By Vania Raebel | October 7, 2019
A Bizarre Bear Costume
A picture tells a thousand words but it’s hard to come up with an explanation for why a group of German soldiers would be posing with a bear. The bear isn’t a real bear, of course, it’s a person in a bear costume. However, this doesn’t make the picture any more logical. While it may be some sort of war tactic, picture collector Jean-Marie Donat has a different answer.
Strange Tactics
Between 1920s to 1960s, all sorts of people – from soldiers to schoolgirls and everyone in between – were taking pictures with this costumed bear. A popular theory is that the bear gimmick was a business run by two friends who figured out a weird way to make additional bucks on the side by offering a cheap and fun photo op with their carnival costume.
