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Sunday, March 21, 2021

A 1940s superhero comic that hints at the Holocaust


Captain Triumph was one of the many mostly forgotten superhero comics of the 1940s. 

In one episode Triumph confronts a thinly disguised composite of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini named "Mussler:"





Triumph's friend pretends to be the dictator's guard, and when the Hitler character demands to know what happened to his regular assistant, he is told that his grandfather was found to be a ....unnamed type of person. Therefore he was shipped off to a concentration camp.



There has been research in how comic books in the post-war years addressed the Holocaust, but I couldn't find any mention of how the comics - which ridiculed the Axis countries often - ever hinted at the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.