Worst Halloween Costume Ever
,” found on Snopes.com.
Prophesied to last a millennium, Adolf Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich lasted only 12 years, from 1933 to 1945. Scripted to end—if it ever ended—in the melancholy grandeur of triumphal arches wreathed in ivy, its tawdry finale turned out to be a self-inflicted bullet in Der Fuhrer’s brain, as Soviet tanks rumbled into Berlin. The Third Reich’s only memorials are the death camps that scream its guilt from every stone, and the odd, unmarked grave of evil dreams: here, a buried mound of rubble (the Reich Chancellery); there, a weed-tufted field (the Nuremberg stadium, where the party rallies were held). Even Hitler’s remains were not laid to rest in the pharaonic crypt he envisioned for himself, a Holy Sepulchre for the Nazi death cult. Poetic justice ordered a more appropriate fate: Hitler’s corpse was shoveled unceremoniously into a shell hole outside the Fuhrerbunker, in a lull between bombings.
