Hitler's Hoffmann

Out of the photographic establishments of Herr Professor Heinrich Hoffmann in Berlin, Munich and Vienna last week poured thousands of big & little pictures of big little Adolf Hitler, to adorn the walls of the new German subjects of Bohemia, Moravia and Memel. It is an unwritten law of Greater Germany that every household, office, factory and assembly room must show a picture of Der Fuehrer, and Heinrich Hoffmann is Germany's official Reichsbildberichterstatter, or Photographic Reporter of the Reich.

When Hitler enters a fallen province or city, or appears anywhere in public, Photographic Reporter Hoffmann rides in the car behind him. Armed with a Leica camera, Bildberichterstatter Hoffmann darts back & forth in front of the Fuehrer unmolested, while other photographers are kept at a respectful distance. The world's news agencies clamor for Heinrich Hoffmann's pictures, for he is the man who picks the photographers to cover everything the Aggrandizer does, and for the best jobs he picks himself.

Barrel-built, barrel-headed Herr Hoffmann came by his titles and his monopoly by joining the Nazis in 1919 and publishing a series of propaganda picture books with such Rover Boys titles as With Hitler Over Germany, Youth About Hitler, Hitler in His Mountains, etc. In 1934 Hitler made him party photographer; in 1937, a Professor, a title which in Germany no more denotes pedagogy than it does on the U. S. vaudeville stage. For five years he has been a constant companion and sometime adviser of the ReichsFuehrer, helping to fill the place once occupied by "Putzy" Hanfstaengl, whose piano was not so successful an instrument of flattery as Heinrich Hoffmann's Leica.

Professor Hoffmann's virtual monopoly of German news photography has made him one of his country's richest men. He sells more than a million Hitler portraits a year. His Hitler pictures range from miniatures to 8-by-12-foot posters which sell for 1,050 marks ($420). For ordinary newspictures his standard price to German publications is 20 to 25 marks, but U. S. rights to a particularly fetching photograph of der schoene Adolf sometimes bring as much as $250. Bildberichterstatter Hoffmann is not the only gainer by his deal with his great & good friend: Adolf Hitler well knows that the least flattering photographs of himself never leave the dark room.

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