After refusing to yank an ad in which Adolf Hitler extols a shampoo brand’s masculine virtues, Istanbul-based advertising agency MARKA confirmed today that the commercial for Biomen “would not be aired again and had also been removed from the company‘s web site,” according to EuropeOnline.
In the commercial, which had aired on Turkish television, der Fuhrer gesticulates wildly while a gruff, dubbed-in voice harangues viewers that “If you’re not wearing women’s clothes, you shouldn’t be using women’s shampoo either. Here it is. A real man’s shampoo. Biomen. Real men use Biomen.”
It looks as though there might be another site added to the Polish Holocaust tourism trail. According to Reuters, Poland is searching for someone to spruce up the Wolf’s Lair, in the northeast of the country, near the Russian border, and open it up to the public.
“Wolf’s Lair” was the code name for Adolf Hitler’s heavily fortified bunker complex, where Hitler and his top officers were protected from bombardment during Operation Barbarossa, otherwise known as the German invasion of Russia. The fortress, which was built in 1940-1941, had its own power plant and railway station. The German forces destroyed it as they retreated in early 1945.
Many of us have saved old letters and cards that were sent to us by family members and close friends when we were children. Some of us even have scrapbooks filled with old “Welcome Baby” notes and birthday cards that our parents compiled as keepsakes.
But only Dennis Helms has such a greeting written on Adolf Hitler’s personal stationery. The CIA recently acquired and put on display a note that Helms’ father, Richard (then an OSS officer) wrote from Germany to his three-year-old son back home on May 8, 1945 (Victory in Europe Day).
You don’t have to be a fan of the U.S. banking system to realize that credit default swaps are not the same as gas chambers and the gulag.
Or so you would think. But celebrity chef Mario Batali evidently doesn’t see that distinction, having compared American bankers to both Hitler and Stalin while participating in a panel discussion yesterday about Time magazine’s next Person of the Year.
“The ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed and taken most of it into their hands is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys,” the TV chef and restaurateur remarked, in comments that were published on Forbes’ website. Asked after the discussion whether he stood by the statement, Batali told Forbes writer Jeff Bercovici, “Oh, that was just a metaphor.”
The controversy about the sale of Nazi memorabilia continues. Just months after Josef Mengele’s diaries were purchased by an anonymous American Orthodox Jew who says he may loan them to Yad Vashem, and days after Hitler’s Gemlich letter went on display at the Museum of Tolerance, it has been announced that an auction of some of Hitler’s personal effects is set to take place this month in Germany.
Some are questioning the decency of private individuals benefiting financially from the sale of such items. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, reportedly called the auction “ a stain on modern-day Germany.” He was also quoted as saying, “As we at the European Jewish Congress try and preserve the memory and historic lessons of this dark period, these types of events are completely counterproductive and damaging toward educating younger Germans and Europeans about the Holocaust.”
A letter typed and signed by Adolf Hitler in 1919, and thought to be his first written comments calling for the annihilation of the Jews, is now on display at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The document, known as the Gemlich letter, was purchased by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for $150,000 and revealed to the public this past June.
Hitler was a soldier in the German army when he wrote the letter. After being wounded during World War I, he was assigned to a propaganda unit in Munich run by Karl Mayr. Mayr asked Hitler to write a response to one Adolf Gemlich’s request for a clarification on the army’s position on “the Jewish question.”
Be careful with those Hitler analogies, America.
Hank Williams, Jr., the guy who performs the “Monday Night Football” theme song, saw the anthem dropped by ESPN last night after he compared President Obama to the Nazi dictator on Fox News.
In an interview on “Fox and Friends,” Williams remarked that the recent “golf summit” between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner was “like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu.”
Displaying a statue of Hitler strikes the Shmooze as an inherently bad idea — and sure enough, the one at Madame Tussauds in London is causing problems.
England’s Zionist Federation has asked the wax-statue museum to alter its Hitler figure, suggesting it be made to look more “vulnerable,” or posed in a way that prevents visitors from posing next to it.
