Springtime For Hitler

"The colour scheme throughout this bright, airy chalet is light jade green. The Führer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect... [Hitler] has a passion about cut flowers in his home."

And he is seldom alone in his mountain hideaway, as he "delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, musicians and singers. As host, he is a droll raconteur... "

Oh, and look who's practising his archery in the garden: "It is strange to watch the burly Field-Marshal Göering, as chief of the most formidable airforce in Europe, taking a turn with the bow-and-arrow at straw targets of 25 yards range."

Looks like finding old magazine articles and posting them on the web is becoming quite a trend. The story that developed around this one is interesting (and perhaps bizarre) in its own right, and amongst other things involves copyright issues and demonstrates that no generation has a monopoly on embarassing commentary and/or foolish behavior.

From The Guardian article:

November 1938 was two years after Hitler had occupied the Rhineland and six months after "union" with Austria. He had just taken Czechoslovakia and Germany was weeks away from the horrors of Kristallnacht. Yet here was a British interiors magazine treating the architect of all this as if he were the Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen of his day.

I scanned the pages of the article, and put them up on my (not frequently visited) weblog. Nothing really happened, and I forgot about it. In August, I revamped my weblog, and wrote about the software I was using in the pages of Guardian Online. I also gave a bit of prominence again on my site to the Hitler scans. Within a week or so, I noticed I was getting about 10,000 page impressions a day on the Hitler pages. Given that I was used to about 300 on a good day on the whole site, this was quite remarkable. I emailed Isobel McKenzie-Price, the editor of Homes and Gardens, which is now published by the Time Warner-owned publishing giant, IPC. I told her about the piece, asked if she or anyone there knew anything about it, and whether they had any other copies.

Two weeks later, I received an email from McKenzie-Price saying: "This piece, text and photographs is still in copyright and any unauthorised reproduction is an infringement of copyright. In the circumstances I must request you to remove this article from your website."

It gets even better. Read it all; enjoy!