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In 1972, when Levinthal was a student at the Yale School of Art, he bought a package of toy Nazi soldiers over Christmas break and began photographing them on the floor of his parents' house. He staged miniature battles, fashioned landscapes out of plastic garbage bags and top soil dusted with flour snow, set model airplanes on fire, and set off explosions using what he has described as "a variety of ridiculously unstable homemade incendiary devices." Shot using a very narrow depth of field and printed on high-contrast paper, the photographs have the gritty, out-of-focus quality of a photojournalist's images sent back from the front.
Back at school, Levinthal teamed up with his fellow Yale art student Garry Trudeau (better known for his "Doonesbury" comic strip) and together they sequenced the images into a graphic chronicle of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. The result was the 1977 book Hitler Moves East, a masterpiece of historical imagination that sustains an unsettling tension between the innocence of child's play and the ghastly horrors of war.