Tonight’s Special Guest Star: Adolf Hitler as Himself

It is perhaps a mark of the kind of show Red Dwarf is that an episode can start with having Lister climb into a living photo featuring Adolf Hitler, beat him up, nick his briefcase, and accidentally foil an assassination attempt.

Nevertheless, ten minutes into “Timeslides” (12/12/89) that is exactly what has happened, leading to Rimmer’s memorable line: “You can’t just stick one on the leader of the Third Reich.” But we’re not here to talk about the actual comedy in the episode. That would be ludicrous.

No, we’re here to talk about this prop newspaper:

In grand time travel story tradition, this is the shot that tells us that what Lister did is real. His leap into the living photograph had actual, lasting repercussions for the universe; it didn’t exist in its own little bubble. It’s the revelation that powers the whole rest of the episode.

It’s also the kind of shot which makes me think: hang on, did they make that newspaper front page from scratch, or is it based around a real one? Of course it made me think that. I have form.

First things first: the News Chronicle was certainly a real paper. Founded in 1930 from a merger between the Daily Chronicle and The Daily News, it was published for three decades until 1960, when it became part of the Daily Mail. And luckily for us, every single edition is online at the The British Newspaper Archive.

Researching these things over the years, you begin to figure out certain shortcuts. There’s no point searching for the “Hitler Escapes Bomb Attack at Nuremberg” headline; that one is almost certainly going to be made up by the production. No, the key is to search for one of the smaller headlines underneath, which is more likely to be from the original paper. In this instance, “Roosevelt Speech is Postponed” looks promising.

And sure enough:

Well, that was easy. That is most definitely the front page our paper was based on. Red Dwarf changed the main headline and added a photo of Craig Charles, but the rest of it matches this edition. Amusingly enough, if you look carefully at the version in “Timeslides”, above the headline “Navy Hits Again at Benghazi”, the word “Hitler” has been awkwardly pasted above it; this actually comes from the “Vichy Helped Hitler To Get Troops Into Africa” headline on the right, which has been excised to make room for the picture of Charles.

So there you have it. Except… that isn’t quite the whole story. The real edition of the newspaper we see above is dated Tuesday May 13th 1941; however, the newspaper from “Timeslides” is dated Tuesday May 4th 1938. So just out of interest, what did the front page of the News Chronicle look like on that date?

Well, for a start, May 4th 1938 was actually a Wednesday, not a Tuesday as per the “Timeslides” prop. But there’s nothing particularly interesting about that front page. Certainly, there’s nothing to do with any attempted attack on Hitler.

Which is perhaps not surprising. Because none of the dates above – either on the prop newspaper, or the real thing – are when this particular attempt on Hitler’s life actually took place. Let’s ask Rimmer, he’ll know all about it.

LISTER: A present here. [Reading the label] “To Adolf, Love & hugs, Staff Colonel von Stauffenberg.”
RIMMER: That rings a bell… Von Stauffenberg, he’s famous for something… Wait a minute, he’s the officer who tried to assassinate Hitler by putting a bomb in his briefcase! How could I forget that?

Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler actually took place on the 20th July 1944, several years after any of the above front pages. Which means that the News Chronicle would have reported on it the day afterwards. So here is the front page for the 21st July 1944:

So I guess technically, “Timeslides” should have done a modification of that front page, rather than one six years previously. But that’s just a bit of my silliness. I include the above merely for interest.

What isn’t a bit of my silliness is that the production seem to be slightly confused by what actually happened with the Stauffenberg plot. The date on that prop newspaper is way out; it’s not even the right decade. But hey, the date is hardly visible except on freeze-frame; it’s not really that important. What is visible is “Nuremberg” in large capital letters.

And… that’s not where the assassination attempt took place. It actually took place in Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg¹, well over 500 miles away.

At this point, my mind goes back to the footage at the beginning of the episode, where we see Lister flicking the Vs at Adolf Hitler. Rimmer himself claims that Lister has travelled to Nuremberg; I can be more specific than that. After watching far more Nazi propaganda than I would ever wish on anybody, I can confirm the original footage is taken from the film Triumph des Willens, aka Triumph of the Will, which comprises of material shot at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in, yes, Nuremberg:

Triumph of the Will

Red Dwarf, “Timeslides”

The “Timeslides” prop newspaper has a date of 1938 rather than 1934, but all of a sudden, the 30s date makes more sense in terms of what the episode is attempting to portray. The last Nuremberg rally occured in 1938; they had long stopped by the time of Stauffenberg’s plot in 1944.

Exactly what Grant Naylor were going for here, who can say. Maybe they simply misremembered the details of the plot.² But it could well be entirely deliberate; that they felt it was worth combining various parts of Nazi history into one ahistorical hole³, in order to get things across to the audience quickly. After all, if you’re going to do this story, you really want to have Lister crash a speech at Nuremberg. Which would be fine if they had simply made up the name of the assassin, but I think it just gets too weird if you’re going to use the name of a real one from a few years later.

In short: don’t learn Nazi history from Red Dwarf, kids.

1. Known officially since 1946 as Kętrzyn. ↩

2. It’s possible they were getting confused with Helmut Hirsch’s attempted bombing of Nuremberg in 1936, which was going to be a suitcase rather than a briefcase. ↩

3. You’re an ahistorical hole. ↩

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