Once again demonstrating that people with an overabundance of money will buy anything, a private bidder yesterday purchased a pair of Eva Braun's panties at auction. Yes—Eva Braun. Yes—panties. The sale took place in the English town of Malvern, at Philip Serrell Auctioneers & Valuers, and along with the monogrammed fascist frillies, which you see above, were sold a gold ring, a red lipstick, and a silver lipstick holder, all once possessed by Braun. But it was the undies that fetched the top price, going for £2,900, or about $3,600. That's a lot of money for panties. But according to a representative of the auction house, “an array” of prospective buyers offered bids on the item, pushing the price more than seven times higher than expected.

Now that the buyer has the undies, you're doubtless wondering what he plans to do with them (and you just know it's a "he" we're dealing with, by the way). He could display them at home, maybe frame them. Or he could tuck them safely away for later resale at a profit. He could even donate them to Munich's Pinakothek art museums, which collect such items. But he'll do none of those things. Nope. He's going to wear them.

But there's more. If the wearer combines the panties with the lipstick and ring he or she will actually have sex with and marry the absolute worst person in the world. And he or she will do it even if it means utter isolation from friends, family, and anything that even resembles real life. And they'll stay loyal even after it becomes obvious their mate is dragging themstraight to doom. Unfortunately, said doom could destroy the valuable panties along with the wearer, but guess what? There are other pairs. One turned up in Ohio just last year. And another was sold in Maryland. Others surely exist, so if you want to waltz blithely through the rarefied world of vulture capitalists, sexual predators, and corrupt politicians, now you know how to do it. And if you navigate this world cleverly and maybe even thrive in it, in time maybe one day people will need Eva's panties just to tolerate you.

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. 

Police Gazette editors hit the panic button with this November 1961 cover claiming the Soviets have a death ray bomb. For a mere twenty-five cents readers were able to acquire new nightmare material by reading about this superweapon, which in the story is called an n-bomb. They’re of course referring to a neutron bomb, which by releasing deadly unshielded neutrons would minimize destruction and contamination of property but maximize human death. Not quite rays, so much as a wave emitted by a massive air burst, but still, the new element it brought to the nuclear party was wantonly scattered neutrons, so, okay—rays it is. It must have been a real stunner for Gazette’s millions of readers to learn of this horrific weapon, but unless the Russian scientist who brainstormed it into existence was named Sam Cohen we have to call bullshit on this tall tale, for it was Samuel T. Cohen—an American physicist—who conceived and developed the neutron bomb.

Cohen was an ex-Manhattan Project scientist who spent his career in nukes. He promoted his bomb relentlessly, defending it as “the most sane and moral weapon ever devised,” because “when the war is over, the world is still intact.” See, this is what can happen when you live in a military bubble—Cohen defined morality not by the neutron bomb’s extra-lethal effects on actual living and feeling humans, but by the survival of (reusable) material assets. At its most compact it could blast an area scarcely a mile across, however only a blind man could fail tosee that tactical neutron weapons were simply the thin edge of a wedge opening a tightly sealed nuclear door.

Moving on, Gazette wouldn’t be Gazette without at least a little Hitler, so in addition to the death ray feature it offers up photos of Adolf relaxing with Eva Braun at a retreat in the Bavarian Alps. In contrast to the

many stories about Hitler living in bitter, defeated isolation in South America, here readers see happy Hitler, socializing during the 1930s with friends and compatriots. Next up, Gazette gives readers their fix of celebrity content with Rita Hayworth, who had been married five times and whose problem the editors are only too happy to diagnose—in their esteemed opinion she’s just too wild to be tamed. And lastly, Gazette presses panic button number two by tying the nascent civil rights movement to communist agitation from overseas. This is a tabloid tale that was told often in the 1960s because, well, we don’t know why exactly—presumably because who besides the puppets of foreign governments would ever deign to demand equal rights? Anyway, we have a few scans below, and an entire stack of early 1970s Gazettes we hope to get to soonish.

The National Police Gazette reveals on this cover from today in 1960 that Hollywood said no to Brigitte Bardot. The accompanying story quotes an unnamed independent producer, who says that the problem is that Bardot's deficient acting skills limited her to sex kitten roles, but American censorship meant Hollywood couldn't make those kinds of movies. He adds that, at $150,000 salary per project, Bardot is too expensive for Hollywood. A second “well-informed source” tells Gazette that studios are afraid of Bardot’s unbridled sexuality, claiming that her image is “so sexually devastating, that [Hollywood] quivers in fear before the slight, curvaceous French girl with the moist, pouted lips.” So, basically two of three reasons Police Gazette gives for Bardot not featuring in Hollywood films have to do with the influence of legions of American prudes. So maybe it wasn’t really a case of Hollywood saying no to Bardot as much as it was saying yes to sexual repressives. Bardot, it should be noted, simply continued on as the biggest star in the world. Elsewhere in this issue you get the plot-of-the-month attributed to Fidel Castro, tales of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Jack Paar’s fears, and a nice portrait of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Scans of all that below, and more Gazette coming soon.