Walt Disney – The Hitler Connection?

The director of a Norwegian museum claims to have found cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed “A. Hitler” that he bought at an auction in Germany. The coloured cartoons included sketches of characters from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which were signed A.H., and an unsigned sketch of Pinocchio from the 1940 Disney film. There is no independent confirmation the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, but Hitler is known to have owned a copy of Snow White and to have viewed it in his private cinema. Mr Hakvaag, who said he had performed tests on the paintings which suggested that they dated from 1940, said: “I am 100 per cent sure that these are drawings by Hitler. If one wanted to make a forgery, one would never hide it in the back of a picture, where it might never be discovered.”

The initials on the sketches, and the signature on the painting, matched other copies of Hitler’s handwriting, he claimed. “Hitler had a copy of Snow White,” he said. “He thought this was one of the best movies ever made.” Hitler tried to make a living as an artist before his rise to power. Nineteen watercolours and two sketches said to be by Hitler were sold in Britain two years ago for a total of £118,000.

Footnote: Maybe Walt and Adolf would have got along just fine. This is a synopsis of a biography written about Disney. Like the provenance of the painting above, we may never know the truth.

Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince is a biography by Marc Eliot, about the darker side of entertainer Walt Disney. Among the serious character flaws and deeds of Disney’s of which Eliot claims are his life-long anti-Semitism (including a deleted scene from the 1933 Silly Symphony Three Little Pigs in which the Big Bad Wolf dresses as a Jewish peddler), his covert employment by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a spy against Communists in Hollywood, intense right-wing politics (claiming he wore a Barry Goldwater badge when receiving the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson just before the 1964 election and refusing to lower the American flag at Disneyland after the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and his fear that he was the illegitimate son of a Spaniard.