If the Nazis conquered America

Matthew Porter's photo composite Empire on the Platte is arresting.

Pairs nicely with Melissa Gould's Neu-York, "an obsessively detailed alternate-history map, imagining how Manhattan might have looked had the Nazis conquered it in World War II".

In 1942, Life magazine speculated about what an Axis invasion of North America might look like.

Nazi graphics standards manual

Steven Heller had heard rumors of a Nazi graphics standards manual for years and finally tracked one down.

Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book "over-explains the obvious" and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.

More photos and a copy for sale here.

A photo album created by an SS

A photo album created by an SS officer stationed at Auschwitz has been donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The unique album shows the life and activities of officers at the camp. Compare the SS officer photographs with photographs from an album showing prisoners arriving at the camp. (via nytimes)

Gunter Grass: How I Spent the War,

Gunter Grass: How I Spent the War, a first-person account of an SS recruit during WWII.

Update: Here's some biographical information about Grass, who is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. (thx, red)

A new book, Heil Hitler, The Pig

A new book, Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead, deals with humor during Hitler's reign in Germany. "From an early stage, Germans were well aware of their government's brutality. And the country wasn't possessed by 'evil spirits' nor was it hypnotised by the Nazis' brilliant propaganda, he says. Hypnotized people don't crack jokes."

Art and genocide...why doesn't Soviet and

Art and genocide...why doesn't Soviet and Communist Chinese propaganda imagery offend us like Nazi propaganda does? The Stalinist and Maoist regimes were responsible for more deaths than the Nazis.