This short story from an Atlas horror comic shows a craven Hitler after years in hell. Adolf tries to get some historical figures to vouch for him, telling the devil he was really a good man, so he can get out of hell.
The ending originally puzzled me. He finally calls on someone named “Joe” for help. Who the hell is Joe? I thought perhaps it was Joseph Goebbels, but Goebbels died in 1945 and had probably been stoking the fiery furnaces ever since. Then I hit on Joseph Stalin. That gave me pause. If ever there were true enemies, Stalin and Hitler fit the definition of enemies. I’ll stick with Stalin because it seems right to me, although I am not sure. Stalin died on May 1, 1953, and the date on the comic book is August, 1953. So it was big news that year, and perhaps the writer jumped on the idea. Basically, the last dialogue in the story, for me, that is, seems to point to Joe Stalin. Which only leaves why Hitler would want to implore Stalin to tell the devil that Hitler was a good guy.
The story is from Adventures Into Weird Worlds #21 (1953), with Sam Kweskin's signature for the artwork.
5 comments:
It was the height of the Red Scare. They'd do anything to bash the USSR then.
Yes, Joe must be Stalin, even with the terrible flaw in the logic that you note, and even though the story then suggests that Stalin, by virtue of being so terrible, got to rule in Hell and even to direct the torture of the man who had once strangely charmed him and then betrayed him.
Alec Ryrie, a scholar of religion, has made the fascinating point that our culture, as it abandoned traditional religion, widely adopted the device of defining evil in terms of Naziism. That is why normative discussions of social policy so often swiftly move to references to Hitler or to Nazis more generally; these references are not so much a cheap device as an attempt to use an implicitly agreed benchmark, which for many people is not merely agreed but functions as their foundation.
(Of course, a very real problem is that Naziism is also widely misunderstood and mischaracterized, so that some of the same folk accusing their opponents of being like Nazis are themselves pushing policies and programmes very much like those of the Nazis. And, even if everyone were well informed of the theory and practice of National Socialism, we need a far better understanding of morality than an axiom that Naziism is evil.)
I wouldn't attempt to identify the most terrible person in history; I don't think that the set is well ordered; and, even if it were, the problem would be very difficult and without any clear benefit to reaching an answer. One thing that I certainly would not try to do would be to defend Alexander son of Philippos, Gaius Iulius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte.
Will, anyone born in the Baby Boomer era should remembers the Red Scare, and ducking under chairs to practice safety for when an atom bomb was dropped on us. I remember a teacher telling the class, "It's not if the Russians will drop an atom bomb on us, It's WHEN!" That caused me a few nightmares.
Pappy, ditto. Our house in the late '60s had a bomb shelter built by the previous owner.
Daniel, people are calling other people Nazis all the time. It helps the argument that there are people walking around in America with swastikas on their sleeves and waving flags with that same symbol.
As for Stalin, I saw a documentary that claimed Hitler wanted his corpse burned because he feared being captured by the Russians, even as a corpse.
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