Meeting of Adolf Hitler with Mussolini in Venice 1934 Cigarette card with image of Hitler walking with Mussolini

Heinrich Hoffmann (1885-1957) was a German photographer and Nazi propagandist. The son and nephew of photographers, he worked in the Hoppé studio in London before setting up in Munich as a portraitist and photojournalist. His photograph of cheering crowds on 2 August 1914 unwittingly captured the young Adolf Hitler, an event which would later benefit Hoffmann's career. Drifting to the far right after the First World War and revolutionary events in Bavaria, he joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and convinced an initially camera-shy Hitler of photography's political value. Hoffman’s assistant, Eva Braun, became Hitler’s mistress in 1930. After 1933, his virtual monopoly of Hitler photographs, as ‘the man who sees the Führer for us’, made him one of the Third Reich's major profiteers. His scenes of carefully constructed intimacy, presenting his master, especially in the regime's early years, as a clean-living, nature-loving man of the people, were massively disseminated. After 1945, though claiming to have been a mere chronicler of events, he was fined and imprisoned. His extensive photo archive survives, including photographs of German political and religious figures, as well as actors, painters, and musicians. 

The cigarette card was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2012 by Martin Shallow III. 

Meeting of Adolf Hitler with Mussolini in Venice 1934 Cigarette card with image of Hitler walking with Mussolini 

overall: Height: 4.750 inches (12.065 cm) | Width: 3.250 inches (8.255 cm) 

Cigarette card, Begegnung Adolf Hitlers mit Mussolini in Venedig 1934, image 66, group 64, series 15, Adolf Hitler - Pictures of the Life of the Führer, about 1936. The card features a black and white photograph of Hitler walking with Mussolini in Venice. Cigarette cards were a popular collectible item in Germany beginning about 1920. Large albums with text, but no pictures, were published for each series and the cards were collected to be added as illustrations. The increasing popularity of the Nazi Party made them a desirable subject for a collectible card series. The album for this series has text and photo captions that tell the story of Hitler's life from his birth in 1899 to his 1933 appointment as Chancellor, and then Fuhrer, of Germany. 

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Small, rectangular paper card with a halftone photographic print with white borders treated to look like a glossy photograph. It has an image of Adolf Hitler in a dark suit and tie, carrying a hat in his left hand, walking with Benito Mussolini who is dressed in a uniform and black cap. The back has the title, the picture and group number, and German fraktur text and adhesive residue on the corners.