Adolph Hitler's public debut - August 2, 1914 - the Photograph of the Century

Adolph Hitler.  Hands down, "Der Fuhrer" is the most famous figure of the 20th Century.  His face, even in the crudest abstract form,  (a black-plastic comb under any nose), is still the most recognizable visage in the entire world. 

All through the month of August the news media salted the airwaves and the Internet with blaring reminders that August marks the 100th Anniversary of the start of the First World War.  I suspect most of junk reportage was ignored, as the public has been fixated on Gaza, the Ukraine, the I.S.I.S. Caliphate, and Ebola.  These past four weeks I planned to write an article on "the most remarkable photograph of the 20th Century" - the exact moment when Adolph Hitler was first photographed at a public event, and nobody recognized him or had any inkling of what he would become.  It was on the Odeonplatz in Munchen (Munich), August 2, 1914.  Hitler was just "a face in the crowd," joyously cheering the Declaration of War against Russia, and joining in the lusty outburst of German National songs.

This portrait, taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, was published in 1933.

This was how Hitler saw himself and how he wanted to be portrayed.

Below,  is one of a sequence of six photographs taken by Heinrich Hoffman, a Munich photographer.  Years later Hoffmann was hired as Hitler's personal photographer, and when his boss mentioned have been at the event Hoffman took the negatives into the lab and made poster-size enlargements. He was thrilled to discover that quite by chance he had recorded Hitler's face in the Bavarian crowd. It was a stunning find, and it was first published on March 12, 1932.  The photo was syndicated and appeared in an unknown number of periodicals and with sets of cigarette cards which are today in thousands of collections worldwide.  In the summer of 1914 Hitler was a complete unknown, but within the week he volunteered for the German Army and was soon in the thick of the fight.  An extraordinary man and I agree with George Will who dubbed the picture "the century's most remarkable photograph". 

Hoffmann was not alone covering the event.  Many German newspapers covered the event, as did at least one newsreel cameramen.  It was even featured in the Illustrated London News. I have collected over a dozen images of the crowd, taken in all four directions.  In addition I have found four different published versions of the shot printed in the 1930s,  in which Hitler is isolated in a circle or vignette.

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE CENTURY
In this photograph the citizens of Munich assemble in front of the Feldherrnhalle, a symbol of military prowess, to cheer the coming of a great war.  They don't yet understand that conflict will destroy their empire and brutally humble the Germanic tribes.  In that crowd is a loner, a man of intelligence but who lacks in the conventional graces, and who doesn't yet understand his own potential as a leader.  Postwar, he will be responsible for rebuilding and empowering his defeated Germany, and return annually to that very symbolic spot to perform the rituals of blood and honour intended to cleanse the stink of defeat.  The loner in the crowd on Aug. 2, 1914 was a man of destiny so potent in significance that a century after this photograph was taken there are writing men who seek their own notoriety in trying to debunk every aspect of Adolph Hitler's life - even to the petty extent of mocking this photograph. 

CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO ENLARGE IT      

As everyone should know,  the modern German state and most of the Germanic people are still traumatized by the Nazi period of social, cultural and political domination.   Political correctness is expected, and few Germans today are capable of producing unbiased accounts of Adolph Hitler or the Third Reich. Some academics go so far as to make false claims which they cannot back up.  For decades the Hoffmann photograph was accepted by authoritative biographers and historians.  Then in December of 2010, the historian Gerd Krumeich, a man whom one London newspaper insisted is "recognized as Germany's greatest authority on World War 1", stepped forward and declared the photo a fake. His precise accusation was that Heinrich Hoffman had doctored the photo, inserting Hitler's face, for the purpose of helping him win an election.    The story spread like an infectious contagion because of course Hitler bashing is easy and fun, and it panders to the lazy mobs that cannot seem to find any 21st Century witches to burn.

