Woody Allen Tonight: Hitler's barber remembers! Part 1 of "The Schmeed Memoirs" from "Getting Even"

"I have been asked if I was aware of the moral implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg, I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years I thought he worked for the phone company."

-- from the Memoirs of "the best-known barber
in wartime Germany," Friedrich Schmeed

Already I've done Schmeed a disservice by referring to him in the head as "Hitler's barber," when in fact he "provided tonsorial services for Hitler and many highly placed government and military officials." In the first excerpt from his memoirs, he chronicles the day in the spring of 1940 when Hitler arrived at his shop and tried to cut ahead of von Ribbentrop, which resulted in the transfer of Ribbentrop to the Afrika Korps. "This sort of rivalry went on all the time," Schmeed notes. -- Ken


TO BEGIN THE STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE WITH
THE MASTER BARBER OF THE THIRD REICH, CLICK HERE

SO FAR IN "WOODY ALLEN TONIGHT"

from Getting Even (1971)
"A Look at Organized Crime"
"Death Knocks," Part 1 and Part 2
"A Twenties Memory"
"Hassidic Tales, with a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar," Part 1 and Part 2
Coming tomorrow: The conclusion of "The Schmeed Memoirs" PLUS (!) Part 1 of "Count Dracula"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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