Office of Strategic Services Comic Aspects of Hitler's Career
IMAGE
A military edition of Charles Chaplin,
with his characteristic mustache and his
bouncing way of walking. He never wore a hat,
but always carried a riding-whip, with which
he chopped off imaginary heads. This was Adolf
Hitler in the old days, writes W.W.C. in the London
New Statesman. "He was so funny, I inquired who
he might be. Most of his neighbors took him to be
one of these Russian emigres who abounded in
Germany at that time, and they freely talked of
his being probably a trifle mentally deranged."
While the myth of the great leader is growing
by leaps and bounds in Germany, certain
independent European dailies and weeklies
are stressing the comic aspects of Germany's
dictator. They picture Hitler as a comedian, all
the more laughable because of his seriousness.
His triumph, as these critics see it, is the fruit
of an indefatigable sense of the theatre. Hitler,
they would have us believe, is a sort of actor-
manager, staging his big show with scraps of
discarded ideas and unconsidered trifles.
............
........ Hitler won devoted adherents in the "Osteria
Bavaria", as that Munich saloon was named:
"There is no doubt his chief admirers were the
two waitresses, buxom Bavarian wenches, who
listened open-mouthed to him and danced attendance
on him in a way that formed the subject of many
jokes among the habitues of the place. Hitler's
relations with women indeed are a strange and
obscure chapter. I saw a great deal of him at that
time and I can certify that he was in these mattersas
[sic] abstemious as in regard to food and drink. The
only woman he seemed to care for at all was the lady
in whose viall [sic] in the hills he fled after his
inglorious collapse in November, 1923....."
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Hitler Source Book
Comic Aspects of Hitler's Career
Literary Digest, August 26, 1933
The Literary Digest; 8/26/33. p.13
(Abroad)