2. The German Polar Bear Craze
Frenchwoman Jean-Marie Donat gathered a collection over 10,000 vintage photos from 1920s and 1930s which shows many Nazis who posed with men dressed up as polar bears. Polar bears became very popular in Germany, starting in the early 1920s, when the Berlin Zoo acquired a pair of polar bear cubs.
The cute wild animals caught the public attention very quickly and proved to be so wildly popular that the result was a mini boom in furries and polar bear costumes.
Polar bear fashion went on for decades in Germany. Every single year in that decade, cheerful Germans snapped photos of themselves posing with polar bears–or men in polar bear costumes–as the country underwent radical changes.
When the Weimar Republic collapsed, the Nazis seized power, then Third Reich revealed its horrors, World War II was fought and lost, Germany was occupied–and despite it all, Germans kept up the polar bear trend. It was only until the late 1940s, that the craze finally faded.
