The painting of a man in a hat and cap is a classic.
This is not an exaggeration, especially in Germany, where the hats and caps of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are so common.
Hitler himself once remarked that “A hat, a cap, a hat are all that I can think of in order to paint the image of a Jew.”
The artist, Adolf Eichmann, was executed by hanging in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
The painting, a portrait of Goebbel, was found by a prisoner of war.
It was in the possession of an American military prisoner, James A. Glynn, who had been sent to the camp as a spy.
Glynn was a decorated veteran and was captured on April 24, 1945, just four days after Hitler was executed.
He later became a German POW in the United States.
Glyn’s captors asked Glynn to paint Hitler, to which Glynn agreed.
Greece, then in ruins, was a refuge for Nazis.
The painting was then used as a canvas to create Hitler’s iconic “Mein Kampf.”
Glynn had been ordered to make Hitler look like an eagle in the painting, and Hitler wore a helmet that covered his face.
Hitler had painted the portrait on canvas for the Allies in a similar fashion, and in 1945, the Allies liberated Greece from Nazi occupation.
The Nazi’s used the same technique on many of the other paintings, including “The Night of the Long Knives,” “The Final Solution,” “Sieg Heil,” “My Struggle” and many others.