This February 1966 National Police Gazette marks the eighteenth time we’ve found Hitler on the venerable publication’s cover, and this is not the last we’ll see of Der Führer on the Gazette—we have three more that will bring his total to twenty-one, and we’re sure there are others out there. This time around, the world’s greatest medium Madame Luce Vidi has seen Hitler not crisped to a cinder in Berlin, but alive and kicking in the tropics. The Gazette attempts to quell any doubts about Vidi's divinatory prowess by informing readers that she foresaw “the assassination of President Kennedy and had predicted the time of the tragedy, and had also seen the death of French boxer Marcel Cerdan, the former middleweight champion, in a plane crash.”

After establishing Vidi’s bona fides, Gazette editors tell us their independent research showed that Hitler escaped Germany aboard a submarine on April 10, 1945, and traveled to a base in Norway where he and a female companion boarded a second sub, laden with millions of dollars in treasure, and sailed for Argentina. Hitler eventually fetched up in the vicinity of San Carlos de Bariloche, where Nazis had years earlier purchased 10,000 acres of land. Vidi describes what Hitler looks like in 1966 (hint: not good—see below). The story ends by claiming he resides in a tropical fortress, where “the aged despot, his heart brimming with hatred and his mind full of the days when his voice shook the world, lives out his time in misery.”

As we’ve pointed out, anyone who thinks conspiracy theories are a new phenomenon needs to read more history. Americans in particular have always given credence to alternate versions of important events, so next time you see someone on television saying Barack Obama was born in Kenya, just remember it’s nothing new. As it turns out though, the town of San Carlos de Bariloche was exposed as a hideout for at least one Nazi when former SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke was found there in 1995. He had been running the local German school. As recently as 2004 claims that Hitler had also lived in the area were aired in an internationally published book, and of course slammed by mainstream historians. But since something like 9,000 former Nazis fled to various parts of South America, we'd be lying if we said we didn't wonder if Hitler couldn't have managed the feat.

Though Luce Vidi supposedly utilized a crystal ball for her Hitler visions, her true specialty was reading ink blots—i.e., she required her clients to throw ink on a surface and she would divine the future from the resultant shapes. We can’t help wondering if she ever divined that she would go from being the “world’s greatest medium” to almost completely forgotten. We doubt it. They never seem to see that coming. We should also note that her vision did not jibe with the beliefs of those who theorized Hitler living near San Carlos de Bariloche. Vidi saw Hitler living in a tropical place—in the background was a turtle dozing on a sandy beach. San Carlos de Bariloche is nestled in the foothills of the Andes, an area where people go to ski, trek and climb. There isn’t a beach anywhere in sight. 

You may remember we noted that, more than any of the other old tabloids, The National Police Gazette used Adolf Hitler as its go-to guy, its linchpin, a reliable boogeyman they could claim was either hiding out in South America (can you say The Boys from Brazil?), collaborating with Fidel Castro (fascists and commies in bed together, oh my!), or maybe even lurking somewhere in the United States with his uncounted legions of eager killers. These covers speak to the relationship between fear and commerce, the seemingly contradictory nature of people that often draws them to the very thing that upsets them. Not to beat a dead horse, but once again, mid-century tabloids are very similar to millennial cable news. Like those tabloids, today’s cable news often plays on deep, irrational fears. But rather than turn it off, audiences eat it up. What we're very curious about is whether Europeans, who bore about 99% of the brunt of Hitler's lunacy, were also later succeptible to these sorts of manipulations, and whether any publications actually took advantage of it in the systematic way the Gazette did. Anyway, we posted eleven Hitler covers before today, and above and below are an additional six. You can see the others here, here, and especially here (Hitler hiding in Antarctica!). We’ll show you more later. Unless you’re scared.

 

The Pulp Intl. tour across America has left San Francisco for our last stop, Los Angeles, and our timing was good, because this interesting item appeared in the news yesterday. Apparently, a Los Angeles bunker intended to house Adolf Hitler is being razed to make room for a picnic area. Set on several acres in what is now Will Rogers State Park, it was built during the 1930s by a group of fascist adherents who called themselves the Silver Legion of America, or Silvershirts, with the idea of giving Hitler a base of operations in America. Though the land was purchased by Winona and Norman Stephens, the mastermind behind the project was William Dudley Pelley, below, a well-known fascist of the time. The sprawling site was inhabited by his Silvershirts, and besides a large house intended for Hitler, included a diesel plant, a sprawling garden, and a bomb shelter.

