Was Adolf Hitler, the most infamous dictator of all time, actually bossed into adopting his iconic mustache?
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00:00Was Adolf Hitler actually bossed into adopting his iconic mustache?
00:04Turns out, Hitler's infamous toothbrush mustache wasn't the only style of facial hair he sported
00:11during his lifetime. In biographer Ian Kershaw's Monumental Tome, Hitler, he points to periods
00:16in Hitler's life before he took power when he experimented with different mustache styles.
00:21The first mention of Hitler's facial hair comes during his teenage years, when, living
00:25with his mother in Linz, he envisioned himself being a great artist and daydreamed about
00:29art and classical music, particularly Wagner. During these years, he and the only friend
00:34he had at the time, August Kubizek, would take self-indulgent trips to theater and opera
00:38houses dressed in a suit and cane and sporting what Kershaw describes as a thin mustache.
00:44Hitler didn't stick with this style for long, though, apparently. He served as a soldier
00:47during World War I while still in his 20s, a transformative experience that reportedly
00:52fomented in him the sinister worldview that would shape the politics that characterized
00:56Hitler's rule. Kershaw cites a fellow soldier, Balthasar Brandmeier, who remembered him in
01:011915 as an emaciated and unkept figure who kept his mustache untrimmed, suggesting it
01:06was far bushier than it was in his later years.
01:09Kershaw's sprawling biography makes no mention of when Hitler transitioned to the toothbrush
01:13mustache that became his signature look. However, there is one story going back to his army
01:18days that some believe can help pinpoint the moment that Hitler first sported the style,
01:22but stuck with it ever after.
01:24German writer Alexander Moritz Frey had written about his first impressions of Hitler in an
01:28unpublished essay. The two served together during World War I. Echoing Kershaw's account,
01:34Frey recalled that Hitler had a long mustache in 1950. He wrote,
01:37"...a pale, tall man tumbled down into the cellar after the first shells of the daily
01:41evening attacks had begun to fall, fear and rage glowing in his eyes. At that time, he
01:46looked tall because he was so thin, a full mustache, which had to be trimmed later because
01:51of the new gas masks, covered the ugly slit of his mouth."
01:55Despite complying with the order and trimming the hair on his upper lip, Hitler was injured
01:58in a British mustard gas attack in 1918, and would later learn of Germany's surrender while
02:03recovering in a planter's hospital.
02:05Other sources claim that Hitler may have settled on the toothbrush mustache years before World
02:09War I, possibly as early as 1912. This information comes from Hitler's sister-in-law, Bridget,
02:14who lived in Liverpool, England, with her husband Alois Hitler Jr. and their son, Patrick.
02:19Bridget became infamous among Hitler researchers for her extraordinary claim that she and her
02:23family were visited by him around this time, offering an account of his time in Liverpool
02:27in which he spent the winter at their home and irritated the family with his behavior.
02:31Bridget later claimed that she was bothered by her brother-in-law's long mustache and
02:35convinced him to trim his sides.
02:39In the end, little is known about Hitler's activities before his relocation from Vienna,
02:43where he failed to make it as an artist to Munich in 1913.
02:47There are those who are inclined to believe Bridget's tale that Hitler spent the winter
02:50in Liverpool before doing so. However, many historians have taken issue with the claims
02:55and say there is no evidence that he made the trip to England. Some say that the detail,
02:59which appears in a manuscript of Bridget's memoirs that remained unpublished during her
03:03lifetime, was intended to garner interest from publishing houses. In any case, photographs
03:07from his army days show Hitler sporting a full Kaiser mustache, showing that even if
03:12Bridget's claim is true, he didn't stick with the look she suggested for long.
03:17Despite Hitler being irreversibly associated with the toothbrush mustache, he was by no
03:21means the innovator of his signature look. It was, believe it or not, an American invention,
03:26first brought to Germany in the late 1800s. Though there was some initial controversy
03:30over the style, it became more common during World War I and was worn by several famous
03:34figures around the time that Hitler reportedly first sported the look.
03:38Today, the other best-remembered wearers of the toothbrush mustache come from the world
03:42of comedy — Oliver Hardy and Charlie Chaplin, both of whom typically wore the mustache on
03:46screen. There is one commonly shared rumor that Hitler was a fan of the latter in particular
03:51and screened Chaplin's films despite banning his work publicly, mistakenly believing the
03:55comedian was Jewish. Was Hitler's toothbrush mustache a tribute to Chaplin? Chaplin certainly
04:00believed so and played on the resemblance in his dairy 1940 satire The Great Dictator.
04:05However, according to Ron Rosenbaum's The Secret Parts of Fortune, there is no evidence
04:09that Hitler had intended to recall Chaplin's little tramp when he first took his razor
04:13to the sides of his whiskers, which Rosenbaum claims Hitler only did for the first time
04:17in 1919. So, we don't know when exactly the mustache first appeared on Hitler's face,
04:22but we do know that the look went immediately out of style for him.