http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/ar...n/18globe.html

The Mystery of Hitler’s Globe Goes Round and Round

Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it’s not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.

Neither is it the one in the Märkisches Museum, the Berlin history museum nearby, nor the one in a geographical institute across town, which first caught Mr. Pobanz’s eye 40-odd years ago when he was a student.

Manufactured in two limited editions in Berlin during the mid-1930s (the second edition changed Abyssinia to Italian East Africa), the real Columbus globe was nearly the size of a Volkswagen and, at the time, more expensive. A standard wood base was designed to support it, but custom furniture stands were made for Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Mr. Pobanz has been methodically tracking them down.

“I don’t know how many of these globes were made because the Columbus factory was destroyed in 1943, along with its archives.” Mr. Pobanz pulled out a photocopy of a drawing he had unearthed for a custom base, designed by the Munich studio of Paul Ludwig Troost. Troost was Hitler’s favorite architect during the early 1930s. “This base was made for Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry,” he said.

It was identical to the one for the globe at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. “So this globe could only have been made for Ribbentrop,” he said.

He opened a blue folder of papers to a photocopy showing a group of Russian soldiers in the New Reich Chancellery in May 1945, crowded around Hitler’s globe. “I don’t know where it is,” he said, studying the image for a second.

“Maybe it’s in Moscow.”

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