New Book on Erich Retzlaff

A while back I provided some images for an exhibition on German photographer
Erich Retzlaff, active during the Nazi era.  That book on the exhibition has just appeared, and should be interesting for anyone interested in photography during the Third Reich.

The author is Christopher Webster van Tonder, and the book is published by Aberystwyth University’s School of Art.

Celebration of Hitler’s Takeover in the USA

In the course of gathering material on my main interests curious things sometimes show up.  This is the program for an event organized by the German consulate in New York City on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of Hitler’s takeover of power.                  

Goebbels on the Political Situation (August 1931)

Before Hitler’s takeover in 1933 Joseph Goebbels wrote a monthly essay for Unser Wille und Weg, the party periodical for propagandists, that outlined the Nazi take on current events.  Today I add his essay from August 1931, an interesting period.  There were no national elections that year, and there was frustration within the Party since things seemed to be moving slowly.  Goebbels laid out the propaganda line that the party was following.

He makes the claim that Germany would long-since have collapsed had it not been for the restraint of the Nazi Party.

A 1938 Painting of Adolf Hitler Surfaces

One of the benefits of my work is that people frequently write me asking for information about something in their possession.  One of the most interesting of those comes from a woman whose father, a B-17 pilot, found this remarkable painting while visiting the bombed-out remains of the beer hall in Munich where Hitler had held many of his early meetings.  I have added it to the page of Nazi paintings of Hitler.

I am not familiar with the artist, one F. Thiele.  I welcome information from anyone who know more about the artist or this painting.

More on “Yankee Beetles” in the GDR

The GPA has material from a 1950 East German pamphlet accusing the United States of dumping potato beetles on the GDR.

The BBC recently did an interesting story on the topic, including interviews with people who were East Germans at the time and who found themselves in the fields with the unpleasant task of plucking potato beetles from the undersides of leaves.  They were rather dubious about the charge, they recall.

International Ethnic Mush (1941)

I particularly like to add ephemera to the GPA — pamphlets and other items that were produced in large numbers, but not intended to grace library shelves for coming generations.  Today’s addition is a remarkable pamphlet titled International Ethnic Mush or United National States of Europe?  It was published in the first half of 1941 by Robert Ley, head of the Nazi labor organization and a person unsavory even by Nazi standards.

The print run was 2,000,000, and I assume it was widely distributed.  It is filled with crude anti-Semitism and a fair amount of Germanic pride.  Ley tells his readers that they are the master race that has earned the right to rule Europe.

Julius Streicher Speech: 31 October 1939

Today I’m adding what was probably Julius Streicher’s last major speech, delivered on 31 October 1939.  He was in considerable difficulty at the time, and was shortly afterward exiled to his country estate outside Nuremberg.

World War II was in its “phony war” stage.  Poland was defeated, but little was happening on the battlefields.  Streicher includes his usual anti-Semitic arguments and encourages his audience to have faith in Hitler.