Hitler Was Not GQ

Mads, my Norwegian companion, and I were up late one night watching TV. We had just finished a movie, Kurosawa's film rendition of the Gorky play The Lower Depths, and Mads was switching through the channels. He stopped on our local access station.

The show was in black and white. There was this guy at a make-shift podium speaking in front of what seemed to be a small, exclusive audience, all wearing World War II period clothing. He was smoking a cigarette, and his face looked like Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger's, and he had on this slightly worn, yet very stylish, knit sweater. On the right sleeve was a Nazi arm band. It took me a second to understand what was going on, but this man behind the podium was supposed to be Hitler.

One major telling point missing was Hitler's trademark moustache, which this person didn't have. He was also dubbed a in gruff American voice, and spoke more like Alan Ginsberg than the fiery orator one usually associates with Hitler.

"Did you hear the news?" The dubbed voice said as the man spoke. "Brazil and Poland just signed a non-aggression treaty."

The crowd loved it. The show then cut to a montage of this man in different shots, all wearing the same clothes, all smoking cigarettes. Sometimes he would have an overcoat with the collar turned up to protect his neck from the cold. There was one where the sweater was draped over a chair at a kitchen table, with him on the other side in a white undershirt slumped in another chair, a half-drunken bottle of Jaegermeister next to an ashtray in front of him. His head was rested on the hand holding the cigarette, and his hair was all rumpled.

Over the montage a man with a British accent talked about the impeccable style Hitler had, and how this stylishness is one of the least known things about the genocidal dictator. Mads turned off the TV.

"Hitler was not GQ."