Hitler's love affair with Snow White and other Disney creations was crushed when American cartoondom joined in the war against the Third Reich. © Disney.

What was going through the mind of der Führer while he daubed his watercolors on to Dopey's shirt? During 1940, several nations, including arch-foe France, had already succumbed to the Nazi blitzkrieg. British forces had been routed and barely escaped at the port of Dunkirk. The Brits were faring little better in North Africa, and Hitler's merciless U-boats terrorized the Atlantic. The infamous Nazi-Soviet pact was in place, with Josef Stalin no threat to the Fatherland. Air Marshall Hermann Göring was attempting, unsuccessfully, to bomb Great Britain into submission, but as far as Herr Hitler knew, all seemed to be going well.

In short, life as the absolute dictator of Germany was good. There was time to take out a set of paints, revive an old hobby, and engage in a little Disney envy. Plenty of time, after all, to dream. Ah... what dreams Herr Hitler had. By the next year his extermination camps would begin operating, Belzec the first of them. The efficiency of gassing Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other sundry "political prisoners" to death using zyklon B would first be demonstrated at camp Chlemo in December of 1941.

It was just around the time those lethal nozzles opened that Hitler approved his "final solution" to the "Jewish problem," a meticulously constructed program of genocide codified at the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942. Military victory, racial purity, and the thousand-year Reich surely lay ahead, the golden road to a grand, Wagnerian Valhalla. Yet, here was one of the past century's undisputable monsters painting gentle pictures of Sleepy.

It somehow seems impossible that Hitler's own hand produced these charming portrayals; one would expect that, no matter how hard he tried, he could produce only twisted, horned homunculi, fanged creatures distorted with hate and ferocity. Sleepy should have had baleful red eyes instead of his pale blue ones, and sharp, wicked spines protruding from his spread fingers. There is something utterly dissonant about the idea of Adolf Hitler toiling diligently over a painting of a smiling Pinocchio, the puppet Disney designed to bring happiness to millions of children. Is it the idea that Disney's beloved designs could be so corrupted by the touch by one of history's foremost murderers... or the possibility that these paintings somehow give Hitler a glimmer of humanity in common with ours?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these "lost" paintings is how prophetic they proved to be, since they represented Hitler's losing battle. Even as the chancellor was daubing his watercolors on paper, it was obvious to him that neither he nor Germany's animators were going to win any battle against Disney. Perhaps German animators encouraged to ape Disney may have been able to produce shorts similar to those done by Hugh Harman for MGM: derivative of Disney's animation but not quite as good artistically or in terms of story structure. The system was simply not in place, nor did Hitler have a Disney. Deutches Zeichenfilm could never have assembled that much talent so efficiently in one place at one time, nor paid for such a film while competing for Reichsmarks with the Wehrmacht. Although of no military import whatsoever, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was an early defeat for der Führer. He had laid France low and routed Churchill, but he could not best Walt Disney in animating German fairy tales. Many more defeats were soon to follow.

Beginning with the epic battles around Stalingrad in July 1942 and the defeat of Rommel's forces at El Alamein in October of that same year, the war began to unravel for Hitler.