Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
Hitler had a dog named Blondi, gifted to him by his secretary, whom by all accounts he loved dearly. Blondi, fittingly, was a German Shepherd. What else could she be in the Third Reich?
The dictator felt such devotion to her, in fact, that he reportedly took her with him to his Führerbunker as the walls closed in on his young Aryan empire. With the enemy at the gates, Hitler slipped her a cyanide capsule before offing himself as well – overtones of Romeo & Juliet, no?
To a German resident of the 1930s, Hitler was a fearsome government daddy immersed in the glory of the Reich, empowered to kick ass and make the trains run on time.
To Blondi, he was Adolf with the weird mustache who fed him sauerkraut or whatever.
Pondering all of this, the revelation came to me while floating aimlessly on an inflated turtle in the pool: this would seem to say something profound of perspective, no?
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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