Intl. Notebook | Dec 25 2015 |
Adolf Hitler and cohorts enjoy an uproarious 1941 Berlin Christmas party, where the mood may have been somewhat subdued due to the fact that attempts to crush Russia had so far failed at the cost of more than 800,000 German casualties. The photo was shot by Hugo Jaeger, one of the Führer’s personal photographers, and didn’t come to light until published by Life magazine in 2010.
Vintage Pulp | Aug 30 2015 |
Check an English language bio on Gisela Fleischer and it’ll likely say she’s a West German woman who claimed to be Adolf Hitler’s daughter, and that the Swiss paper Tribune de Genève broke the story in 1966. Well, guess what? The above Midnight is from today in 1965, and inside, readers are told that Abigail Van Buren—aka Dear Abby—received a letter from West Germany that began: “I need some advice in a hurry. Should I marry a rabbi? I am the daughter of Adolf Hitler.” Fleischer’s mother Tilly Fleischer had competed in javelin at the 1936 Olympic games. According to Gisela, Hitler was impressed enough to invite her mother to the Berghof for dinner and that meeting in Obersalzberg was the beginning of an eight-month affair.
Vintage Pulp | Aug 5 2015 |
This awesome August 1953 National Police Gazette featuring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby cut-and-pasted into baseball uniforms came from the website Ephemera Forever, which we had no idea existed until today. It’s a nice spot, and claims to have more than 22,000 rare items. The prices? Well, those are high. But you can always browse, at least. As far as the Hope/Crosby feud mentioned on the cover, different sources make claims of everything from full blown mutual hatred to the two using rumors of discord as a publicity stunt. However Hope did once reveal that Crosby never once invited him and his wife over for dinner, which seems like a pretty strong clue. See much more from Police Gazette in our tabloid index.
Intl. Notebook | Jun 8 2015 |
We’re back to Hitler today, as The National Police Gazette finally stops beating up poor Argentina in this June 1968 issue and decides the Führer is instead alive and well Colombia. Nowhere is Argentina mentioned, although the magazine had claimed at least twenty times previously that Hitler was there. Antarctica isn’t mentioned either, though Gazette had also told readers Hitler was plotting a new Reich from those icy reaches. Instead, Hitler’s u-boat is said to have landed in Bahia Honda on Colombia’s lush Caribbean coast, whereupon, garbed as a peasant, he was conducted by “rustic Indians” to a jungle ranch. Bogotá, by the way, also doesn’t enter into the story, despite its mention in the cover text.
In previous Gazette tales Eva Braun also made it to South America, but this time she died aboard the u-boat of a brain hemorrhage and was buried at sea. The story, which by the way is once more the work of Hitler-obsessive journo George McGrath, ends with this: “Only his closest German servants knew his real identity. The ranch hands thought him a mine operator. He wore a beard and eyeglasses. It was a complete disguise.” We see the disguise just above, in a photo supposedly taken at a u-boat base in Norway prior to his long submarine journey. We assume Gazette will have more on Hitler’s South American adventures in other issues. After all, this is the twenty-seventh Hitler Gazette we’ve found, and we have no expectation that it’s the last. Stay tuned.
Hollywoodland | Jun 6 2015 |
This issue of the New York based tabloid Private Affairs appeared in June 1962, and features cover stars Kim Novak and American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell rendered by an uncredited artist. Inside the issue Affairs rehashes Novak’s various relationships, recounting how mafia goons threatened to kill Sammy Davis Jr. if he didn’t stop meeting Novak across the color line, how she accepted an expensive sports car as a gift from Ramfis Trujillo even though his hands were “bathed in the blood of executed political prisoners,” and how she shot down a smitten Charles Boyer by asking him in bewilderment, “How could you have thought I loved you?” The overarching concern is Novak’s longstanding unmarried status, wedlock of course being the default state for any normal woman. Novak was only twenty-nine at the time—but that was spinster age by tabloid standards. She eventually did wed when she was thirty-two, and it’s a wonder she made it down the aisle without the aid of a wheelchair.
Elsewhere in the issue we get Lana Turner, who Affairs claims let her daughter take a murder rap for her; comedian Dick Gregory, who is accused of stealing jokes; and Ingrid Bergman, who is shown with her later-to-be-famous daughter Isabella Rossellini. We also meet Nai Bonet, a famed Vietnamese bellydancer who within a couple of years would parlay her fame into a film and music career. Private Affairs is not a well known tabloid today—it probably arrived on the scene just a bit too late to carve out a readership when newsstand shelves were already packed with established imprints such as Confidential, Uncensored, Top Secret, Inside Story, Hush-Hush, et al. This particular issue—designated Vol 1, No. 3—is the only copy of the magazine we’ve ever seen. We suspect the brand was defunct within the first year. Many scans below, and more rare tabloids coming soon.
