still waiting

Crooked Timber has a piece on taste and social class in the USA culled from a 1949 edition of life. You can click through from there to a whole collection of Life magazines available at Google books. It’s fascinating stuff, including this.

Helicopters. Designs flourish but public has to wait for practical family model

And the adverts are an absolute cornucopia.

Oh and check this out: a multi page picture spread on Nazis committing suicide before the advanbce of allied troops in 1945, presented in full curl up on the sofa style.

Comments

[ajay]

Which includes the bizarre assertion that the July bomb plot happened in Munich (complete with a photo of someone pointing at where the bomb was concealed), and whose text implies that Life wasn't entirely sure whether the plot had been a success or not...

[Richard J]

The pictures of the GIs getting shot were suprisingly explicit.

[Chris Williams]

The Munich cellar pillar bomb was the one planted in 193?8 by a random carpenter (and, it should go without saying, utter hero), who left it there on a long-delay fuse several weeks before the annual Nazi Party renunion. As we know, it didn't work.

[Richard J]

They kept said carpenter (Georg Elser) alive for a surprisingly long time too. He wasn't shot until April 1945, which I found out only recently.

[ajay]

Hmm, Life got its bomb plots confused then, because the caption is "ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT by generals last year of Hitler occurred in this room of Burgerbrau. Guide points to pillar where the bomb was concealed."

I'd never heard of Georg Elser before. Interesting.

[Chris Williams]

There's quite a bit on Elser in Ian Kershaw's second Hitler volume. November 8th, 1938 - the timer was only for one day, but alas, Adolf left ten minutes early in order to plan the attack on France. Elser did manage to kill eight nazis, though. Ian K speculates that Elser was left alive because Hitler was planning a postwar show trial which would implicate the British, whom he blamed at the time.