Okay, now this is getting even more weird and depressing. First, a playwright stages a work depicting Walt Disney as a Nazi sympathizer, and claims that Walt’s hatred of Jews and Blacks is well-documented. And now a Norwegian museum official is claiming that he’s found drawings of Pinocchio, Bashful, and Doc that were done by Hitler himself.
Said museum director is claiming he’s absolutely positive the sketches–which are crummy tracings as you can see above–come from the hand of the Great Dictator, but the whole thing has a whiff of the Hitler Diaries about it. Common sense would suggest that you regard all bizarre, suddenly-discovered new Hitler artifacts as profoundly suspect until there’s striking evidence that they’re the real thing.
The Telegraph.co.uk site says it’s known that the Fuehrer owned a copy of Snow White. Anyone want to confirm or deny that?
I haven’t seen anyone “connect” the “dots” between this “news” and Disney in Deutschland and claim that the drawings are yet more evidence of the cozy relationship between Walt and Adolf. But what do you wanna bet that someone, somewhere will do exactly that?
And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going off to quietly weep in a corner now…
Outside of the common sense argument, there’s the fact that Pinocchio never even made it into Germany (or much of Europe) in 1940. Rather, it debuted in West Germany in 1951, and was dubbed with a cast including Horst Buchholz (Magnificent Seven; One Two Three) as Lampwick.
Now Snow White was screened in Germany in 1938, so it’s slightly possible that Adolf owned a copy (but not that he traced Doc and Sleepy). Here’s a nice page, in German, with a full photographic rundown comparing the voices of Snow White (original US cast and various German versions; in other countries, the classic Disney animated features are routinely re-dubbed at least once a decade or sooner, with a mere handful remaining untouched).
http://edigrieg.ed.funpic.de/features/snowwhite.htm
The site is a great source for info on Disney animation in Germany in general (as far as dubbing, video releases, and so on).