Word: nazi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mourners at his funeral (where a photographer got slugged for being "disrespectful"); a Hollywood extortionist waiting on a street corner for money from Actress Betty Grable, getting caught by agents disguised as gardeners. There were absorbing glimpses of malefactors from George ("Machine-Gun") Kelly to Fritz Kuhn and his Nazi German-American Bund, as well as behind-the-scenes sleuthing heroes at work in the FBI's Quantico, Va. laboratories. From secret files came a sequence of rare excitement. Filmed by G-men through a transparent mirror in his office wall, it showed German Spy Frederick Joubert Duquesne clandestinely...
...Schicklgruber-Hitler was delighted and Naziism began to take shape. That, at any rate, is the way Ernst ("Putzi") Hanfstaengl tells it. A sometime Harvard student (his grandmother was a New England Sedgwick) and longtime Hitler crony, Putzi* began supporting the Nazi Party in 1922 and labored to make it palatable to Germany's "best people...
...pranced up and down the room like a drum majorette." The "Rah, rah, rah!" refrain of Harvardmen, by Putzi's account, became the thunderous "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" of the Brownshirt demonstrations. Storm Trooper bands blared their goose-step rhythms with a between-halves unison. Such Nazi slogans as Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer were patterned on the effective use of catch phrases in U.S. election campaigns. As Hitler's "American expert," Putzi modestly admits: "I suppose I must take my share of the blame...
Hitler was also a tremendous orator with a droning voice whose hypnotic effect "has never been equaled," and Putzi Hanfstaengl dreamed of becoming the power behind the drone. With a quality of mind that Germans call dummschlau-a combination of cunning and stupidity-he thought he could use the Nazi barbarians to defeat the domestic Communists and Socialists, and then craftily make sure that Hitler's "revolution" would be orderly and beneficial...
...Hindsight. In 1937, a badly-scared Hanfstaengl fled Germany, convinced that the Nazi "wild men" were about to kill him. He spent World War II shuttling between British detention camps and the U.S., now lives in Munich...