Page 119 – LIFE

Hitler at 50: Color Photos From a Despot’s Garish Birthday Bash

January 17, 2020March 3, 2014 by

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, LIFE 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, military parades and, frequently, in quieter, private moments. Jaeger’s photos were, it turned out, so attuned to the Führer’s vision of what a so-called Thousand Year Reich might look and feel like that Hitler reportedly declared, upon first seeing the kind of work Jaeger was doing: “The future belongs to color photography.”

The story of how LIFE came to own Jaeger’s collection of roughly 2,000 color photographs—an archive comprising a vast, insider’s portrait of the Reich—is an extraordinary and little-known tale of intrigue from the post-war years.

According to Jaeger’s own account of the creation, preservation and, ultimately, the sale of his photos, the espionage-thriller aspect of the tale began in 1945, when he found himself face to face with half a dozen American soldiers in a small town west of Munich, as Allied troops were making their final push across Germany at war’s end. This very scenario had, for years, been Jaeger’s enduring nightmare: he knew, after all, that he would be arrested or worse if the conquering Americans discovered his trove of pictures and his close, personal connection to Hitler.

On that spring day in 1945, during a search of the house where Jaeger was staying, the Americans found the leather satchel in which the Führer’s personal photographer had hidden literally thousands of color slides. What happened next, however, left Jaeger staggering.

Inside the satchel that held the compromising pictures, Jaeger had also placed a bottle of brandy and a small, ivory gambling toy a spinning top for an old-fashioned game of chance known by, among other names, “put-and-take.” Happy with their find, the soldiers sat down to a session of put-and-take while sharing the bottle of brandy with Jaeger and the owner of the house where the photographer had been living. (Jaeger’s own apartment in Munich had been destroyed in Allied air raids.) The leather satchel, and whatever else was hidden away in it, was forgotten as the brandy dwindled and the game of put-and-take spun on.

After the Americans left, a shaken Jaeger packed the color slides into metal jars and, over time, buried them in various locations on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his caches, digging them up, drying them out, repacking and reburying them. He had hidden them systematically over an area of a square mile or so, with notes and a map to guide him back: “From the railroad switch, 263 ties west, then 15 meters north. . . .”

Jaeger finally retrieved the collection for good in the late 1950s all 2,000 of the slides, amazingly, were still in good shape and in 1965, after storing them in a Swiss bank for years, he sold the entire archive to Time Inc.

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, not so long ago, convulsed a “civilized” nation of millions; and dread at the horrors that, we know, such madness would soon unleash.

The automobile engineer Ferdinand Porsche (in suit), Adolf Hitler and, immediately to Hitler’s left, the head of the German Labour Front, Robert Ley, admired Hitler’s birthday gift on his 50th birthday: a convertible Volkswagen.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A rally in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Ost-West-Achse (East-West Axis) in Berlin, site of a massive rally and parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

German troops goose-stepped past the reviewing stand during a massive rally and military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthdayBerlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Guests of honor at a rally and military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Heavy artillery passed the reviewing stand during a military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A rally and military parade in celebration of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Banners hung from buildings in honor of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Hitler shook hands with one of his personal photographers, Heinrich Hoffmann, while his doctor, Theodor Morrell (right) waited to greet the Fuhrer on Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939, in Berlin.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Some of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday gifts stored in a room at the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, April 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The automobile engineer and designer Ferdinand Porsche (in suit) presented Hitler with a convertible Volkswagen for Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, Germany, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Some of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday gifts, including flower vases emblazoned with swastikas, were stored in a room at the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, April 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Adolf Hitler received a model of a Condor airplane as a gift on his 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939. Beside Hitler (left) stood Capt. Hans Bauer, his personal pilot.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A solid gold model of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (a celebrated German museum), a gift from Luftwaffe commander—and future suicide at the Nuremberg war crimes trials—Hermann Goering to Adolf Hitler on Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The automobile engineer and designer Ferdinand Porsche (in suit) presented Adolf Hitler with a model car during celebrations for Hitler’s 50th birthday, Berlin, April 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A hand-worked castle inlaid with precious stones given to Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday, Berlin, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Berlin’s Brandenburg gate and colonnades were lit up at night in honor of Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday, April 20, 1939.

Hugo Jaeger/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Winter Scenes, Winter Fashions: Photos From Canadian Ski Slopes

January 21, 2022February 17, 2014 by

In February 1945, LIFE magazine declared Mont-Tremblant, a resort in the Laurentian Mountains 90 miles north of Montreal, the “ski-fashion center of the world.” The reasons for Mont Tremblant’s surpassing winter-style meccas like St. Moritz and Sun Valley, according to LIFE, were two: “Many of the guests are rich, well-dressed friends of the owner, Joseph B. Ryan, grandson of financier Thomas Fortune Ryan, [and] one of the instructors is a beautiful former model, Blanche Rybizka.”

