Time Life "We do not usually give so much space to the work of men we admire so little.
"So began a remarkable editor’s note to LIFE’s readers in an April 1970 issue of the magazine, introducing a photographer named Hugo Jaeger — a man who, the note pointed out, “was a fascist before the Nazi party was formed.”
"In that issue, LIFE published a series of startling color pictures that Jaeger made in the late 1930s and 1940s, when he enjoyed unprecedented access to the Third Reich’s upper echelon, traveling with and chronicling Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts at massive rallies and, frequently, in quieter, private moments, as well. Jaeger’s photos were, it turned out, so attuned to the Führer’s vision of what a Thousand Year Reich might look and feel like that Hitler declared, upon first seeing the kind of work Jaeger was doing: “The future belongs to color photography.' ”
....
"Here, in grudging acknowledgment of the scope of Jaeger’s achievements as a photographer — acknowledgment, in other words, of the work of a man we admire so little — LIFE.com presents a series of color pictures from the over-the-top celebrations in Berlin marking Hitler’s 50th birthday (April 20, 1939), as well as some of the ludicrously gaudy gifts bestowed on the German leader by his Nazi peers and sycophants.
"Seen today, Jaeger’s photographs elicit an unsettling sense of both dismay and dread: dismay at the sheer scale of the tribal, nationalist madness that once, not so long ago, convulsed a country of millions; and dread at the horrors that, we know, such madness was soon to unleash."
Judgment at Nuremburg
How amusing that Werner Klemperer, the man who will one day play Colonel Klink on "Hogan's Heroes" portrays a sadistic jurist in the movie.
