The Profiles of the Fuhrer

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How would Hitler look without a mustache? or hair? Would he be able to change the appearance at the end of the war and disappear? These were the questions that haunted the Allied Occupying Forces in 1945. Hitler’s death was not a certainty in 1945, and these pictures were planned to be posted up all over Germany in the summer of 1945 to ease finding the “fugitive” dictator.

In 1944, the U.S. Secret Service and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) instructed the New York makeup artist Eddie Senz to retouch Hitler’s photos for possible profiles. Senz noted that the most difficult part of Hitler’s face to disguise would have been his penetrating eyes. The photos remained buried in the OSS archives until 1998, when the German Publication, der Spiegel, published them for the first time in May 1998, under the title Steckbriefe des Führers (The Profiles of the Fuhrer).

Wikipedia has high-resolution images of Senz profiles.

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