The white summer tunic dates this figure to the moment the Third Reich stood at its height. In the summer of 1942 Nazi Germany dominated Europe from the Atlantic coast of France to deep inside the Soviet Union; German armies were driving toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields, and in North Africa Rommel stood barely sixty miles from Alexandria. To Hitler and those around him it must have seemed the war was all but won. It was an illusion. Within months the tide turned hard and for good — the catastrophe at Stalingrad, the defeat at El Alamein, the Americans landing in North Africa — and from late 1942 the Reich only ever retreated. This is Hitler at his zenith, in the last summer before the long fall began.

K&C's new set — a replacement for a long-retired earlier version — shows Hitler in the white summer tunic he wore in warm weather, black trousers and peaked cap, his German Shepherd Blondi standing at his side. It joins the collection's other portraits of him, the brown-uniformed saluting Hitler and the earlier Adolf and Blondi, and the generals who ran the war he was winning that summer, like Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. As a dated historical piece — Hitler in the summer of 1942 — it marks, for the collector who knows the history, the precise hinge of the war.

Model: LAH224 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 2 piece set (Hitler and dog)