The accompanying text, by Emil Herold, suggested a connection between the "Jewish features" shown in the photographs and the subjects' left-wing policies.

[5] A noted photograph, taken by Hoffmann in Munich's Odeonsplatz on 2 August 1914, apparently shows a young Hitler among the crowd cheering the outbreak of World War I.

[7] Footage of the event from a similar angle has also been claimed to show Hitler,[8] but there is no evidence he adopted a toothbrush moustache before the war.

[9][10] In 2010, historian Gerd Krumeich [de], a German expert on the First World War, came to the conclusion that Hoffmann had doctored the image.

As a result of the doubt raised by those considerations, the curators of a 2010 Berlin exhibition about Hitler's influence inserted a notice saying that the image's authenticity could not be verified.

[3] Historian Alan Bullock succinctly described Hoffmann as an "earthy Bavarian with a weakness for drinking parties and hearty jokes",[18] who "enjoyed the licence of a court jester" with Hitler.

[24] In the autumn of 1929, Hoffmann and his second wife Erna introduced his Munich studio assistant, Eva Braun, to Hitler.

Hoffmann reported, however, that even though Braun eventually became a resident of the Berghof – after the death of Geli Raubal (see below) – and was then constantly at Hitler's side during the times he was with his private entourage, she was not immediately his mistress.

Ultimately, to the surprise of his intimate circle,[26] Hitler married Braun in the Führerbunker in Berlin on 29 April 1945, and the couple committed suicide together the following day.

[27] On 17 September 1931, Hitler was with Hoffmann on a trip from Munich to Hamburg when the Führer got word that his niece, Geli Raubal – whom he adored and who accompanied him to almost all social events – had committed suicide by shooting herself.

[33] In 1933, Hoffmann was elected to the Reichstag[29] which, after the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933, had become a powerless entity with little function except to serve as a stage setting for some of Hitler's policy speeches.

[34] As a one-party state, an "election" in Nazi Germany meant marking a ballot approving the Führer's list of candidates; no alternative choices were presented or allowed.

Frederic Spotts, in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, describes Hoffmann as "an alcoholic and cretin who knew little more about painting than did the average plumber".

A room full of somewhat more modern paintings which Hoffmann had selected as possibilities were angrily dismissed by Hitler with a gesture.

Hoffmann remained in charge for subsequent annual Great German Art Exhibitions, making the preliminary selections which were then hung for Hitler to approve or veto.

A year later, Josef Goebbels, the Reich Propaganda Minister, brought the commission into his Ministry and restaffed it to include more art dealers, since the sale of the confiscated works internationally was a source of hard currency for the Nazi regime – although not as much as was expected, since the knowledge that the Nazis were putting large numbers of the artworks up for sale depressed their market value.

When auctions were halted as war approached, there were still over 12,000 works stored in warehouses which the commission Hoffmann sat on had condemned as artistically worthless.

The result was the burning of 1,004 oil paintings and 3,825 other works in the courtyard of Berlin's central fire station, on 20 March 1939.

[42] Along with sculptor Arno Breker, stage designer Benno von Arent, architect Gerdy Troost, and museum director Hans Posse, Hoffmann was one of the few people whose artistic judgment Hitler trusted.

[43] He bestowed the honorific title of "Professor" on Hoffmann in 1938,[29] something he did for many of his favorites in the arts, such as architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, and sculptors Breker and Josef Thorak.

[31] Hoffmann accompanied Hitler on his state visit to Italy in 1938, in which the Führer was much taken by the beauty of the Italian cities of Rome, Naples and Florence and the artworks and architecture they contained.

Hitler specifically asked Hoffmann to take a close-up photograph of Stalin's earlobes, by which he thought he could determine if the Soviet leader was Jewish or not.

[47] In 1941, Hoffmann was chief among the many Nazi chieftains who took advantage of the occupation of the Netherlands to buy paintings and other artworks from Dutch dealers, sometimes at inflated prices.

That drove the art market up, much to the consternation of Hans Posse, who had been commissioned by Hitler to assemble a collection for the planned museum.

[29] Hoffmann was classified as a "major offender" in January 1947 by the Munich Spruchkammer, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and had his entire fortune confiscated.

In 1954 a ten-part autobiographical series, "Hoffmann's Tales", was published in the "Münchner Illustrierte", the result of interviews by journalist Joe Heydecker [de], later collected as a book in 2008.

Henriette married National Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, who provided introductions to many of Hoffmann's picture books, in 1932.

These photographs are in the public domain in the US owing to their status as seized Nazi property, otherwise their copyrights would first expire on 1 January 2028.

[62] In 2020, following years of negotiations, Jan van der Heyden's painting View of a Dutch Square was restituted to the heirs of Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, who fled Vienna in March 1938.

After the war Bavaria made no attempt to return the work to the Kraus family, instead selling it for little money in 1962 to Hoffmann's daughter, Henriette Hoffmann-von Schirach.