Beginning in 1946, the year after he had supposedly shot himself dead in a Berlin bunker, no less an individual than Adolf Hitler began mailing out a long-running series of letters to persons living in the rural eastern US States of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.
These letters – in which Adolf strangely billed himself as “the Furrier” rather than ‘the Führer’ – came soliciting donations for a cunning new Nazi plot to enslave America, the world, and finally the galaxy itself. It turned out Hitler had been taken alive after all, and had escaped across the Atlantic, where his latest communications, written in the kind of barely literate English you might expect from a non-native speaker, made their recipients a tempting offer: in return for charity in the form of postal-orders, Adolf would consider making each donor his official “Furrier #2”. As Hitler would accept individual sums as low as $5 for his cause, this represented quite a bargain. Hiding out in a top-secret location somewhere in the enemy heartland, Hitler had established no fewer than 116 underground factories, with his 36,000-strong army of German revolutionaries digging tunnels towards Washington where he would later establish his “new kingdom”. Within these subterranean lairs Adolf’s scientists were busily manufacturing atom bombs and an indestructible fleet of “invisible spaceships which make no sound” with which to defeat America. If those in receipt of the Furrier’s begging-letters had not already seen or heard such wonders buzzing through their local skies, then this only showed just how invisible and silent these craft were – the ideal vehicles, Hitler maintained, to launch a “surprise attack” on the White House.
Authorities were tipped off when Adolf’s most generous supporter, a 70-year-oldVirginia stonemason with the good old Teutonic name of GA Huber, dropped dead. Huber’s family did not expect to inherit much from their relative, living as he did in a pathetic wooden shack. Yet the reason Huber was destitute was because he had blown his $10,000 life-savings on aiding Hitler’s future coup.
A 1947 Gallup poll showed 45 per cent of Americans believed Hitler was still alive, and Huber, described as being in “poor physical and mental health”, had taken it upon himself to investigate the fugitive Führer’s whereabouts. After Huber’s death, around 200 handwritten Nazi begging-letters were found in his hovel, together with stacks of money-order receipts filed away as proof of Huber’s purchase of the eventual role of Deputy Furrier.
Alerted to the existence of this looming totalitarian plot, officials lured Adolf into a Kentucky post office to pick up a vital new donation, a money-order worth as much as $15, towards annexing the Universe. As soon as Hitler cashed the cheque on 11 August 1956, he was arrested, despite the dictator’s shrewd disguise – that of a 61-year-old black man, surely the last identity you would expect to have been assumed by history’s most notorious white supremacist. Once behind bars, the dark-skinned prisoner had to admit he was not the Furrier #1 at all, but a former coal miner and part-time Baptist mountain preacher turned mail-order fraudster named William Henry Johnson.
Lined up to behad been squeezed from Charlie by promising him a “royal palace” and his “choice among… virgins”, with a forced child bride to be sourced from the families of the future Nazi diplomatic corps once Washington had been obliterated. So eager was Charlie for his reward that when contacted by investigators he had only eight cents and a single can of beans left to live off, having just mailed Hitler his final $20. So impressed was he by Brown’s sacrifices that Adolf wrote to Huber admitting he might make Charlie “assistant world-ruler [alongside yourself] for his bravery act last week [in sending me money]”. Sometimes, Brown was brave enough to send Hitler other things via the US Postal Service too, specifically a natty sports-coat and pair of size-11 white shoes, it being “necessary for Adolf to dress sporty so he won’t be recognised” when goose-stepping around town.
