Reform
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
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George Orwell
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)
No one perhaps has done as much as the British writer who calls himself George Orwell to persuade former fellow-travelers that their ways lie in some direction other than the Stalinist party line.
So begin the first two paragraphs of this book review that are devoted to the anti-totalitarian elements that animated the creative side of the writer George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair: 1903 – 1950). The novel that is reviewed herein, Coming Up for Air, was originally published in 1939 and was reviewed by Pathfinder Magazine to mark the occasion of the book’s first American printing in 1950.
San Francisco: 1906
(Collier’s Magazine, 1956)
These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother’s face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white.
‘Why I Live in Los Angeles”
(Pageant Magazine, 1950)
An article written at a time when L.A. was a very different city – with a population of merely ten million, the city’s detractors often called it Iowa by the sea; today they compare it to the Balkans:
The point is that in [1950] Los Angeles the individual leads his own life and plays his own games rather than lose himself vicariously in the capers of professionals.
Click here to read about the San Fernando Valley.
Adolf Hitler and Women
(Click Magazine, 1939)
This article about Adolf Hitler and women appeared on the newsstands two months prior the start of the Second World War, when the world learned how evil a man the lunatic truly was. The journalist wanted to confirm that there was no truth to the 1939 rumor that Hitler was dead and quickly began musing about other rumors:
More feasible is the theory that the sexless madman of Naziland is still alive and has merely discovered that he gets a vicarious thrill out of having women around him and likes to watch acrobatic dance routines.
Photographed in this article is Frau Scholtz-Klink, who had been dubbed the perfect Nazi woman by the Reichfuehrer, in addition to three curvy American burlesque dancers who performed before Hitler.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.
Production Delays
(PM Tabloid, 1940)
The week the French Army collapsed was the week Hollywood experienced the greatest number of production delays. Studio wags believed it was an indicator as to just how many European refugees were employed on their stages. Studio bosses banned all radio and newspapers from their properties in hopes that each production would maintain their respective schedules.
The Taboos
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Radio executives hated any controversy – as you will see in the attached list of subjects all writers and broadcasters were instructed to veer away from at all cost.
The Rangers of Pointe du Hoc
(Collier’s Magazine, 1954)
The triumphs of the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion on the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day stand as a testament to the superb combat leadership skills of Lt. Colonel James E. Rudder (1910 – 1970), who is the subject of the attached article. As a participant in the planning the Allied invasion of Normandy, General Omar Bradley recognized that the German heavy guns situated above and between the Omaha and Utah beaches had to be silenced if the landings were to be successful; Bradley selected Rudder and his group to do the job, later remarking that this order was the most difficult he had ever, in his entire career, given anybody.
Written ten years after that historic day, this article is about Rudder’s return to Omaha Beach with his young son, and his recollections of the battle that was fought.
A good read; an even more in-depth study regarding the assault on Pointe du Hoc can be found at Amazon: Rudder’s Rangers.
More about Rangers can be read here…
‘Anger at Nazi Atrocities”
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
During the closing weeks of the war it was estimated that the Germans lorded over as many as 65,000 American POWs. Likewise, in the United States, there were 320,118 German Prisoners of War held captive. This article compares and contrasts how each army chose to treat their prisoners.
Nazi Infiltrators
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
The greatest deception deployed by the German Army during the the Ardennes Offensive was to parachute Nazi commandos into the American lines – men who had been raised in the U.S. and spoke the language well. They wore American uniforms and performed heinous acts of sabotage, and as this article spells out, lured many GIs to their deaths.
Two of these Germans attempted to kidnap and assassinate General Eisenhower, click here to read about it…
The Malmedy Massacre
(Yank Magazine, 1945)
Attached is a stirring collection of eyewitness accounts by the American survivors of the Malmedy Massacre (December 17, 1944) that took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
The German officer in the car stood up, took deliberate aim with a pistol at an American medical officer in the front rank of the prisoners and fired. As the medical officer fell, the Germans fired again and another American dropped. Immediately two tanks at the end of the field opened up with their machine guns on the defenseless prisoners…
By thew war’s end it was revealed that 43% of American prisoners of war had died in Japanese camps; by contrast, 1% had died in German POW camps.