Krumeich claimed that he had examined many variants of the Hoffmann photo and found minute differences, such as a lock of hair hanging in one and absent in others.  That is not surprising as  many prints were in circulation and were screened and tinted by individual printers. I include a vignette printed in 1933 as a collectable card. It is tinted in colours and a technician has touched up the moustache to give it more definition, but there are no substantial differences.  If Hitler had a hat, it was down at his side. He is not waving it in the air as many in the crowd were doing.  More to the point, Hitler had become a practiced politician, and he was hyper-vigilant of his image.  He spent hours in front of the mirror perfecting his body language and building a repertoire of facial gestures.  Heinrich Hoffmann had photographed his client's theatrics and he had a huge archive of images on file.  If he wanted to pull some photo-fakery he could have done a much better job, and he would have had the client looking at the camera, just as others standing next to Hitler are doing.  How obvious is that?

Everyone in the crowd understood they were witnessing history, and there were cameras recording faces from all points of the compass.   So what was Hitler looking at, while the other men are looking into Heinrich Hoffman's camera lens? 

CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO ENLARGE IT

Hitler was intensely interested in the official proceedings - ie. the declaration of war.  He longed for war, and the joy on his face is very apparent.  He was at this point in his life disassociating himself with his native Austria, and would petition the government of the King of Bavaria for permission to join his army. Permission was in fact immediately granted.

The Bavarian State Library in Munich has many Hoffman images in its

online catalog, which it will gladly sell to publishers and film makers.

This one, "HOFF 4482" is offered without any editorializing about it

being faked or contrived. It is deemed an authentic record of German history.

The city of Munich was where Hitler found his courage, honed his iron will,  and developed his unique form of political brilliance. He was particularly enthralled by the historical symbolism of the Feldherrnhalle and after the war, when he began moulding the NSDAP, he would annually meet with Nazi recruits in the Odeonplatz for oath-taking pageantry which was highly scripted and very photogenic.

I conclude PART 1 of this article with this water colour of the Feldherrnhalle on the Odeonplatz, which was painted by Adolph Hitler.  It is more evidence of just how important that ceremonial structure and that unique location were in his thinking process.  All my life I have read in biographies and weighty works that Hitler did not have what it takes to become an artist. The truly nasty insisted that had no talent at all, as if the man who orchestrated the murder of six million Jews must be stripped of the merest shred of humanity.  That verdict is of course absolute rubbish, shared and repeated by cowards who are afraid to form their own opinions about art and about the man.  What Hitler inflicted on Europe after he took leadership of the Nazi Party is another story entirely.    Those who make no attempt to understand the man he was before Germany's defeat in the Great War or before the coming of his leadership in the NSDAP, are not worthy of your attention.   Young Hitler walked the streets of Munich carrying an artists easel and would not have bothered with a camera even if given one. He had an eye for detail and an ear for a well turned phrase, and on August 2, 1914 he pressed close enough to  the great hall to catch the speeches and the military salutes. We are very fortunate that Hoffman preserved his negatives  long enough for one of them  to reveal something of Hitler during those formative years before he had yet to find his destiny or capture the public imagination.

Part 2 and 3 will appear when time allows.

Update Jan 7, 2015: clearly I had no time in 2014 to return to this interesting subject. That is unfortunate because it's a fabulous story muddied and distorted by a couple of recent books written by academic historians with contemporary political agendas.  I think I need a bigger gun than a Google Blog for this one.

Ronald J. Jack
August 30, 2014

Hitler's Armoured State Coach - Canada's Greatest War Trophy

In the autumn of 1945 ships began arriving in Canada loaded with war booty from Europe. Our soldiers smuggled home the obvious souvenirs ... Schmeisser machine pistols and Lugers, but our technical intelligence personnel filled cargo holds with tanks, artillery pieces, radar systems, jet engines and even V2 rockets. We missed out on the really sexy stuff -  Hitler loot.  The Americans, the British and the Russian had over-run his command posts and private residences, and so Canadian troops were denied some some of the most coveted war trophies.   And yet in the end, thanks to a savvy collector with an eye for undervalued artifacts, our national collection now includes one of the most iconic artifacts of the Third Reich - one of the Reich Fuehrer's armoured limousines -  prominent in most of the news reels which documented Nazi state events.

