Adolf Hitler

It was sometime in the spring - she's not certain of the date - when Helen Steinbacher swung open a long-locked safe in her Chester County home. Widowed since 1966, Steinbacher had lost the key to the safe years before and "had no idea what was in it. " But her son Michael "had been bugging me for years" to find out what was inside, she recalled last week. And so she had called a locksmith. Inside she found a confusing hodgepodge of papers and artwork that had belonged to her husband, Charles, who for 30 years was art director at the George Moll advertising agency in Philadelphia.

The wooden, electric-powered tour boat glided quietly to a stop in a narrow neck of glass-smooth Koenigsee, a pristine alpine lake. Steep slopes on either side were draped by fog and crowned with snow that had fallen the day before. At the side of the boat, a crewman opened a glass door, lifted a trumpet and played a simple fanfare. The echo came back clear, cold and pure. Berchtesgadenland, the crown jewel of the Bavarian Alps, is beautiful. It is also forever stained by Adolf Hitler, who relaxed, entertained and sometimes governed from nearby Obersalzberg and for whom the mountaintop Kehlsteinhaus, also known as the Eagle's Nest, was built.

I AM THE DAUGHTER of a Holocaust survivor. Twenty-five years ago, I began to date a man whose middle name is Adolph (as in Adolf Hitler). We have been happily married for 22 years. In fact, we celebrated our son's bar mitzvah last year, with my "Adolph" proudly participating, even though he is not Jewish. We'll do it again next year with our daughter's bat mitzvah. The notion that my husband's middle name would hide the fact that he is an anti-Semite looking to rid the world of Jews is absolutely ridiculous.

NOW THAT the Michael Vick controversy has died down, I want to know where in our Constitution or Bill of Rights it says that dogs are included. I don't think the Founding Fathers were thinking about Lassie in the big scheme of things. How is it possible that someone can serve more time in prison for abusing a poop machine than for murdering a fellow human being? Do you know who put dogs above human beings? The world's favorite whipping boy, Adolf Hitler. What about the rat or the shark?

IENJOYED Ronnie Polaneczky's column on the Dixie Chicks controversy. I'm glad Bob McKay at XTU is proud of the station's boycott of the Chicks. I am boycotting the station until the Chicks go back on the playlist. Don Henry, Philadelphia Those who watched the Academy Awards were "treated" to the foreign policy expertise of filmmaker Michael Moore, who arrogantly purported to speak for all Americans in saying to President Bush, "We are against this war. " I imagine Michael Moore would have been out on the streets rallying against U.S. intervention against Adolf Hitler, arguing that it would be wiser to appease Hitler.

NEW YORK NO FUROR FOR FUEHRER BUT OSWALD SELLS The only known self-portrait of Adolf Hitler, penciled in 1916, failed to sell at auction last night. No one matched auctioneer Herman Darvick's opening bid of $9,000. The self-portrait was expected to sell for between $15,000 and $25,000. The portrait, on yellowish paper in an old 8-inch by 10 1/2-inch brown frame, shows a three-quarters view of Hitler when he was 27, wearing a World War I uniform and cap and carrying a dispatch bag. The high price for the night was $15,400 paid for a 1959 letter from Lee Harvey Oswald from the Soviet Union to his brother Robert.

City Councilman Richard Mariano, a former electricians' union official, told city workers' union leaders at a candidates forum Tuesday that his members would have supported Adolf Hitler if it meant more jobs. A source at the forum paraphrased Mariano, a freshman councilman who faces two opponents in the May 18 primary, as saying "his guys would have been for Hitler if he had promised more jobs to the electricians' union. " Mariano told the Daily News he used Hitler's name, but said his remarks were being taken out of context and that they did not imply he either supported Hitler or was anti-Semitic.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, 90, the last surviving member of the main plot to kill Adolf Hitler, died Friday at his home in Munich. As a 22-year-old German army lieutenant, Mr. von Kleist volunteered to wear a suicide vest to a meeting with Hitler. The assassination did not come to pass, but he went on to play a key role in the most famous attempt on Hitler that same year. Despite his family's opposition to the Nazis, the younger von Kleist joined the German army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943.

Dodgers centerfielder Brett Butler has throat cancer and will miss the rest of the season, the club said yesterday. Butler, 38, had a tonsillectomy last week, and doctors found a tumor the size of a plum. A CAT scan yesterday determined that he had throat cancer. He will have surgery on May 21 to remove lymph nodes, and also will have radiation therapy. The survival rate for his type of cancer is 70 percent, doctors said. "My goal was always to play major-league baseball," Butler said in a statement.

