HOME |
RSS | 
As a joke, forgers at the United Kingdom’s Special Operations Executive made this fake German passport in 1941. It lists Hitler as a Jewish painter who has permission to visit Palestine, then ruled by the British. You can view another photograph of this passport from the UK’s National Archives at the link.
Link -via How to Be a Retronaut
In January, construction workers digging a new subway tunnel in Berlin found a cache of sculptures that had been banned by Adolf Hitler for being “degenerate”. It’s uncertain who is responsible for saving them, but it’s possible to make some educated guesses:
Archeologists have so far determined that the recovered works must have come from 50 Königstrasse, across the street from City Hall. The building belonged to a Jewish woman, Edith Steinitz; several Jewish lawyers are listed as her tenants in 1939, but their names disappear from the record by 1942, when the house became property of the Reich. Among its subsequent occupants, German investigators now believe, the likeliest candidate to have hidden the art was Erhard Oewerdieck, a tax lawyer and escrow agent.
Oewerdieck is not widely known, but he is remembered at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. In 1939, he and his wife gave money to a Jewish family to escape to Shanghai. He also hid an employee, Martin Lange, in his apartment. In 1941 he helped the historian Eugen Täubler and his wife flee to America, preserving part of Täubler’s library. And he stood by Wolfgang Abendroth too, a leftist and Nazi opponent, by writing him a job recommendation when that risked his own life.
The eleven sculptures are now on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin. Pictured above is “A Likeness of the Actress Anni Mewes” by Edwin Scharff.
Link via Flavorwire | Photo: Angel Flores Jr.
This past January, Timothy Ryback wrote in The Times about the books that Adolf Hitler kept in his private library. 1,200 books that he retained at his residences in southern Germany are now warehoused by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Ryback suggests that one might gain insights into the mind of a man by the books that he collects. Among Hitler’s favorites:
He ranked Don Quixote, along with Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gulliver’s Travels, among the great works of world literature. “Each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself,” he said. In Robinson Crusoe he perceived “the development of the entire history of mankind”. Don Quixote captured “ingeniously” the end of an era. He was especially impressed by Gustave Doré’s depictions of Cervantes’s delusion-plagued hero.
He also owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. The entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather, with a gold-embossed eagle, flanked by his initials, on the spine.
Hitler considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller. While Shakespeare had fuelled his imagination on the protean forces of the emerging British empire, these two Teutonic playwright-poets squandered their talent on stories of midlife crises and sibling rivalries. Why was it, he wondered, the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise, the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Venice and Shylock?
Link | Image: Calvin College
Remember the post about parents that named their kid Adolf Hitler and got into trouble when they tried to order a birthday cake? Well, here’s an update. New Jersey Children’s Services has just taken the kids into custody:
The three-year-old boy and his two sisters – JoyceLynn Aryan Nation, 1, and 8-month-old Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie – were removed from their home by New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services.
So far no officially reason has been given for the intervention, and local police say they have not received any reports of abuse or negligence.
Link – via Linkfilter
(Photo: Getty)
Heath and Deborah Campbell wanted a birthday cake for their son, but a local supermarket refused their order because of the boy’s name: Adolf Hitler!
Deborah Campbell, 25, of nearby Hunterdon County, N.J., said she phoned in her order last week to the Greenwich ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son’s name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.
Karen Meleta, a ShopRite spokeswoman, said the store denied similar requests from the Campbells the last two years, including a request for a swastika.
"We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate," Meleta said. "We considered this inappropriate."
Why did they choose that name?
Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name."
The Campbells’ two other children are named JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, who turns 2 in a few months, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, who will be 1 in April.
Campbell said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.
Link – Thanks Denita!
(Photo: Rich Schultz/AP)