Pelley and his Silvershirts numbered about 15,000 official members during the mid-1930s, and certainly there were many more sympathizers. The group was powerful enough that it became a concern for President Franklin Roosevelt, who ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to keep an eye on them. Hoover did so, but left the group more or less in peace until Pearl Harbor was bombed, at which point feds raided the ranch and arrested the occupants. That was 1941, and by then the Silvershirts had already declined in membership and influence. The raid pretty much destroyed what was left of the group, and the base designed and built forAdolf Hitler fell into disrepair. We think the place would serve an important purpose if at least one building could be saved and perhaps adorned with a historical marker. Picnic areas need bathrooms, after all, and what better place to take a piss than in a monument to global fascism. But of course, what else would we think? We’re a history site, and we believe covering up the past serves no one. Some say the Silvershirts were never important enough to be considered a threat to American democracy, and thus should not be remembered, but they only seem hapless in hindsight. It’s precisely when people think their society is immune to malign influences that they always seem to take hold. 

Rave, for which you see a cover above, was a low budget U.S.-based magazine that launched in 1953 as a celeb publication, quickly moved into scandal and gossip, but didn’t survive beyond 1956, as far as we can tell. The graphic design was revamped twice, and so we suspect it just never found its niche in a crowded tabloid market. But it wasn’t for lack of providing celebrity rumormongers what they craved. This August 1955 issue discusses Serge Rubinstein’s murder, Anita Ekberg’s bombshell status, Jackie Gleason and more, but of special note are two stories: one about Sonja Henie, and another about Sheree North.

Sheree North, not well known today, was a dancer-turned-actress who in the mid-1950s was groomed (like so many other women) as the next Marilyn Monroe. She even made the cover of Life with the caption: “Sheree North Takes Over from Marilyn Monroe.” But it didn’t happen. Though North had a couple of hit films, her on-deck status was quickly usurped by another bottled blonde named Jayne Mansfield. North had done some burlesque early in her career, and Rave claims she had a few stag reels floating around. We don’t know about that, but there was a 1951 clip called the “Tiger Dance” that certainly pushed the bounds of contemporary sexiness. We found an upload of it, and you can see it here.

The story on Sonja Henie is a bit more interesting. A Norwegian-born world and Olympic champion figure skater, Henie shot to international fame at age fourteen and turned that recognition into a Hollywood career. She became extremely popular as a screen star, and the same drive that sparked that success fueled her personal life. She married three times and had numerous affairs, including with Tyrone Power and allegedlywith champion boxer Joe Louis. But the mystery man Rave hints at on its cover is none other than Liberace, just above. If you know anything about Liberace then we know what you’re thinking. But if Liberace was gay or bi—something he denied until his dying day—then dating women would have been a completely understandable strategy to avoid being outed and losing his career.

Henie, on the other hand, rarely let controversy get in the way of her decisions if she thought the result would ultimately be a net gain. This is possibly why she publicly greeted Adolf Hitler with a Nazi salute at a Berlin exposition in 1936, and why she sought Joseph Goebbels’ help in distributing one of her films in Germany. Yet you have to assume that anyone who would hang out with and possibly sleep with Joe Louis didn’t have rock solid racist views. But as millions died, her behavior can only be seen as shameful. However she returned to Norway with Holiday on Ice in 1953 and again the year Rave published the above cover and was warmly greeted, if not quite totally forgiven. Henie died of cancer in 1969, but as another fascinating product of a complex time, we suspect her name will come up on this website again.

