How wild is this: investigators with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s office have recovered several items that are believed to have come from Adolf Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” chalet and may even have been personal possessions of Der Fuhrer himself! The items were apparently brought home from Germany as souvenirs following World War II, and they eventually ended up in a storage locker in West Valley City, from which they were stolen in 2005.

(FYI for my out-of-town readers: West Valley is a conglomeration of several smaller townships located — as if the name wasn’t a dead giveaway — in the central western section of the Salt Lake Valley. It’s something of a low-rent area that has been struggling to correct its image problems for as long as I can remember.)

Three of the five artifacts were confiscated from a collector of antiquities who did not know they were stolen goods; he was planning to buy them and had taken them to a local college professor for appraisal. The prof, apparently suspicious of the items for some reason, alerted authorities. Interestingly enough, just a few hours after the initial story broke, a fourth item was turned over, leaving only one — the bronze bust of Hitler seen in the photo above, which was damaged at some point by a blow from an ax — still unaccounted for.

The articles I linked are maddeningly vague on certain details — who turned in the fourth item, I wonder? — but I nevertheless find this story fascinating. It’s hard not to think of Utah as a quiet little backwater where nothing interesting ever happens — the point farthest from the bright center of the universe, if you take my meaning — so when some local connection to the major events and characters of history does turn up, it’s… startling. Difficult to wrap my head around. And in this case, all the more so because of where those objects had been residing until they were swiped. West Valley is the last place in this area where you’d expect to locate any kind of long-lost treasures. It’d be like finding the Ark of the Covenant tucked away in a dusty corner of a Kmart stock room. Which, come to think of it, would probably be a perfect hiding place…

(Incidentally, I’m not really comparing some tacky Nazi knick-knacks to the fabulousness of the Ark, and I’m not excited by this story because I harbor anything resembling positive feelings toward Hitler. I want to be very clear on that. But given how large the twisted little wretch looms in the history of the century just past, I can’t help but feel some measure of awe at the idea of objects he once handled occupying the same time zone where I grew up. I guess it seems like everything to do with him should’ve been destroyed or relegated to museums long ago. Certainly not sitting behind a roll-up door in an anonymous storage unit in a lane filled with such units smack-dab in the middle of boring old Jello-eating Utah. It makes the 60-year-old history I enjoy reading about suddenly feel very, very close, as if the man himself has somehow magically stepped out of those scratchy old black-and-white film clips into the real world, my world, where I once played as a child. The past touches the present through these tangible artifacts, as if they somehow contain echoes within their structure. Am I making any sense at all? I’m not sure I am…that’s what I get for writing in the wee hours while suffering insomnia…)