"Paul Revere" -- the American Nazi who worked for National Geographic

April 28, 2017 7:53 AM

Douglas Chandler's 1937 feature on Berlin for National Geographic magazine painted a citizenry content under Nazi rule. He later collaborated with the Nazis, working as a radio propagandist.

Chandler was convicted of treason, but his sentence would be commuted by President Kennedy. He later tried to bill National Geographic for expenses. (h/t Neatorama)
posted by Etrigan (6 comments total)

Wow. I knew about his work as a radio propagandist as Paul Revere, but I don't think I had ever made the connection between that and the NatGeo photographs. I do find it fascinating that he quite literally vanished with virtually no trace in his later life, to the point we do not even have a documented date of death.
posted by strixus at 8:14 AM on April 28, 2017

I've seen that issue of National Geographic. An uncle of mine had nearly a century's worth of NatGeos down in his rec room, and I was slightly flabbergasted to pick one out from the 1930s at random and see photographs of bright swastika flags and read about how Hitler was, to coin a phrase, making Germany great again.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:26 AM on April 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

No documented date of death? Good riddance to bad rubbish.

And if --- according to Chandler --- all Germans were content to be ruled by the Nazis, then somebody please explain to me why my German grandparents had to run for their lives in 1930, spending a year underground to avoid being killed by the Nazis. I'm proud to say my grandfather was a member of an anti-Nazi political party, and to the end of his life he'd say that the world would have been better if they'd just bricked up the jail Hitler was in in the 1920s.
posted by easily confused at 8:28 AM on April 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

Though political tensions were historically high, La Gorce urged Chandler to abide by National Geographic’s founding editorial rules, which dictated that stories should be “of a kindly nature” and, most important, apolitical.

I think I was 12 when I figured out that with any NatGeo article whose human subjects weren't hunter-gatherers or otherwise outside our industrial society, the prose was worthless and all the information worth finding was in the photos and their captions.

That "kindly nature" requirement really stifled any chance of informative writing.
posted by ocschwar at 9:17 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

So it seems like National Geographic being taken over by Fox wasn't really a big culture change for them.
posted by TedW at 10:47 AM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

Now, that's not too kindly either. They fired Chandler before his Nazism was public.
posted by ocschwar at 12:19 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]