At home with Hitler. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

In November of 1938, Better Homes and Gardens ran a piece in their autumn issue,

a luxurious three-page spread of House Walkenfeld, a stately chalet in the Bavarian Alps.

The piece was written by Ignatius Fair, and the House, well, it belonged to another

than Adolf Hitler. Today we're talking about Hitler's 1938 spread in the American magazine Better

Homes and Gardens. Better Homes and Gardens was founded in 1922 by Edwin Meredith, who had previously

been the United States Secretary of Agriculture under Woodrow Wilson. It was originally titled Fruit

Garden and Home, but beginning with the August 1924 issue, they went with a catchier and a

bit less fruit-centric title of Better Homes and Gardens. Better Homes and Gardens is one of

the seven sisters, a group of women's service magazines, some of which we still have today,

or had until very recently, including Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal,

McCalls, Red Book, Women's Day, which is still around. Researching these titles gave me very

grocery store checkout aisle nostalgia, but that's where my own personal affinity with the content

of this episode ends. It's important to note the context of this piece in the landscape of

world history. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed as German chancellor to the new

Germany, the Nazi state, also referred to as the Third Reich. Rights were being stripped away

from marginalized people, and the first mass arrest of Jews happened in mid-June of that year.

On August 8, SS authorities opened the Mt.000 concentration camp near Lins, Austria,

and the Munich agreement was signed. Between November 9 and 10, one of the most violent incidents

in Nazi Germany occurs, a nationwide program called Crystal Nacht, also known as Night of the

Broken Glass, where synagogues are burned, Jewish homes and businesses are looted,

almost a hundred people are killed, and uniformed police arrest approximately 30,000 Jewish men,

...