Hitler’s globe on display

Published February 22, 2002

MUNICH, Feb 21: A giant globe on which Adolf Hitler is believed to have outlined his plans for world domination has been put on show in a Munich library, pockmarked with bullet holes and bayonet stabs.

The outsize globe, which has a diameter of 1.15 metres and stands at a height of 1.7 metres, is one of a handful made in 1937 for top Nazis, said Reinhard Horn from the Bavarian State Library.

Its size evokes Charlie Chaplin’s anti-Nazi satire “The Great Dictator” in which his parody of Hitler, Adenoid Hynkel, dances around his office playing with a giant globe, enthralled at the prospect of ruling the world.

“I thought at first about putting a photo of Chaplin next to it, but we’re a scientific library so I left it,” said Horn, who is head of the library’s maps and pictures department.

It was found in the Fuehrerbau, the Nazi party headquarters in Munich. “We believe it stood in Hitler’s office,” Horn said.

One media report said Hitler was believed to have used it to explain his foreign policies to visiting dignitaries.

The globe sustained its injuries when the allies took over Munich at the end of the war.—Reuters