The request comes after complaints by Israeli tourists who were upset to see other Madame Tussauds visitors giving the Nazi salute to the wax dictator. The Zionist Federation has made clear that it is not protesting the museum’s right to display a Hitler statue, but that it would prefer it be done in a different manner.
A lot of people don’t like Kanye West — which apparently makes him feel like Hitler.
“I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street and people look at me like I’m [expletive] insane, like I’m Hitler,” the rapper and awards-show hijacker told fans last night at a concert in England. “One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did.”
The Hitler comparison drew “light boos” from the crowd, according to a write-up in Australia’s Telegraph.
Good news for crazy Danish director Lars von Trier, who definitely doesn’t admire Hitler: his latest film, “Melancholia,” will celebrate its North American premiere in September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Toronto screening will offer something of a fresh start for “Melancholia,” which temporarily stole the show at the Cannes Film Festival in May, after von Trier said he “understand[s] Hitler” during a bizarre monologue that got him kicked out of the festival.
There’s nothing like a carefree luxury vacation where you visit Dachau, eat a Bavarian dinner at the beer hall where Hitler unveiled the 25-point Nazi party program, and drop by Wannsee, the elegant lakeside residence where the Holocaust was planned.
At least that’s the idea behind Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: The Face of Evil, an eight-day, $3,200 “historical tour” which “covers the entire sobering story of Nazi Germany — from the Nazi party’s birth in the smoky beerhalls of 1919 Munich to the Third Reich’s protracted death, amidst the ruins and despair of 1945 Berlin,” according to the website of U.K. tour operator Historical Trips.
Just as a whole new generation of kids is about to be introduced to those little blue creatures called Smurfs by a big Hollywood movie to be released this summer, a French writer and professor is warning parents that taking the tykes to the Cineplex might not be such a great idea. According to Antoine Bueno, things are not quite as they might seem in Smurf Village.
In this cute, imaginary, cartoon world, Bueno perceives a cover for a fascist, totalitarian state with racist, sexist and anti-Semitic practices and messages. Bueno is not the first to suggest such ideas, but until now, they were merely the rants of fringe voices from various corners of the Internet. With the professor’s publication this month of his “Le Petit Livre Bleu” (Little Blue Book), these theories appear to be going mainstream.
So that’s what “master race” meant.
A new book contends the Nazis attempted “to breed an army of educated dogs that could read, write and talk,” Time reports under the surely unprecedented headline “How Nazi Scientists Tried to Create an Army of Talking Dogs.”
In Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities, Cardiff University historian Jan Bondeson “mines obscure German periodicals” to discover “scientists envisioned a day when dogs would serve alongside German troops, and perhaps free up SS officers by guarding concentration camps.”
Hitler even set up a Tier-Sprechschule – “Animal Talking School” – near Hanover, Time reports, and recruited “educated dogs” from throughout the country.
“Teachers claimed a number of incredible findings,” says Time. An Airedale terrier named Rolf who could spell by tapping his paw on a board “mused on religion, learned foreign languages and even asked a noblewoman, ‘Can you wag your tail?’” Rolf apparently told his German masters he wanted to serve in the German army because he disliked the French. Another canine barked “Mein Fuhrer” when asked to describe Hitler, Time reports. “And Don, a German pointer, is said to have imitated a human voice to bark, ‘Hungry! Give me cakes!’ in German.”
“Part of the Nazi philosophy was that there was a strong bond between humans and nature. They believed a good Nazi should be an animal friend,” author Bondeson tells time. Perversely, when the Nazis started interning Jews, “newspapers were flooded with outraged letters from Germans wondering what had happened to the pets they left behind.”
After causing a stir at the Cannes Film Festival this morning, Danish director Lars von Trier has issued an apology, clarifying that he is a weirdo — but not a Hitler-admiring weirdo.
The festival’s organizers also issued a press release, saying they were disturbed von Trier’s remarks — apparently poorly delivered jokes — that “I understand Hitler” and “I am a Nazi.”
