One of the things I hated in the Army was all out fatigue uniforms were long sleeves and pants. We actually were issued dress class B (tan) shorts, but never wore them.
The German version has a hedgehog instead of a tortoise, and the hedgehog wins not by being faster, but by getting his wife to stand at the end of the race course and pretend to be him.
I was born in Germany in 1965 and the book was still a central part of small kid's early socialization. Every child of my family or in general had been confronted with it. The thumbsucker story on its own made the content so absurd, even for a 2-3 year old, that messages like "don't be racist" or "don't hurt animals", which were rather progressive by the time the book was written, and sadly even in 1965, would not come across and all we would remember is that black people are called "n---" and they usually wear a loincloth made of grass. Luckily, the progressive wave of thought of the 70's washed all that away.
Flashbak