This September 1964 National Police Gazette cover is the twenty-fourth we’ve found starring Adolf Hitler within the date range 1951 to 1966. You get the idea here—Hitler didn’t die in Berlin, because he was harder to eradicate than polio, and was instead living in the tropics/Argentina/Antarctica plotting to build a Fourth Reich.
We mentioned before that we thought Hitler appeared on the cover of the Gazette twice a year. That’s now confirmed. We found five more covers to bring his total to twenty-nine between ’51 and ’66. When you consider how often other Reich figures such as Adolf Eichmann starred, it becomes clear the Nazis were a cottage industry for the Gazette, which used tales of their dreaded return to induce outrage and fear—and no small amount of newsstand sales. In that way we consider this magazine (and others) to be the precursor to today’s American cable news, where inducing outrage and fear has overtaken responsible journalism as a modus operandi.
The Gazette would use Hitler for as long as it plausibly could—we have a cover from 1974 claming he was still alive at age eighty-five—before focusing on other fictional threats, such as the scientific community. That sounds familiar too, doesn’t it? We’ll have more from Gazette and Hitler later.
