As a result of this casual browse through an old magazine, I have struck up a friendship with an amateur historian in Louisiana, been involved in a copyright tussle with the UK's biggest magazine publisher, been branded a Nazi sympathiser, been written about in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune and the Jerusalem Post, and become the subject of a petition from 60 Holocaust scholars as well as protests from David Irving.Last month, at the request of IPC Magazines (owners of the original copyright), Waldman took down the pages he'd scanned onto his blog from “Homes and Gardens.” But since then, I’m pleased to say, the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies has successfully lobbied IPC Magazines to have the pages published on the internet, and Waldman has now rebuilt his original post at Words of Waldman.
The H&G piece has some interesting pictures, but it’s the article’s admiring portrayal of Hitler in a British magazine of the time that makes it significant. It's a classic piece of appeasement propaganda, from a time when public opinion in the UK was starting to move away from support for Chamberlain’s policy of negotiation.
It's chilling to think that the same people who read the November 1938 issue of “Homes and Gardens” would also have been reading newspaper reports that November about the violent events of Kristallnacht.