The press release included von Trier’s apology, in which he wrote, “I am not anti-Semitic or racially prejudiced in any way, nor am I a Nazi.”
The famously eccentric von Trier, the winner of Cannes prizes in past years for films including “Dancer in the Dark” and “Breaking the Waves,” made today’s comments after being asked about his family’s German background. (The director himself was born in Denmark in 1956.)
“For a long time I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew. Then I met Susanne Bier and I wasn’t so happy,” he said, referring to the Danish-Jewish filmmaker who won an Oscar earlier this year for the Danish movie “In a Better World.”
As The Shmooze has already observed, the people of the United Kingdom have a habit of seeing Hitler in odd places — from the facade of Welsh houses to their own pet cats.
Now a small-town politician has spotted the Nazi leader — or at least his mustache — on one of his own political posters, leading to a minor controversy in Pitcombe, Somerset, a hamlet west of London.
Town councillor Mark Beech complained to police about the poster, which featured his own face and was later adorned with a Hitler mustache by an unknown vandal. Using the Public Order Act as justification, investigators made “house-to-house inquiries” at each of the town’s 20 residences, the Telegraph reported, an investigation derided by locals as “an outrageous waste of police and taxpayers’ money.”
This week’s unofficial theme is turning out to be Things That Look Like Hitler.
Following Tuesday’s frenzy over a house in Wales that (supposedly) resembles the dictator, today brings a cat that bears his likeness.
Once again, the doppelganger comes from the UK: The Guardian has posted a photo of a feline bearing a suspicious-looking moustache, a cat we can only assume has nefarious plans for the Rhineland.
Someone call the Simon Wiesenthal Center: Hitler has been spotted in Wales!
Well, not Hitler, exactly, but his likeness — in the form, if you can believe, of a two-story house. A 22-year-old in Swansea noted the resemblance between the suburban home and the German dictator during a routine traffic stop, then set off a media frenzy by tweeting an image of the house.
Sure enough, with its slanting rooftop “hairline” and above-door “mustache,” the house looks a little like the fuhrer. (You know, if he were, um, a house.)
The Sun quotes a resident as saying he wasn’t aware of the Hitler look-alike in his midst, telling the paper, “You’d never know from this side of the street, but from a bit of a distance, it could almost be him. How funny that I never even noticed before.”
Hitler’s girlfriend apparently loved a film focused on the struggle to maintain Jewish tradition.
A recently released photo now making the rounds online shows Eva Braun in 1937, in an image the dictator’s mistress titled “Al Jolson and Me.” Internet chatter about the picture has focused on Braun’s use of blackface, citing it as further evidence of the Nazi leadership’s racism.
But what online commenters have largely neglected is that the image is a tribute to “The Jazz Singer,” the 1927 Hollywood classic about Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson), a Jewish man disowned by his family after he pursues a career in jazz rather than follow in the professional footsteps of his father, a cantor. The first feature-length “talkie,” the movie depicts Jewish life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, including a Yom Kippur service and songs titled “Kol Nidre” and “Kaddish.”
John Galliano could be headed from the fashion house to the big house.
French prosecutors have confirmed they’ll press charges against the disgraced designer, who was fired from Christian Dior this week after the release of a video that showed him launching an anti-Semitic tirade at a Paris cafe last fall. Galliano told shocked onlookers, “I love Hitler,” and that their relatives would have been “f—ing gassed” by the Nazis.”
So much for that defamation suit.
Fashion designer John Galliano is now in even deeper trouble after being arrested last week in Paris for an anti-Semitic tirade. (Anti-Semitic speech is illegal in France). England’s Sun newspaper posted video of the rant online today, with the clip immediately going viral, and contradicting Galliano’s denials last week about the incident.
Galliano, who initially threatened a defamation suit against his victims, will now have to explain footage that shows him proclaiming, “I love Hitler” and telling his targets, not unhappily, that if history had worked out differently, “People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f—ing gassed.”
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