Tag Nazi Germany

Hitlerrific!

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with Adolf Hitler, book reviews, Eva Braun, Nazi Germany, political humor, The National Interest Magazine, The New Republic August 31st, 2011 @ 11:34 am

After the war, Adolph and Eva settled in Cleveland and could be seen riding the bus every Tuesday to go to the senior center for bingo-and-beer night

Boy, howdy people can’t get enough of Hitler. I hear the reason Dick Cheney brought out his new book recently was because he was afraid Hitler was getting all the good PR. Heck, it’s only recently that the History Channel stopped with their 24-7 schedule of Hitler documentaries in favor of their new 24-7 schedule of episodes of “Pawn Stars”, and *I* heard they asked Chumlee to lose the goatee and grow that little mustache.

So here is your Daily Dose of Dolph:

The news magazine The National Interest reviewed a new scholarly biography of Eva Braun in their latest issue. Because she had no public role in the world of the Third Reich, not much was known about her during the Hitler years, and little had been written about her since except as she appeared in episodes of his life. Indeed, just reading the review will assuredly increase your knowledge about her tenfold, even if you never even remotely consider reading the book. As the reviewer, Richard J. Evans, concludes, the larger issue about developing a better understanding of Braun is that it forces a re-examination of Hitler himself as a real human being and not as the Ultimate Monster of History, and that seems to still be beyond the conceptualization of many.

So that’s a good way to segue to this book review in The New Republic by Monica Osborne, looking at a book by Rudolph Herzog that examines political humor in Germany in the 1930s and the way that Hitler was generally portrayed as a laughing stock during the early part of his rise to power, and continued to be played for laughs by Allied war propaganda even though the knowledge of the unfolding terror committed by the Nazis was fairly widespread. The book also considers the use of Hitler humor in the post-war period; it is safe to say that Mel Brooks would probably not have a career without Hitler to kick around. How we choose to use humor to deal with the horrors of modern life is a provocative question, certainly.

Two Feel-Good Hitler Stories

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with "The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens, Nazi Germany, NPR, Ohio State University, Steve Wick, Wall Street Journal, William L. Shirer August 5th, 2011 @ 11:34 am

Totally unrelated links, except that both involve the Nazis:

NPR’s Morning Edition featured a story earlier this week about a little-known facet of the otherwise well-known legend of Jesse Owens and his victories in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Apparently, as part of the pageantry of the Games, the Germans gave each athlete an oak sapling for every gold medal won. Owens brought home four saplings, and a couple of them became famous legacies for the schools where they were planted. One of the four was never accurately accounted for, but now researcher think a tree near the library on the campus of Ohio State University may be that tree and will do genetic testing on it to compare it to the other known trees.

Equally Hitlerrific is this review in the Wall Street Journal by Barton Swaim of a new biography of journalist William L. Shirer by Steve Wick, “The Long Night: William L. Shirer and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. Wick focuses on Shirer’s personal story of mixed professional fortunes but ideal vantage point of the unfolding crisis in Germany, which would become the source material for Shirer’s milestone book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. The review is a good precis of what promises to be an interesting book.

A Little Of This, A Little Of That

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with "My Daguerrotype Boyfriend", airship models, Almanzo Wilder, corporate collaborators, funny scientific names, Futility Closet, Groucho Marx, Henry Ford, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nazi Germany, scientific nomenclature, U.S.S. Macon, zeppelins June 23rd, 2011 @ 11:25 am

My old college friend Marty Isenberg is the person who turned me on to the Marx Brothers many years ago. I knew a little bit of Groucho from reruns of “You Bet Your Life”, but I wasn’t really familiar with their movies as a kid. That was rectified, and I also read pretty much every book I could find about them or by them (a brief aside to mention that Harpo’s memoir, “Harpo Speaks!”, is a wonderful book). So I enjoyed this recent Neatorama post detailing some of Groucho’s assorted dietary habits and peccadilloes. Groucho was a complicated individual, and his tastes and habits reflect that.

This good-looking fellow is none other than Almanzo Wilder, Laura Ingalls’ husband. He is 28 years old in this photo, the same age as when they were married. Wilder was 10 years older than his bride. This website has an undated picture of the two of them together that looks like its from just a few years later. He lived to the ripe old age of 92. The photo above isn’t new or anything, but it made an appearance the other day on a somewhat whimsical tumblr site called “My Daguerrotype Boyfriend”, which is chock-full of 19th Century hottie boys like Manly Wilder.

Check out this Popular Science article about a guy who built a 20-foot flying radio-controlled model of the U.S.S. Macon, one of a pair of zeppelins built by the U.S. Navy in the 1930s. The Macon and her sister ship, the Akron, were both destroyed in accidents, which convinced the Navy to abandon the use of airships. The model builder is planning to donate his project to a museum being built at Moffett Field in California, which was the airship’s original home.

