Number 862


The death(s) of Hitler


I've posted several stories this year featuring Hitler as a character. Many stories I post were published during World War II, with Hitler being the object of venomous hatred. Even years after the war it wasn't clear what had happened to Hitler. History tells us he killed himself and his body was burned. But it became the subject of fiction: what really happened to Hitler? Did he escape to set up another Nazi threat?

This story from Quality Comics' T-Man #6, 1952, gives us yet another version of that fantasy. Pete Drake, the T-Man himself, even gets to kill the man who is Hitler. All in a day's work for a dedicated agent of the United States government.

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The revenge fantasy persists, even with as unlikely a scenario as Hitler machine-gunned by a member of an elite Jewish-American military team. The screen captures are from Inglourious Basterds.


In real life Hitler wanted to avoid being captured alive, and he didn't want his body paraded by his conquerors. Photographs of the corpse of his ally, Mussolini, circulated. Those pictures showing Il Duce with his mistress, their bodies strung upside down by their own people, was a good incentive for Hitler to deny his enemies that satisfaction. But we manufacture satisfaction. That's what fiction is for.