The Canadian War Museum acquired a Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering "staff car" in 1969 in exchange for a federal gift tax receipt. (All Canadian museum's may use tax receipts to acquire art and artifacts.)  Though thrilled to have the car, from the beginning the Museum harboured doubt that the Mercedes had been used by Goering. The provenance had been established by the U.S. Army at the time it was landed at the Port of Boston and introduced to the American news media.  That was how the C.W.M. displayed it, and from year of acquisition it became the favourite of museum visitors. 

A Mercedes 'Staatskarosse' or State Coach built by Daimler-Benz for Adolph Hitler.

This example was captured by men of the 20th Armoured Division on May 4, 1945.

Used briefly as transport by an American general, the car had its engine replaced

but arrived in the U.S. relatively intact. Arrows indicate bullet damaged glass and a

white star painted atop the convertible roof that helped authenticate the war trophy.

One of the myths perpetuated  for decades was that the armoured glass on the car

was damaged by testing at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Photo's taken at Boston in

August 1945 documented the fact that damage occurred prior to leaving Germany.

Several armoured limousines and staff cars, vehicles issued by the state to Adolph Hitler and Hermann Goering, were captured by men of the 20th Armoured Division and the 101st Airborne Division in early 1945.  Most young American males were, and are "car crazy," so it was quite natural that they would seize prestige automobiles wherever found. The "Goering car" was found loaded on a rail flatcar and before abandonment someone put a burst or two into it, ruining the armoured glass on the front passenger side and leaving bullets embedded here and there. From the beginning this car, a model known as a Grosser Mercedes  770 W  150, was mis-attributed to Goering,  senior military leader and second in state authority.  Moreover, as Hitler was dead and burned, while Goering had been captured, the latter was frequently in the news and his personal property was equally newsworthy.  When it off-loaded in Boston a local paper, THE DAILY GLOBE, ran the crude headline "Goering's Auto Bullet Proof to protect Fat Marshal's Hide".   Such digs were very common in 1945, but to be fair, had the table been turned and the Wehrmacht overrun Washington,  German headlines might have read "Roosevelt's Limo   armoured to protect his crippled ass".  Hate cuts both ways.

Two Nazi vehicles were used to sell U.S. War Bonds in 1945, but in the rush

to parade the trophies across America, one car was attributed to the wrong

German leader... and as a result in 1956 a Canadian collector ultimately scooped 

up one of Adolph Hitler's armoured state coaches for less than $6,000.  

"Goering's car" was given the royal treatment, including another coat of paint, and the men who captured it were rewarded with some plum duty.  They were assigned to accompany two "bullet proof" Nazi  (several had been captured including everything in the garages under Hitler's mountain retreat) on a cross country blitz to sell U.S. War Bonds.  The following year "Goering's car" was used in a recruiting campaign and then suddenly the U.S. Army had no further use for it. The Mercedes fell into the custody of the Property Disposal Office which put it into storage for nearly ten years. In 1956 a Montreal car collector saw a notice that the vehicle was up for public auction and he acquired it for $2,725. Fortunately his $5,000 of restoration efforts were careful to maintain the integrity of the artifact. For example he opted to leave the shattered glass in place and the car's odometer was left pegged  where it jammed in May of 1945.

