contact with Dr Hans Munch, an SS doctor who has done what he could to help the Jewish guinea pigs and who, in the postwar years had sunk into deep depression and guilt. She decided to forgive him and, consequently, Mengele himself. Other survivors and the families of many who perished questioned her right to morally pardon the unpardonable.

The folks at OpEd News compare Bush's administration to Hitler's in a critique of the Iraq War, while TheTrumpet compares America's apparent lack of interest in the Iranian threat to Chamberlain's treatment of Hitler.

The CBS is reporting on an interesting art exhibition to be held in Jerusalem:

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem plans an exhibit in February of more than 50 drawings and paintings stolen from France by the Germans during the Second World War and never reclaimed.

The exhibit, being organized with the French Ministry of Culture, is part of an effort to trace the owners of the works.

French museums, including the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay, currently hold about 2,000 pieces of Nazi-looted art that were never reclaimed.

Hitler as Time magazine Man of the Year 1938

Time's naming of Vladimir Putin Person of the Year for 2007 (announced yesterday) has sparked dozens of news stories about others who received the same treatment. Hitler is squarely at the top of the lists. U.S. News & World Report:

To be sure, Time did not always name those admired by its founder, Henry Luce, a liberal Republican and interventionist in the run-up to World War II. For 1942, it named Joseph Stalin for the Soviets' successful resistance to the Nazi invasion that began in 1941, but it had also, justifiably, named Stalin as the man of the year in 1939, because the Hitler-Stalin pact agreed to in August 1939 enabled Adolf Hitler to invade Poland without serious opposition. Indeed, Time also named Hitler man of the year for 1938, when he got Britain and France to appease him by destroying the power of Czechoslovakia to resist conquest.

Hitler's appearances on the cover of Time

Hitler was named Time's Man of the Year for 1938:

Caption: MAN OF 1938, From the Unholy Organist, a Hymn of Hate

The Man of the Year story begins:

Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler.

The Dec. 21, 1931 cover:

I believe Time obtained their image from a Nazi film -- the same from which the following three images originate. These kinds of publications, especially during and shortly after WWII, gave rise to the popular notion that Adolf Hitler was insane. People seem unwilling to distinguish between the stage Hitler and the private man. He may have been insane, as it's an easy argument to make that a man who destroys millions of people with death camps and warfare qualifies as insane -- but the enraged Hitler who gave fiery speeches, with wild hand gestures and flying spittle, was a carefully created public image, one that seems to have only rarely appeared in private.




The 1931 cover story begins:

Fighting every inch of the way, three men stood out against the advance of Fascism in Germany last week: pale, bespectacled Chancellor Heinrich Bruning; white-haired Paul von Hindenburg; and their faithful lieutenant, Minister of the Interior and of War Wilhelm Groener. Each morning foreign correspondents in Berlin expected the Bruning Government to fall and Fascist Adolf Hitler, who only fortnight ago pounded a platform and shouted in his best Mussolini manner "Right goes hand in hand with Might!", to seize the Government. Municipal elections were held in Stuttgart. Hitlerites nearly doubled their previous vote. The provincial diets of Oldenburg, Brunswick and Hesse were all Hitler-controlled. Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin giving press interviews as though he were already Chief of State. In Leipzig a congress of pharmacists and physicians turned into a typical Fascist rally. Hitlerite orators, drunk with the sound of their own voices, shouted their program to maintain the superiority of "the Nordic race, the finest flower on the tree of humanity." They mentioned the hanging of Marxists, abolition of trade unions, compulsory sterilization of Jews.

The Apr. 14, 1941 cover:


The 1941 cover story begins:

The crucial spring of his career came last week to Adolf Hitler. He could see it in sheltered, sun-struck places around the Berghof where lilies of the valley, violets, Alpine roses, blue gentians, and wild azaleas bloomed, and in the green showing through the white on the Untersberg's slopes across the way. But he could feel it even more strongly in his bones: spring, when armies march.

The May 7, 1945 cover:


The 1945 cover story begins:

Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe's two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan (see below). Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich. Whether or not he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (as reported from Stockholm), or had "fallen in his command post at the Reich chancellery" (as reported by the Hamburg radio, which said that he had been succeeded as Führer by Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz), or was a prisoner of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler as a political force had been expunged. If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.

If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler's eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to last 1,000 years, sank to embers as the flames fused over its gutted cities. The historic crash of what had been Europe's most formidable state was audible in the shrieks of dying men and the point-blank artillery fire against its buckling buildings.

Hitler also made Time's list of The Most Important People of the Century. Their profile of him begins with: "The avatar of fascism posed the century's greatest threat to democracy and redefined the meaning of evil forever." From the profile:

Adolf Hitler or the incarnation of absolute evil; this is how future generations will remember the all-powerful Fuehrer of the criminal Third Reich. Compared with him, his peers Mussolini and Franco were novices. Under his hypnotic gaze, humanity crossed a threshold from which one could see the abyss.

At the same time that he terrorized his adversaries, he knew how to please, impress and charm the very interlocutors from whom he wanted support. Diplomats and journalists insist as much on his charm as they do on his temper tantrums. The savior admired by his own as he dragged them into his madness, the Satan and exterminating angel feared and hated by all others, Hitler led his people to a shameful defeat without precedent. That his political and strategic ambitions have created a dividing line in the history of this turbulent and tormented century is undeniable: there is a before and an after. By the breadth of his crimes, which have attained a quasi-ontological dimension, he surpasses all his predecessors: as a result of Hitler, man is defined by what makes him inhuman. With Hitler at the head of a gigantic laboratory, life itself seems to have changed.

Churchill and FDR also made this list.

Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler's son

Did Adolf Hitler have a son? The Times of London published an interesting story today about Unity Mitford, who may have been mother to Hitler's child. This is extremely doubtful. Mitford, interestingly enough, was a cousin of Winston Churchill, and went to Germany in the early 1930s, according to the article, and found herself in Hitler's inner circle. The Times is referencing an article in the New Statesman.

Excerpts from the Times:

She first went to Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were on the rise, and the young woman was so overwhelmed by a visit to the Nuremberg rallies that she became determined to meet Hitler. This she managed in spectacular style, ingratiating herself to the point where he described her to friends as “a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood”.

[...]

The makers of a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary, Hitler’s British Girl, examined theories surrounding Mitford’s notorious life and concluded that there was very little evidence that she was pregnant or ever had a sexual relationship with Hitler.

Whereas some might consider the idea of her giving birth to the Führer’s only offspring to be a harmless and intriguing tale, Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, thinks differently. “Unity Mitford’s relationship with Hitler was basically political,” he said. “She was a hard-line Nazi and a rabid racist and antiSemite, and I’m worried that gossip about her personal life might take attention away from these facts.”

And from the New Statesman:

At this point I decided to return to the National Archives, where I discovered a file on Unity that had been sealed under the "100-year rule" - reserved for only the highest classification of top-secret files. An official told me that it was possible to have the classification of such files reviewed and I applied to have the file opened. To my great surprise, the Home Office agreed. Inside was a startling new piece of information: it wasn't quite the birth certificate of a child, but here was hard evidence that Unity might not have been quite the invalid it was supposed.

After all these years, this is still fascinating stuff.

Hitler speaks

Voice has been given to home movies of Hitler. This is a fascinating trick accomplished with impressive software called ALR, or automated lip reading. It helps us separate the stage-managed image Hitler portrayed to the public, and the real man. This documentary was made for British TV and The History Channel, and runs 46 minutes.



Compare the home movies with the public speech below. Running time 55 seconds: