All Man: 'I Saved Hitler's Life'

Another men's adventure magazine that, in the late sixties, transmogrified into a more conventional men's magazine, with the focus on naked women.  Not that All Man wasn't mildly obsessed with sex and naked ladies in its original format, as this cover from November 1964 shows.  Presenting a heady mixture of vice, violence, Nazis, sex and nudity, the cover seems to be a generic one, its sensational imagery not necessarily illustrating any particular story.  That said, it could illustrate 'The Nude Nymphos Who Fight for Freedom', although the girls doing the swastika carving on the Nazi's chest aren't naked, (their clothing could just be artistic licence as nudity wouldn't have been allowed on covers at this time), or, at a pinch, it could be illustrating 'The Slashing Killer on Main Street', (although the slashers here are in multiple).  Whatever it is meant to be illustrating, the cover does represent that variation one sometimes encounters on men's adventure magazines, whereby instead of semi-clothed women being bizarrely tortured and menaced by Nazis, (or Commies, Viet-Cong, biker gangs, etc), we have a dude being brutalised by a couple of bad girls.  Except that these 'bad girls' are clearly 'good guys' as they are slashing a Nazi, so are presumably resistance fighters in some part of Nazi-occupied WW2 Europe.

The stand out headline on the cover, though, has to be 'I Saved Hitler's Life', as boasted by an 'unreformed Nazi'.  The latter no doubt having been found hiding in the South American jungle.  Who knows, when he says that he saved the Fuhrer's life, maybe he doesn't mean that he foiled an assassination attempt, but rather that he succeeded in spiriting Adolf away from Berlin at the end of the war and is now living with him in Paraguay.  Purely platonically, of course.  Whatever the story is about, it is undoubtedly as true as that 'true fact story about the mob', telling us of 'How Vice Girls Learn Their Trade'.  Having learned their trade, they then apparently form 'Sex Clubs' and hold unspecified contests.  These latter two items underline the fact that, by the mid-sixties, these magazines were being marketed toward an adolescent male audience to whom sex with a live, breathing, woman was an aspiration, something to be approached with trepidation.  Theses sorts of stories play toward all of those adolescent male fears about sexually active women - that they are all actually involved in vice and/or see the bedding of young men as some kind of game, in which the guy will ultimately be humiliated.  Such women are simultaneously objects both of desire and fear. Something emphasised again by that cover, with its cleavage-flaunting beauty carving a swastika into the chest of a guy she and her friend have lured into vulnerability with the promise of sexual gratification.  Sex is scary, is the message - only the brave and fearless, who can tame these women can ultimately taste its pleasures.