Well, here we go again with The National Police Gazette and der Führer. This July 1953 issue brings us to eleven covers we’ve shared of one of history’s biggest monsters. We have seven more in our archive, and there are certainly others out there in the world to be unearthed. It makes a sort of sense, we suppose, that a person who irreparably warped the course of the twentieth century also warped the Gazette’s editorial content. In this case, Gazette purports to have located his secret hideout. Where is it? Would you believe Antarctica? No, seriously. They claim that, as of 1953, Hitler was chilling with penguins on an ice shelf. Oooo—march-off! Penguins win! Anyway, this from the Gazette’s text: "Hitler is alive! Hitler is plotting to return! These are facts Police Gazette has investigated and fearlessly revealed during recent months. [snip] Why doesn’t the United States government take immediate action on our information—track down Hitler, arrest him, and bring him to trial? The answer is this. Our government’s hands are tied. We are a democratic nation and we cannot trespass upon, invade, or interfere with the territorial integrity of another country." Is it not revealing that the Gazette—a rightwing scandal sheet—informs its readers that a murderer of millions must be captured and brought to trial? And that bit about the United States being a democratic nation that cannot simply invade another country? That’s really something, isn’t it? Oh, how times change. But we digress. We’re wondering if Hitler possibly appeared on more Police Gazette covers than any other person. No way to research that, so we’ll just speculate—yes, he did. But in Gazette’s defense, it never presented him as anything other than an object of fear or ridicule. At least, not that we’ve seen. We’ll have more Gazette later, and you can get Antarctic scoop below. 

Above is an unusual war-themed cover of The National Police Gazette from May 1953. In addition to stoking up a little Soviet fear with an A-bomb photo illustration, editors play the Hitler card, telling us at upper right that Der Führer is still alive. They made this claim scores of times after the end of World War II, and it never seemed to get old (we documented that phenomenon here). And since the U.S. was embroiled in a proxy war against China in Korea when this issue appeared, that conflict gets a mention too, in the banner at the bottom of the cover. All in all it's three enemies for the price of one—and a small insight into the nuclear fears that shaped the post-war generation. Do you ever wonder what fears shape us that they'll study in the future? We could take a guess, but then we might get real scared, so let's not think about it.

This March 1955 issue of The National Police Gazette is beat all to hell, but then again so are the Gazette’s stories about Adolf Hitler. In a previous post we showed you nine Hitler covers from the 1950s and 1960s, and we know of at least a dozen more. As it happens, the story inside this particular issue isn’t only about Hitler, but about his naval commander Karl Dönitz. Dönitz was due to be released from prison in 1956 and Gazette writer George McGrath sounds the alarm that, once sprung, the admiral planned to revive the Nazi empire. Dönitz had indeed been specifically mentioned in Hitler’s last will and testament as a successor, but a lost war, a discredited movement, and ten years behind bars will tend to have a detrimental effect on even an admiral’s ambitions. After his release Dönitz settled in the village of Aumühle and lived out the rest of his life in tranquility. He wrote two books, Zehn Jahre, Zwanzig Tage (Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days), and Mein wechselvolles Leben (My Ever-Changing Life), and corresponded with memorabilia collectors, but basically stayed out of the limelight. He died in December 1980 aged eighty-nine and was buried without military honors, having made no attempt to conquer the world. So the Gazette got that one wrong. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. 

Yes, neo-Nazis can have a laugh too, as George Lincoln Rockwell seems to prove on the cover of this October 1961 National Police Gazette. Rockwell was the founder of the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, which became the American Nazi Party, which then became the National Socialist White People’s Party. Rockwell admired Adolf Hitler to the point of worship, thought the Holocaust was a lie, believed the U.S. was heading toward a race war, and agitated for the hangings of ex-presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Espousing these beliefs, he raised hell on the U.S. political circuit for about fifteen years, until he was assassinated by fellow neo-Nazi John Patler in August 1967. Patler, née Yanacki Christos Patsalos, was feuding with his colleagues because, instead of just using Hitler’s old trick of falsely calling himself socialist, he had actually begun reading Karl Marx and had developed actual socialist leanings that were of course abhorrent to the neo-Nazi leadership. This friction eventually led to Patler’s expulsion from the party. So in retaliation, he put two bullets through Rockwell from the rooftop of a beauty salon. But that came later—on this Gazette cover, Rockwell was on his way up, using a veneer of charm to soften his message. But as Smoky Robinson once memorably sang: “If there’s a smile on my face, it’s only there trying to fool the public…”