Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe MARBACH, Germany, May 6 (UPI) -- New research in Germany into the life of Adolf Hitler reveals the dictator was ordered to trim his mustache into the shape that became iconic. Britain's Sunday Telegraph reported on the find, which was unearthed in a new biography of Alexander Moritz Frey. Advertisement Frey, who served alongside Hitler during World War I and died in 1957, wrote that Hitler was ordered to trim his mustache to fit the respirator masks meant to protect soldiers from mustard gas attacks. Had that order not been issued, Frey asserted, the dictator would be remembered not his tightly clipped mustache, but as a man with a large Prussian mustache. Stefan Ernsting, author of the biography, unearthed Frey's essay, "The Unknown Private -- Personal Memories of Hitler", in archives in the provincial German town of Marbach.
