When Hitler saved Red Riding Hood...

Few children would identify Adolf Hitler as the saviour of Little Red Riding Hood or recall that Snow White's father wanted to invade Poland.

But these were the allegorical twists injected into classic fairy tales re-fashioned by Nazi propaganda chiefs to recruit German children to support the Third Reich. In the Nazi film version of Little Red Riding Hood, the child wears a swastika-emblazoned cloak as she skips through the woods and is saved from the Big Bad Wolf by a man wearing an SS uniform in a style favoured by the F hrer.

Snow White's father, a minor character in tale, is portrayed in the Nazi film as the leader of a mighty army advancing on the "eastern" enemy. The film's premier, in October 1939, came one month after Germanyu00a0 attacked Poland.

Bad influence

Josef Goebbels, the propaganda genius of the regime, was quick to seize on the potential to plant the seeds of racial superiority in the minds of kids, according to a new study.

"The perfidious message was that Germany must resist its aggressors at all costs," said Ron Schlesinger, the author who is leading the study. His research, the most complete examination of Nazi manipulation of fairy tales, will be published in a book soon.

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