Click here to read about the Nazi murder of an American Jewish P.O.W.
Nightmare At Stalag IXB
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
On April 2, 1945, elements of the American First Army liberated a German prison camp adjacent to the little town of Orb, Germany:
What they found there appalled even the toughest GI and seemed to demonstrate that in some cases at least the Germans had treated British and American prisoners of war as badly as any of the pitiful slave laborers.
A Woman’s Place Within the Third Reich
(Collier’s Magazine, 1933)
One of the kindest things you could possibly say about the Nazis is that they were sexists – and if you wanted to back your thesis up with anecdotes, facts and figures, you would read the attached article from 1933:
To say that woman’s place is in the home is understatement, so far as Adolf Hitler is concerned. Certainly she’s not to be allowed in the library. Intellectual life, as well as all business and legal affairs, is a purely masculine enterprise in the Third Reich. And the women, most of them, in hysterical devotion to their leader, obey. Mr. Quentin Reynolds, in a series of brilliant pictures, presents the women of modern Germany; triumphant and desperate.
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…
Only Über-Blondes Need Apply…(Ken Magazine, 1938)
This article covers a weird Nazi scheme to create the future rulers of the Reich. It is such a bizarre plan and it seemed to us that if it weren’t true, we would have had to rely on Robert Ludlum to dream it up for us:
The idea took root in the fertile brain of Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, also known as the ‘Limping Devil’…’Heroes are both born and trained’, is the Nazi slogan. The future leaders are taken under the government’s wings at the age of ten.’
-and over a period of about twelve years they would have been dragged around from one Harry Potter-style-castle to another being schooled in Nazi dogma and all other assorted Nordic pagan weirdness and then, after having jumped through a number of additional Teutonic hoops, they would be posted in top government positions.
A fascinating look into the queer thinking of the Nazi hierarchy.
A second article about the Adolf Hitler Schools can be read here
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…
Life in Hitlerland
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
It’s a prison or a concentration camp if they catch you tuned in on a forbidden radio program in Hitlerland. And they will take your driver’s license away if even once you are overheard making a careless or joking remark that could be interpreted as ‘out of sympathy with the spirit of the new state’. So even in the apparently private little world bounded by the turning wheels of your own closed car, you must think long and hard like a badgered witness under cross-examination, before you dare open your mouth…
Click here to read what life was like in Mussolini’s Italy in 1938…
Nazi Indoctrination: the Eighth Grade
(Ken Magazine, 1939)
Five months before the Second World War began an American journalist paid a visit to a German middle school and watched an eighth grade German history pageant; these are his observations:
Sitting in Germany’s schoolrooms are 20 million boys and girls. It is the custom, in democratic countries, to think that Hitler is engaged in pulling wool, or at least some cheap non-import substitute for it, over their eyes every school day.
For two years , for instance, all German boys and girls have been exposed to the following clear-cut lesson:
‘Where e’er I gaze, as German,
My soul with pain o’erflows,
I see the German nation
Girt round and round with foes.’
Click here to read about the Allied effort to re-educate the German boy soldiers of W.W. II.
More Laws for the Germans
(Literary Digest, 1936)
With no check of legislative body or court, the Nazi triumvirate had decreed that smuggling money or shares out of Germany, and failure to bring into Germany money from goods sold abroad, should be punishable by death.Today shadows have fallen upon the once-proud German universities. The professors have been forced out of the temples of learning or driven into exile or subjected to a subtle pressure which has changed their academic detachment into clumsy conformity with Hitler’s ideals.
Click here to read Hitler’s plan for German youth.
The Nazi School System
(Click Magazine, 1940)
German school children in Bad Wilsnack as elsewhere look like American kids, study the same arithmetic, discuss the same current events in a regular ‘press period’. But they sneer at democracy and tolerance, deliver serious, bitter impassioned orations in regular Fuhrer style against liberty and freedom…Youth is not youth, but a servant of the state.