In 1974, during  the commemoration of the 30th Anniversary of D-Day, the C.W.M.  put two of Hitler's paintings on display, but nothing fired the imagination of the public like "the Goering staff car" which the museum did not even believe had belonged to Hermann Goering. Also that year the museum provided pictures and text for an article in the British magazine AFTER THE BATTLE.  Entitled "Hermann Goering's Mercedes Benz" the piece repeated several of the myths and errors which museum staff had never even believed. Still, serious investigation of the artifact was put off by one excuse after another but finally in 1980 staff got serious, and the first thing they did was remove the paint which had obscured the original registration plate, which bore a number issued to Berlin, and it was not a military registration.  It could not have been issued to the Luftwaffe.  

Ludwig Kosche was the librarian at the Canadian War Museum and he also had an M.A. in History. He was also German and certainly the man to finally solve the mystery.  The car had been delivered to the Reich Chancellory in 1940 and it was for Hitler's use.  Kosche accomplished in a few short months what the curators and staff historians had failed to do in the preceding decade, and in so doing he transformed a popular exhibit into the Museum's most popular display item. While we Canadian's honour our heroes, the truth is that  a medal group issued to a Victoria Cross recipient can never attract as much attention as one of the sleek "chariots" Hitler often stood erect in as he passed before his people or his troops.

AFTER THE BATTLE is one of my favourite history magazines and clearly it is well regarded by the staff of our national war museum.  No sooner had Ludwig Kosche completed his research than he submitted a highly detailed article which completely recants all that had been provided by a C.W.M. staffer in 1974.   True, there were a few outstanding mysteries, such as the current whereabouts of two other armoured limousines which were imported into the U.S. in 1945, but the file on the museum's acquisition was finally complete.

The research article written by Ludwig Kosche, and published in 

AFTER THE BATTLE  No. 35, 1982 provided conclusive evidence linking

the armoured Mercedes limo to the Reich Chancellory and Adolph Hitler.

The armoured "Grosser" Mercedes-Benz limousine was just one of eight delivered for Adolph Hitler's personal use, but it witnessed some incredibly significant events, all itemized in the Kosche article.  It is undeniably Canada's greatest war trophy, and this opinion has been tested in the court of public opinion. When historian Jack Granatstein  was named Director General of the Museum in 1998 he was interviewed by CBC Television. When the interviewer, an Ottawa local, was queried about his own knowledge of the C.W.M. he admitted the Hitler car was the only artifact he could remember.

JACK GRANATSTEIN'S   NEO-NAZI  FANTASY
Jack Granatstein was still a York University lecturer, when in 1994 he was asked to appear on CBC Television coverage of the 50th Anniversary of D-Day.  He was also chosen for VE Day special coverage in 1995.  From that point on he cultivated a media persona and was seen regularly on national broadcasts. He re-appeared on CBC not only for the 60th and 65th veterans anniversaries  but became a daily fixture on television screens during the unprecedented and exhausting Somalia Inquiry  and throughout the period of Canada's involvement in the Iraq War.

Two years after taking the helm at the War Museum, Granatstein floated the idea of the C.W.M. selling the Hitler vehicle and using the proceeds to build a new museum facility. He "guessed" the car might fetch $20 million at auction. According to a report in the OTTAWA CITIZEN the Director's intentions were noble. "Adolph Hitler's bulletproof Mercedes limousine should be removed from Canada's War Museum because it glorifies the evils of Nazism and sends the wrong message to visitors, says the museum's chief." (Feb. 2, 2000) Granatstein had a further worry, which was described as "a horrible dilemma".  "If we put it up at auction, we can't control who buys it. This car would be such a powerful icon for a neo-Nazi or extreme group. If it fell into the wrong hands, we would feel very foolish, and worse. The possible consequences are frightening."

In the end the C.W.M. got to keep all of Hitler's mojo for itself. The neo-Nazis, if they existed, never ever had a chance of offering their $$millions for the Mercedes, because a vocal Canadian public wanted to keep our prize war trophy.  The outcry was so intense  that only one week later Granatstein was forced to backtrack because, it was reported, "selling the car would fly in the face of public opinion".   The CBC News report further stated - "The car has been the most popular exhibit at the museum for 30 years."