I recalled this so fully that I saw the cats, one with a Hitler mustache, at the window.

When I came across this bit while reading Humboldt’s Gift, I put a little note in the margin because I thought it was funny.  Today, unfortunately, I had some time on my hands while waiting for my coffee to brew, and I started wondering when people first started referring to cats having Hitler mustaches.  Also unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me that the earliest date wasn’t going to be from Shakespeare’s time.  We’re dealing with pretty much 1935(?) to the present day.

We know about the internet site devoted to such precious litle kitlers, we know Humboldt’s Gift was published in 1975, but we don’t know whether Bellow was the first to make note of it.  The best search tool I have is Google Books Search, though I suspect Lexis Nexis would do a more thorough job.  So off I went.  My suspicion was that the fuhrer/feline similarities wouldn’t appear until well after the war, when it wasn’t so real.  I was again, wrong.  Cats with Hitler mustaches were a thing to be mentioned before the war even ended.So, here’s the link to my results.  I combed through them the best I could, however I as rather limited as some publications only give you short previews, and often these previews weren’t long enough to really determine whether their subject interested me.

From Heart’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan, 1944-

She told him about the new kittens- one had a white nose and one had a black mustachel the one with the black mustache was too cute to call him Hitler, or else she would.

(I’m not sure if the magazines were one magazine, or if Google just has them combined for whatever reason.)  But that’s not it.

That’s the oldest reference I’ve found, but there are a handful more worth mentioning.  Gertrude Stein mentions one such cat in her 1945 book Wars I Have Seen:

…we have a cat, the peasants who gave it to us had called it by a name Hitler because of his mustache…

Two different sociology journals mention the following in 1946, but it only comes up on the main results page, not in the actual links.  I dont know what that means.  It doesn’t include enough to know for sure that it’s a cat-Hitler, but it seems to suggest it.  If a sociology paper in ’45 references this line of though, presumably it was already somewhat established.

A cat was kicked in New York because he had a moustache that looked like …

So these are the three earliest citations I found.  After 1975, there are a bunch.  Maybe next time I’ve got access to l/n I’ll look into it, but I think the kind of writing that would go into as much detail as to decribe cat’s facial hair is probably more likely to be a book or a magazine, and less likely to be in a newspaper.  That said, this is an important area to delve into…  If anyone has acess to better research tools, please let me know what you find out.