The November 1953 issue of Men's Adventures #24 contains this grueling Russ Heath illustrated concentration camp terror tale about nazi experiment atrocities and torture, proving once again that historical based facts can most certainly be much more horrific than fiction.
So this is a bit less than a decade after the death camps became common knowledge, and there is -- justifiably -- the desire to see vengeance wrote out for the murders sociopath's that ran those places, so these always make good stories.
ReplyDeleteThat said, this is a Hogan's Heroes level plan!
I like the silent, terrifying Himmler which is pretty far from the truth!
This is really a fun story; the art is incredible, and watching the walls come down on the commandant is satisfying.
I love the cover -- the tunnel framing the guy framing the hand. That's a nice piece of work!
Having lived here and there around the world--especially in post-conflict societies like Viet Nam and Sarajevo--I've become forever interested in the way traumatized cultures publicly exorcise the lingering specter of atrocity. There are many ways. In Japan, they created Godzilla, a walking roaring burning Armageddon, something they could endure, drive back into the ocean, or even befriend. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, bodies fished from river beds and unmarked graves are annually transported through the country by trucks before being re-interred at the memorial in Srebrenica (the routes are in the paper; people of the towns they pass through lay wreathes on the transport vehicles). And in the predominantly Jewish-owned, predominantly veteran-operated magazine and comics industry of New York City, circa post-war, they made things like this--pure uncut post-Holocaust rage set down in four-color funnybooks. There might have been a time when I suspected this of being some kind of callous anti-imagination; something prurient. Like when it comes to bogeymen Nazis are just too on-the-nose, lazy low-hanging fruit. But I'm more educated about that kind thing now.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, it is interesting that this story goes out of its way to avoid any indication that the horrors perpetrated here are in the service of ethnic genocide. The Nazis are still Nazis, but the protagonists of this story are multinational prisoners of war, not persecuted Jewish people. This strikes me as a whitewashing in a way, and I wonder if it was to more easily spark the empathy of a wider US readership, or if it was to somewhat spare the sensitivities of those New Yorkers who were suffering the effects of having so recently survived the Holocaust. No telling.
Excellent Russ Heath art here, as always.