Hitler makes a mad dash from the Arctic Circle to the bottom of the world.
Has it really been nearly a year since our last Hitler Police Gazette cover? A look back through the website confirms the lull, but we haven't run out of Adolfs yet. This is the twenty-eighth Gazette we've found with him as the star, a May 1961 issue proclaiming, of course, that he's alive. Inside, journo Harvey Wilson reiterates the Argentina claims that had been well flogged in previous issues, telling readers Hitler's “super secret” hideout is located in Rio Negro province at the edge of wild Patagonia. Wilson writes: “Hitler flew out of Berlin on the night of April 30, 1945. He fled the city in company with a woman and they made their departure in a Fieseler-Storch plane. They carried several suitcases and proceeded to a Nazi submarine base in Norway.” According to Wilson, the u-boat chugged across the ocean and docked at Mar de Plata, Argentina. It's easy to understand Gazette's (and its readers') interest in Hitler. He was a titanic figure who died a tawdry little death—suicide by self-inflicted gunshot. It must have felt to the World War II generation like an anti-climax, or even a cheat. So Gazette instead assures those readers that Hitler escaped, and makes his flight sound like adventure fiction. This formula, which must have both titillated and terrified those who believed, not only furnished material for twenty-eight covers, but the story was also told numerous times in issues that didn't feature Hitler on the front, such as this one focusing on JFK, and this one that shines a spotlight on Eva Braun. But we may have finally reached the end. We know of only one other Hitler cover. We'll share that a little later.
If they aren’t in your city already, they’ll be there soon. We would love to have been part of this. Yesterday Mexico City had their annual La Marcha Zombie, or Zombie Walk, with the goal of setting a new record for the number of zombies (held by Buenos Aires, which had assembled 25,000 shambling undead just a few days earlier). As you might deduce, zombie walks are growing more popular globally, and have been staged in places as far flung as Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Mar de Plata, Exeter, Santiago, and Singapore. According to Wikipedia, the first walk was held in Sacramento, California in 2001, and now hundreds of cities have them. Perhaps in a decade or two, social scientists will tell us the complex reasons behind the rise of zombie walks, i.e., the trampling of individuality in the modern world, the rise of ravenous greed and the death of caring, etc., and that, ironically, one day sooner than most people think, the masses will rise up and destroy the elite few that have enslaved them. Okay, maybe that last part is just what we think. But complex reasons aside, from our non-scientific perspective, we’d do a zombie walk just because it looks fun. And do you think there’s any zombie sex going on afterward? Why of corpse there is.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1931—Nevada Approves Gambling
In the U.S., the state of Nevada passes a resolution allowing for legalized gambling. Unregulated gambling had been commonplace in the early Nevada mining towns, but was outlawed in 1909 as part of a nationwide anti-gaming crusade. The leading proponents of re-legalization expected that gambling would be a short term fix until the state's economic base widened to include less cyclical industries. However, gaming proved over time to be one of the least cyclical industries ever conceived. 1941—Tuskegee Airmen Take Flight
During World War II, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, aka the Tuskegee Airmen, is activated. The group is the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp, and serves with distinction in Africa, Italy, Germany and other areas. In March 2007 the surviving airmen and the widows of those who had died received Congressional Gold Medals for their service. 1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe
Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane. 1965—Leonov Walks in Space
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod's airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk. 1966—Missing Nuke Found
Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the deep submergence vehicle Alvin locates a missing American hydrogen bomb. The 1.45-megaton nuke had been lost by the U.S. Air Force during a midair accident over Palomares, Spain. It was found resting in nearly three-thousand feet of water and was raised intact on 7 April.
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