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Satanic Tomatoes and Other Weird Details Not Taught in History Class

Khalid Elhassan July 4, 2020 33 min

South Lawn - Goat — Wilson's sheep. Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum

31. Germany’s Polar Bear Mania

SS members at the height of the polar bear craze. The Guardian

Frenchwoman Jean-Marie Donat has amassed a collection over the past three decades, containing more than 10,000 weird vintage photos of 1920s and 1930s Germans. The photos, which include plenty of Nazis, depict the Germans posing with men dressed up as polar bears.

Polar bears became all the rage in Germany, starting in the early 1920s, when the Berlin Zoo acquired a pair of polar bear cubs. The cute new additions caught on with the public, and proved so wildly popular that the result was a mini-boom in furries and polar bear costumes.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.