In the midst of one of the snowiest, most unsettled winters in decades, LIFE.com remembers that long-ago issue of LIFE — and the lovely Blanche Rybizka’s singular fashion sense — with a series of Alfred Eisenstaedt photos of Canadian winter scenery and winter finery.

Mont-Tremblant 1945

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE Magazine cover, February 19, 1945

LIFE Magazine

Hillary Clinton’s First National Splash: LIFE, 1969

January 2, 2020February 15, 2014 by

Long before Yale Law, before Arkansas, before her marriage to Bill, before the Senate, the White House, her own runs for the White House, the State Department, and so many other highlights (and lowlights) of her remarkable life, she was Hillary Diane Rodham, the older sister of two brothers, and the over-achieving daughter of loving, politically conservative parents from suburban Park Ridge, Ill.

Intelligent, intensely curious and, from a young age, driven to find a way to contribute to the world around her, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965. It was there, in Massachusetts, that the moderate Republican underwent her transformation (she might characterize it as “an evolution”) to committed Democrat.

By the time she graduated from Wellesley in May 1969, Hillary Rodham was already such a notable figure that she was featured, along with four other speakers from four other schools and excerpts from their commencement addresses in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE, in an article titled, simply, “The Class of ’69.”

Her speech was, perhaps not surprisingly, less strident and confrontational than those of the other student speakers quoted in the issue. As early as 1969, Hillary was showing signs of her ability to modulate her message without diluting or compromising it that helps explain so much of her success in public life. The other student speakers featured in that June 1969 issue included Yale’s William Thompson; Justin Simon at Brandeis; Mills College’s Stephanie Mills, an author; and Brown University’s Ira Magaziner, a high-profile student activist who went on to become a business strategist and a senior adviser in the Clinton White House.

Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures by photographer Lee Balterman, only one of which ran in the June 20 issue of LIFE. The images were captured at the Rodham home in Park Ridge in mid-June 1969, a week and a half after she graduated from Wellesley. Leaving aside the insights into late-Sixties fashion that these pictures afford, the LIFE archives also contains insights into the younger Hillary that never made it into the magazine. For instance, in a note dated June 11, 1969, that accompanied Balterman’s film when it was sent from Illinois to LIFE’s offices in New York, we learn that Hillary told reporter Joan Downs that “press accounts of her commencement speech were vastly different from what she actually said because the speech wasn’t written out and taped transcripts were unavailable until several days after commencement.”

“She’s also quite concerned” the note continues, “that it be made clear she was not attacking Senator Brooke personally.” Senator Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate and the last Republican Senator elected from Massachusetts until Scott Brown’s election in 2010, spoke before Hillary Rodham at Wellesley’s commencement, and she deviated from her prepared remarks to address at least part of what he said.

Another Balterman note in the archive, meanwhile, written in the photographer’s own hand, points to a less dramatic, if no less revealing, element of the photo shoot: “Had to go for nothing more than informal portraits, but should be some good expressions & hand gestures, etc.,” the note reads, before ending with a simple, gentle suggestion: “Her glasses helped.”

—Photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This image appeared in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Rodham Clinton), Park Ridge, Illinois, June 1969.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

hillary-clinton-in-1969-14

Life Magazine

LIFE magazine, June 20, 1969, “Class of ’69” page spreads.

The Amazing Lunar Module: From Early Models to the Moon

January 17, 2020February 13, 2014 by

Artists and engineers share this bond: their visions are often first embodied in rough, rudimentary form. Whether it’s a sculptor working in clay or an industrial designer using three-dimensional software, modeling is not just part of the creative process: to a large degree, it is the creative process.

For NASA’s engineers, finding ways to model the remarkable craft that would not only land astronauts on the moon, but would allow them to lift off from the lunar surface, rendezvous and link up with an orbiting vessel and return safely to Earth and their families well, tackling that sort of challenge is the reason so many of the best and brightest join NASA in the first place.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of images celebrating the various Lunar Excursion Modules—scale-model and life-size—that NASA built through the years; the men who flew them; and the brilliant, daring minds that envisioned the extraordinary spacecraft in the first place.

First deployed during Apollo 9’s 10-day mission in March 1969, roughly 100 miles above the earth, and tested again a few months later, less than 10 miles above the lunar surface during Apollo 10’s “dry run” for the July 1969 moon landing, the various versions of the lunar module that NASA designed and produced represent, in microcosm, pretty much everything technological that got people excited about the American space program in the 1960s.

After all, behind the craft’s complex development is an audaciously straightforward idea—enter moon’s orbit; separate from command module; land on moon; lift off from moon; reconnect with command module; come home—that would take years of effort (and not a few mistakes) to finally put into triumphant, era-defining practice.

In July 1969, when Apollo 11’s rendition of the LEM, Eagle, touched down on a vast lunar plain named Mare Tranquillitatis, or the Sea of Tranquility, centuries before by two Italian astronomers Neil Armstrong radioed a simple, momentous phrase to Mission Control a quarter-million miles away in Houston.