Intl. Notebook | Apr 15 2015 |
England’s tabloid newspaper/website Daily Express has an interesting story today about the discovery of a Nazi propaganda book Hitler had banned because its photos made him look undignified. The book was called Deutschland Erwache, aka Germany Awaken, and was written in the 1930s by Baldur von Schirach, the former Hitler-Jugend leader who died in Spandau Prison after his conviction at the Nuremburg Trials. His book had been mostly forgotten, but now it’s about to be republished after an intact edition was found amongst the war souvenirs of a deceased British private. The volume was aimed at younger readers, which is why Hitler was portrayed in lighthearted fashion, such as in the above rural photo showing him in shorts working his Uncle Adolf vibe.
As dedicated documenters of Hitler’s horrors, we welcome the republication of Deutschland Erwache. Anything that shows der Führer as human rather than a monster is useful, because it can hopefully remind people that he didn’t arrive here in a flash of light from an alien dimension, but was rather a member of Earth’s human race—and one from just a single lifetime ago, when people had the exact same needs, fears, pressures, desires, lusts, hatreds, and political confusion as they do right now. Which means if we aren't careful and diligent everything that happened during Hitler’s rule could happen again. And we don’t mean in some benighted corner of the planet, but anywhere—even in the well-lit, well-paved, heavily-policed havens some people call home. The top photo is a good reminder that Hitler put his shorts on one leg at a time—just like the rest of us.
Intl. Notebook | Mar 5 2015 |
Everyone knows booze makes people shoot their mouths off, so what better way for a liquor company to support the Allied effort during World War II than by producing a propaganda poster that says—basically—don’t let our product affect you the way our product affects people? The Montreal based whiskey distiller House of Seagram did exactly that when it hired artist Essargee, aka Henry Sharp Goff, Jr. to paint the above poster warning of the potentially disastrous combo of booze, chattiness, and military secrets. You can see Essargee’s signature just about in the middle of the poster.
This piece is pure genius, not just because it features a highly stylized, almost new wave Führer, but because it could be produced today with slightly different text and instead of talking about Hitler it could be cautioning that drinking too much can make you listen to punk-ass Justin Bieber. This is a message the people need today. We had no idea Hitler and Bieber resembled each other so closely, but you see that, right? Like twins, these two. Now if only all Bieber’s music could be doused with petrol and incinerated we’d be getting somewhere.
In any case, the House of Seagram and Essargee cooked up several of these propaganda pieces together, all of which are highly collectible today. We have another two of their collaborations below for you to check out, and you can see a third—entitled “Starve Him with Silence”—at our previous post on World War II propaganda from Germany, Japan, Russia, England, and the U.S. here.
Vintage Pulp | Feb 9 2015 |
Police Gazette sometimes faced a need for Adolf Hitler to star on their covers that surpassed available supplies of art. The February 1956 cover you see above was the first time that particular image was used, but they dug it out again for their January 1977 issue, which you see below, and which we showed you in larger size here. By now you know the Gazette’s mission post-World War II was to prove Hitler didn’t die in Berlin. In this issue George McGrath—the same writer who usually penned these stories—offers a list of reasons why Hitler was still alive as of 1956. Among them:
In short—and this seems especially appropriate to point out with American news anchor Brian Williams in hot water for alleged on-air lies, and Fox News being laughed at for echoing an obviously fake story about the King of Jordan flying combat missions against ISIS—sloppy or false reporting in America’s most popular media outlets has always been a problem. The old tabloids fashioned themselves as maverick truthtellers, and that label, along with some flashy visuals, was enough to attract eyeballs. For today's cable news, the same self-labeling and eye candy visuals work the same way. We will have plenty more from the Police Gazette later.
Vintage Pulp | Dec 19 2014 |
Just in time to ruin everyone’s Christmas shopping, this National Police Gazette from December 1960 splashed Adolf Hitler’s face on its cover along with an inset of Swedish actress May Britt (who could hardly have appreciated the inclusion). George McGrath’s story minces no words, opening with this: Indisputable evidence that Adolf Hitler is alive and living in the Argentine has has been uncovered by the Police Gazette. Although this new information is in the hands of government intelligence chiefs, the United States and its allies are not lifting a finger to catch the runaway Nazi dictator.
Modern Pulp | Nov 22 2014 |
A long while back we shared a Spanish cover of the Mercocomic publication Kennedy and mentioned that a series of six appeared in 1977. The same comics were also published in French, so today, inappropriately, we’re sharing those six covers from France with their excellent if unsettling art by Prieto Muriana. Mercocomic published serials of other well known figures, among them Che, Hitler, Mussolini, Don Juan Tenorio Garcia, and Quijote 78. None are strictly factual accounts, but rather re-imaginings of the circumstances and motivations that drove important historical episodes.