History

Happy Campers of the Third Reich

Shorpy dug up this Heinrich Hoffmann photo of Hitler Youth on a camping excursion from 1938. Smiles and swastikas are an uneasy mix at best.

Hoffmann, incidentally, was Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer and a fixture on the Obersalzberg. He was also the one-man jury for the annual Great German Art Exhibitions in Munich. One of his assistants, Eva Braun, would become Hitler’s secret mistress.