That’s none other than American industrial icon Henry Ford receiving a big ol’ medal from the Nazis back in the 1930s. The Wehrmacht overran Europe in Ford trucks, built with slave labor, but even before the war, Henry Ford was one of Hitler’s biggest international supporters. American businesses LOVED Hitler and most did business with the Nazi regime right up until war was declared. The role played by IBM in providing tabulation machines to the Nazis to make the Final Solution become reality has been well-documented. This top-ten post from Cracked Magazine lists some of the other companies still in business today who were big Hitler supporters. Guess how many of them are Republican Party donors today.

I got some chuckles out of this Futility Closet post about some of the deliberately silly scientific names given to various species by fun-loving scientists. My favorite: a species of wasp named Lalapa lusa.

FOX News: The Early Years

By Brian Filed in Links, Media Tagged with broadcasting history, Dangerous Minds, German television, Nazi Germany, Paul Nipkow January 26th, 2011 @ 10:56 am

I was completely fascinated to learn last week that the Nazis operated an experimental television service from 1935 almost until the end of the war, going off the air in 1944. The excellent blog Dangerous Minds, which usually focuses on music, but whose writers have an excellent knack for finding all sorts of rare videos and other gems, had a post about it here. The documentary itself was produced by Spiegel TV in Germany in 2001 and ran as part of a British documentary series called “Secret History”. MetaFilter also somehow managed to cover this in 2008 without me noticing (as I look at the date of that post, I realize how I missed it, but that’s not important at the moment).

If you’re a student of broadcasting history, you absolutely MUST invest an hour in watching this documentary. I can’t ever recall hearing anything about this in many, many years of studying broadcast history. The German inventor Paul Nipkow often gets a quick mention in television history books as one of a number of people who developed mechanical television systems in the early 20th century (along with another one of my favorite television historical figures, John Logie Baird), but most standard histories focus on Zworykin and Farnsworth and their electronic systems that eventually “won”. But, as this documentary shows, the Germans were operating a working system that was comparable to the early experimental systems in the U.S. and U.K. As in those countries, the service was limited to a few hours a week and only available to party officials and in some government-sponsored television “parlors”, but somehow continued to operate through most of the war, while British and American television development were both suspended.

Most of the footage in the documentary is actual programming that was pre-recorded on film; some of it is awkward and stilted, as you might expect, and some of it is downright creepy. The Germans also developed a method for recording live events using film that was instantly developed and then transmitted via cable from production trucks to the television station in Berlin. This allowed them to offer “live” television coverage of the 1936 Berlin Olympics as well as events such as the annual Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg and other news coverage.

I’d love to find more information about this. Some light Googling mostly turns up links to this video, so I’m guessing there isn’t a lot of detailed historiography to be had. The German television producers interviewed for the documentary were ancient then (2001), and I’d bet are all dead now, so there’s not a lot of primary source left either. Maybe Roger Ailes has some boxes of documents in his basement, right next to his supply of blood ink.

Oh, in case you’re interested, here is the documentary:

The Torch Is Past

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler, Avery Brundage, Beijing Olympics, Berlin, Germany, International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, Nazi Germany, Olympic Games, Olympic torch relay, Olympics history April 7th, 2008 @ 2:45 pm

Everybody seems to be in quite a dither about the Olympic Torch being doused twice today as it was run through the streets of Paris.

I certainly hope the irony is not lost on anyone that it was Adolf Hitler’s propaganda ministry that came up with the idea of running the Olympic Torch from Greece to the site of the Games for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was all part of the glorification of the Aryan supermen, with the direct implication that there was a link between Nazi Germany and the Olympian gods. Hitler himself was big on the idea that somehow the Germans had some sort of tie to the Spartans.

Of course, the IOC itself was run by a Francoist for twenty years, and even prior to that the long-time head of the U.S. Olympic Committee and head of the IOC, Avery Brundage, had direct business ties to Nazi Germany. So to pretend that the Olympics are somehow tainted by their association with Beijing and the Chinese government is a little disingenuous.

As a true testament to the 19th Century ideal of amateur competition, the Olympics ceased to be worthy of that consideration with the 1936 Games. When the Games resumed after World War II, the political propagandization and the proxy battles between the two sides of the Cold War carried the Games for another 30-odd years until the 1980 Games in Moscow. Since 1984, though, the Games have mutated into nothing but a commercial spectacle, deteriorating further and further along that path with each subsequent event. Protesting over China hosting the Games is too little, too late. China as the Next Big Superpower seems to me to be the perfect symbol of the triumph of unbridled capitalism and hypocritical symbolism. Dousing Hitler’s torch in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe only seems fitting to me.

Tag Nazi Germany

Hitlerrific!

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Dredging Up The Past