WHEN shrink-turned-war criminal Radovan Karadzic was captured in Belgrade in 2008 posing as a doctor of alternative medicine and looking like a cross between The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and The Big Lebowski's Dude, the world learned an important lesson.

Genocidal maniacs will look not at all as you expect them to when they are finally run to ground after time on the lam.

Which brings us to American make-up artist Eddie Senz and a little post-D Day commission given to him by the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. "Could you," they asked, "imagine how Adolf Hitler might look if he tries to escape Germany disguised as James Joyce, DH Lawrence or Leon Trotsky?"

They didn't actually put it like that, and besides those men were all dead by 1944 so pretending to be them would have been dumb even for Hitler. But you get the drift. Senz was being asked to draw up photographic likenesses of the Nazi leader with as many combinations of facial hair and tonsorial stylings as was plausible in the mid-1940s. (This was before the advent of designer stubble and pony-tails for men.)

The pictures were to be distributed among US forces in Europe. But, of course, the mass murderer spoiled what would have been a terrific game of Catch The Fuhrer! by shooting himself in his bunker. That meant Eddie Senz's mock-ups remained under lock and key until last week when they were released by the US National Archive in Washington and the world was given a glimpse of what might have been.

A question, though: would the monster seem as terrible today had he been captured in Argentina in 1949 looking like Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead? Or would the 1960s have just seemed an awful lot weirder?