There was a widespread joke in Germany at the time that, despite Nazi ideology, most Germans remained as tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering, and as blonde as Hitler.
As for the death’s head: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsNLbK8_rBY&feature=PlayList&p=5F5A9B76F62E367E&index=5
Psh, I’d prefer panem et circenses.
Good point. No Hitler, no Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Boy, I’ll say. It looks like an upper lip soul patch.
I just wish he’d have waited until AFTER we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine how much he’d have shit his pants if he knew what the U.S. could have done to him!
OOoh, I know!!! What about all those Downfall parodies? Those are AWESOME!
He wasn’t a total vegetarian either. He was quite fond of dumplings made from chicken liver.
I was under the impression that they were trying to find an effective treatment, not studying the effects. That is they weren’t trying to test the hypothesis that cold kills people, instead they froze people to neat death, then tried various ways of bringing them back.
What an amazing asterisk that was. Just spent the past forty minutes reading through it and gaining a deeper understanding about the issues surrounding the Nazi data.
Thank you for posting that.
This was a nauseating read, but I am glad you posted it too! I needed to know this.
Q
Rumors abound that the People’s car had Jewish origins.
Maybe he didn’t invent it but he tapped the civil engineer who had experience with road design in college, Dr. Fritz Todt (1891 Pfrorzheim -1942), in 1932 after Todt had extolled the virtues of a superhighway system to move military materiel. Todt headed a corps of engineers that built the autobahns, the West Wall of fortifications, bunkers, airfields and bridges and became one of the most powerful members of the Nazi party by 1942. Having an interest in transportation history, I have a copy of the International Historic Films 1935 documentary on him, Dr. Todt-Berurung und Werk (Mission and Accomplishment) (in German w/English subtitles, 32 minutes). See imdb Dr. Todt - Berufung und Werk (Short 1935) - IMDb .
The film states that Todt convinced the Party that building roads would create jobs and Hitler hiered him on only11 days after becoming Fuhrer. Then, the propaganda film says, that Hitler turned the first sod for the program on 9/23/33 and that on 5/19/35 the Darmstadt-Frankfurt section opened to traffic and by 1939 there were 4000 km of autobahn open, all of which “harmonized with the landscape”.
General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower came back from trouncing the Nazis and brought the superhighway concept to fruition in the USofA when he became president in 1952, with (fellow alumini of mine) John A. Volpe (Wentworth Institute, 1929) as the first federal highway administrator and we now have a 42,000-mile freeway system built to move military materiel, etc.
Another vote for killing himself. Saved the Allies some money putting his decaying body on trial.
It would have been interesting though, to see if he could have pulled himself together at Nuremburg as well as Goering, or if they would have had to gag him to prevent the deranged shrieking.
As to the earlier comments about “research” in the camps, it should be noted that Hitler himself was a scientist, though he had a bit of trouble getting published.
MAJOR thread hijack.
Wentworth Institute in Boston?! My grandfather graduated in '30. I still have the watch fob and his yearbook somewhere back home in the States… (wonder if he and Volpe ever knew each other. Prolly not.)
[MTH]
Hitler’s primary legacy is to serve as a horrible example for everyone else . . . permanently affecting the usage of simile and metaphor and straw men . . . and making many other evil men seem not so bad, in comparison. He also helped the cause of Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel.
And oh yes, the suicide.
The archetypal example of the bromide “the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.”
Hi, Jack. That’s the place, although I got out decades later. Never been out of work since. See their website at www.wit.edu
I recall at least one study was controversial because it used data from them, so they must have at least produced some workable data…
While I’m not going to say that these statements aren’t true, the fact is that Werner von Braun and Hans von Ohain are ascribed too much exclusive credit for the development of rocketry and jet power, respectively. Von Braun certainly pushed and pursued the technology under the developing Third Reich, but much of the basics and technology that was implemented in the Aggregate family of rockets (including the V-2 rocket) was either adapted from or parallel to developments made by the Russian scientists and mathematicians, or by Goddard, Theodore von Kármán, et cetera. Post-WWII, the adoption by the United States via Project Paperclip of von Braun and his crew of A-rocket scientists and engineers definitely advanced the start of the art of liquid fuel rocketry in the United States (the work of Goddard and his people was mostly relegated to the basement archive, as it didn’t seem to have any immediate use as a weapon and the ‘mature’ view of the future of rocketry was that it was pure science fiction), but solid propellent motor development continued apace at GALCIT, albeit funded primarily by the Army at relatively low levels and intended primarily for tactical use.
The Soviets also acquired some of the A-program scientists and engineers and (mostly broken) hardware, but primarily stripped them for information, built one design (the R-1) adapted from the A-4, and then proceeded to develop their rocket technology essentially independent from the Germans. This allowed them the early advantage, albeit with vehicles that were not really suited as weapons. (The R-7 booster did and its descendants still do use cryogenic fuels and therefore had to be fueled on-pad before launch.) This prompted rapid development of American cryogenic liquid rocket systems, (PGM-17 ‘Thor’ and PGM-19 ‘Jupiter’ IRBMs, and then the SM-65 ‘Atlas’ and the SM-68 ‘Titan’) followed by development of storable liquids (LGM-25 ‘Titan II’) and solid propellant rocket motor vehicles (LGM-30 ‘Minuteman’ family, UGM-27 ‘Polaris’, UGM-73 ‘Poseidon’, UGM-96A ‘C-4 Trident’, UGM-133A ‘D-5 Trident II’, and LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’) which were typically had lower maintenance demands and were somewhat superior in technical capability (and, until the late 'Sixties, numerical superiority) over Soviet developments. Von Braun’s crew had basically nothing to do with solid motors and von Braun himself was philosophically opposed to the use of SRMs in any man-rated vehicle, often forestalling efforts to use SRMs as parallel stages (strap-on boosters) for an uprated Apollo V variant.
The long and short of this is that while von Braun was certainly influential in the American space program, the German scientists were not nearly as much on the Russian program (and obviously almost not at all for the French, Chinese, or Japanese) and the basic technology existed independently of German development. More significant to space exploration than the A-rocket scientists was the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, which compelled both powers to spend large amounts of funds that would not otherwise have been available for development.
This is absolutely true, and von Braun made no bones about it; he would work with anyone who would advance his dream of space planes, voyages to the Moon and Mars, and eventual space habitats.
Stranger
In Japan, I believe a lot of the Unit 731 atrocities were ignored by post-war reconstuctionists in the US government in order to capitalize on their findings. It is debatable whether germ warfare advances are a good thing, though.
A classic car magazine I had lying about had an article about a British officer whose job it was post war to get the VW factory up and running. It wasn’t until he was in charge that the factory started mass producing Beetles.