Hall of famer Bobby Hull has filed a lawsuit against a Moscow newspaper and the Toronto Sun for stories that quoted Hull making racial slurs and praising Adolf Hitler. The suit was filed yesterday in Hull's hometown of Belleville, Ontario. On Aug. 25, the English-language Moscow Times quoted Hull, 59, as saying "Hitler had some good ideas, he just went a little bit too far. " The story also said Hull made remarks about the black population in the United States and suggested the Nazis' plan to build a master race was not entirely flawed.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, 90, the last surviving member of the main plot to kill Adolf Hitler, died Friday at his home in Munich. As a 22-year-old German army lieutenant, Mr. von Kleist volunteered to wear a suicide vest to a meeting with Hitler. The assassination did not come to pass, but he went on to play a key role in the most famous attempt on Hitler that same year. Despite his family's opposition to the Nazis, the younger von Kleist joined the German army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943.

WARSAW, Poland - A statue of Adolf Hitler praying on his knees is on display in the former Warsaw Ghetto, the place where so many Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by Hitler's regime, and it is provoking mixed reactions. The work, HIM , by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, has drawn many visitors since it was installed last month. It is visible only from a distance, and the artist doesn't make explicit what Hitler is praying for, but the broader point, organizers say, is to make people reflect on the nature of evil.

Are you ready for some fallout? This week's poster boy for political incivility is country singer Hank Williams Jr. During a frequently awkward Fox and Friends interview Monday, Williams said President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner's "golf summit" last summer was analogous to a pairing of Adolf Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I think we all know who was supposed to be the Hitler figure in Williams' mind. His comment is yet another reminder that Hitler references never work.

BERLIN - The bones of Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess were exhumed under cover of darkness, burned, and secretly scattered at sea after his grave became a shrine for thousands of neo-Nazis, a cemetery official said Thursday. Workers removed Hess' remains from his family's plot with the permission of his relatives, cremated the bones, and dispersed them before dawn Wednesday, said Andreas Fabel, a cemetery administrator in the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel. Hess was captured in 1941 when he parachuted into Scotland saying he wanted to negotiate peace between Britain and Germany.

Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin By Erik Larson Crown. 448 pp. $26 Reviewed by Karen Heller William Dodd was a serious scholar, a University of Chicago history professor hoping, at age 64, to secure his legacy. A friend of Woodrow Wilson, an acquaintance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he put in for an ambassadorship - nothing big, perhaps the Netherlands - hoping to finish his massive study of the early American South. What he got instead, after at least four far more qualified candidates declined, was Germany.

HELENA, Mont. - Mayhew "Bo" Foster, a World War II Army pilot who flew the one-time heir to Adolf Hitler for interrogation in an unarmed, unescorted plane, has died. He was 99. Foster died Monday night in a Missoula nursing home, son-in-law Roy Korkalo said yesterday. Foster served as brigadier general of the Montana National Guard, was awarded the Silver Star for valor as an artillery air officer and received the French Legion of Honor for his service in World War II. But his mission flying Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering was the highlight of his military career.

Seventy years ago this summer, the Western democracies faced what may have been the most dangerous moment in their histories. We tend to be fascinated by turning points - those decisive moments when the fate of nations is at stake. June through September of 1940 was just such a moment. In a matter of six weeks, Adolf Hitler's armies - which had already dispatched Poland in a month - swept through Belgium, Holland, and France. France, which had defied Germany for four years in World War I, was effectively beaten after six weeks, in June 1940.

Jack Harrison, 97, who survived the Great Escape plot by Allied prisoners in a German prison in World War II, died June 4 at a veterans' home in Bishopton, Scotland. As one of the camp's gardeners, Mr. Harrison helped dispose of the dirt excavated from three escape tunnels. He was 98th on the list of about 200 inmates designated to make the escape on March 24, 1944, but only 76 got away before guards detected the breakout. The breakout was celebrated in the 1963 film The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen and James Garner.

NOW THAT the Michael Vick controversy has died down, I want to know where in our Constitution or Bill of Rights it says that dogs are included. I don't think the Founding Fathers were thinking about Lassie in the big scheme of things. How is it possible that someone can serve more time in prison for abusing a poop machine than for murdering a fellow human being? Do you know who put dogs above human beings? The world's favorite whipping boy, Adolf Hitler. What about the rat or the shark?

I AM THE DAUGHTER of a Holocaust survivor. Twenty-five years ago, I began to date a man whose middle name is Adolph (as in Adolf Hitler). We have been happily married for 22 years. In fact, we celebrated our son's bar mitzvah last year, with my "Adolph" proudly participating, even though he is not Jewish. We'll do it again next year with our daughter's bat mitzvah. The notion that my husband's middle name would hide the fact that he is an anti-Semite looking to rid the world of Jews is absolutely ridiculous.