The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Here’s your bizarre story of the week: William Hakvaag, director of a war museum in northern Norway, has claimed that he has discovered three cartoons supposedly penned by a rather feeble artist who is better known for turning his artistic energies into other arenas such as global domination and genocide – Adolf Hitler. According to a report from Reuters Hakvaag bought a painting signed “A. Hitler” at an auction in Germany for $300; inside he discovered three cartoons based on – of all things – Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and another based on Pinocchio;the Snow White cartoons are supposedly signed “A.H.”

Hakvaag is convinced he has discovered genuine cartoon doodles by the Nazi dictator and to have had tests performed to verify the date (allegedly thought to be around 1940), commenting that Hitler loved the original Disney cartoon: “I am 100 percent sure that these are drawings by Hitler…If one wanted to make a forgery, one would never hide it in the back of a picture, where it might never be discovered.” Oh well, that’s convinced me utterly… This obviously raises the spectre of the Hitler diaries which were bought for large sums of money by German and British papers, authenticated by historians like Hugh Trevor Roper and then humiliatingly exposed as crude fakes.

(I didn’t see any images of the alleged Hitler cartoons, so instead here’s a still from “Der Bonker” by the superb German illustrator Walter Moers showing Hitler singing in the loo; you can see the rest on YouTube)

Since which point people have generally been more reticent in making bold claims about finding lost Hitler documentation, understandably. That incident seriously damaged the reputation of Roper, an expert in the period who had previously written the fascinating history book The Last Days of Hitler, based on his own research for British Intelligence in 1945 when the Soviets were feeding misinformation to the West suggesting Hitler was alive and on the loose. Without independent analysis and verification of the alleged Hitler cartoons I’d imagine most of us will be more than a little sceptical about simply accepting Mr Hakvaag’s word on their authenticity. If by some bizarre chance they did prove to be genuine though I’m really not sure how I’d feel about it – the history buff in me is intrigued but the emotional side of me is repulsed at the thought of anything created by that odious being. On a related subject, can I interest anyone in some cartoons I found at a car boot sale recently which I believe are genuine Leonardo Da Vinci doodles clearly showing he came up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles centuries before we first same them? Anyone?