“The Eagle has landed,” he said, cementing the lunar module’s central role in one of humanity’s greatest dramas.

Early lunar module model, in wood, 1960s

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Early lunar module model, 1960s.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Lunar module model, 1969

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A sketch made by Dr. John C. Houbolt in 1961 for a lunar module, later adopted by NASA for Apollo 9.

Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This sketch made by Dr. John C. Houbolt in 1961 shows a modular concept much like the one that was ultimately adopted by NASA for the Lunar Excursion Module.

Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A sketch by Dr. John C. Houbolt suggested a design for a moon landing craft designated the “Lunar Schooner,” in 1961

Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A full-scale model of the Lunar Excursion Module, 1969.

The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An astronaut descended the lunar module ladder during an enactment of a moon landing during a training exercise, 1967.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Apollo 9 and the lunar module, 1969

NASA

Apollo 9, March 1969. On the fourth day of the mission, astronaut David Scott stood in the open hatch of the command module and scanned the blue earth below.

NASA

The Apollo 9 Lunar Module, a.k.a., “Spider,” remained attached to the Saturn rocket stage while in low Earth orbit, March 1969.

NASA

The Apollo 9 Lunar Module (a 30,000 lb. vessel nicknamed “Spider” by crew members Scott, McDivitt and Schweichkart), 100 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, March 1969.

NASA

The Apollo 10 command module, piloted by astronaut John Young on his third space flight, entered into low orbit above the moon in May 1969 during a “dry run” for the July 1969 moon landing. The lunar module on this mission was nicknamed “Snoopy”; the command module was nicknamed “Charlie Brown.” (Charlie Brown, after all, rarely gets to have any fun. The same could not possibly be said of Young himself: he made six space flights over his 40-year career with NASA, and remains the only astronaut to have piloted four distinct classes of spacecraft: Gemini; the Apollo command and lunar modules; and the Space Shuttle.)

NASA

During Apollo 11’s historic moon mission in July 1969, astronaut Buzz Aldrin unfurled a “solar wind sheet” designed to collect atomic particles blowing from the distant sun. The Lunar Excursion Module, which got Aldrin and Neil Armstrong safely to and from the lunar surface, stood behind him.

NASA

With the Earth visible in the distance above the moon’s horizon, Apollo 11’s lunar module ascended toward the command module (piloted by astronaut Michael Collins while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the lunar surface).

NASA

Shirley Temple: America’s Greatest Child Movie Star

August 11, 2021February 11, 2014 by

Shirley Temple Black—known to millions as simply Shirley Temple, who acted in scores of movies and was arguably the greatest child movie star of all time—was a constant presence on the silver screen during the Great Depression, lighting up movies like Stand Up and Cheer! and Bright Eyes with her singing, dancing and her sharp (but never cloying) wit. She retired from the movies when she was just 21, in 1950, and continued with her remarkable life, shifting into the world of international politics. She held a number of diplomatic posts during her lifetime, including U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia during that country’s convulsive years in the late 1980s.

After her death, Temple Black’s family paid tribute to her in a statement that read, in part, “We salute her for a life of remarkable achievements as an actor, as a diplomat, and most importantly as our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and adored wife for fifty-five years of the late and much missed Charles Alden Black.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Shirley Temple arrived at the 20th Century Fox studio to celebrate her eighth birthday, 1936.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple celebrated her eighth birthday at 20th Century Fox in 1936, when, in the middle of the Great Depression, she was the biggest box office star in America.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple celebrated her eighth birthday, 1936.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple, 1936.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple took pictures of famous sites in Washington, DC, from the window of a car, 1938.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple at the Lincoln Memorial, 1938.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover showed Shirley Temple how to ride a mechanical horse, 1938.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple, photographed as she was leaving the White House, 1938.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple walked on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple walked down stairs at the Bel Air Country Club at her 11th birthday party, 1939.

Peter Stockpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Shirley Temple with Sgt. John Agar, to whom she was married from 1945-1950.

Peter Stockpole The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A Breed Apart: Portraits of Yorkshire Terriers

November 4, 2020February 9, 2014 by

In November 1964, LIFE magazine noted that “a small dog with a sweeping hairdo and a peppery disposition” was pushing the poodle aside as the elegant canine accessory-of-the-moment. LIFE also noted that the small, dynamic Yorkie — for it was none other than the Yorkshire Terrier to which the magazine devoted a multi-page feature — “is no lap dog. It has the dash and spirit of all terriers and is a better ratter than most cats.”

The image of a fearless rat-killer is hardly the first that comes to mind, of course, when one thinks of the Yorkie — and the Nina Leen photos in that LIFE feature focused on the breed’s cute, lively nature rather than its innate (if rarely exercised) ferocity. But the point was clear: while small in stature, the Yorkie has huge appeal.

Here, LIFE presents some of Leen’s pictures from 50 years ago — photos celebrating a rare and singularly winning breed.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.