The “Hitler at Home” stories of the pre-WWII American press | Hacker News Reader

The “Hitler at Home” stories of the pre-WWII American press

atlasobscura.com

What's missing from the article is how a large part of the american public (especially upper class) really loved Hitler, as a "great man of state" that would fight against the communism threat.

Also before WWII, anti-semitism was much more widespread in the US than after it.

In fact jew refuges from Germany were often denied entry into the US, as in this classic tragic story:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267

While it doesn't make it any better, one should keep in mind that anti-semitism was widespread everywhere at the time. Jewish refugees were denied entry not just by the US but also many european countries.

> one should keep in mind that anti-semitism was widespread everywhere at the time.

It was and it is widespread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism ,not only at the time.

> Also before WWII, anti-semitism was much more widespread in the US than after it.

Exactly. And this is what Hollywood has been rewriting the whole time in WW2 movies, to make the US seem like the good guys against the Evil Himself, while the reality at the time was way more nuanced.

On top of that, the horror of the concentration camps was not well known to the public during the war, and was mostly a post-war phenomenon (with many folks not believing such stories at first, until the evidence became overwhelming).

>> the horror of the concentration camps was not well known to the public during the war

But it was pretty well known for the british and american governments(since 1941 or at the latest 1942) , and even to this day, some details of said knowledge(the intelligence reports on decryptions on concentration camps communication) are not availble to historians.

One has to wonder why.

Actually when reading more about it, even if the American public would have known, it probably wouldn't have mattered much, judging by later genocides :

""no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence[genocide]. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060541644/metafilter...

Also another book shows how the holocaust was an open secret , known to millions since at least 1941:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805059849/metafilter...

By the 1940s most of the top leaders in the US and Britain knew of the concentration camps. But at that point there wasn't much to be done about them besides winning the war.

Not really. For example it was maybe possible to reliably warn other Jews. Or maybe help other Jews in countries that might in the future be aimed by Hitler find refuge.

Potentially they could have saved many.

To add a strong counterpoint, I suggest that you read The holocaust in American life by Peter Novick. It's a rather controversial book and entire chapters piss me off in unbelievable ways, but Novick creates an interesting lens through which to view the Holocaust.

One important thing to consider is that the holocaust has become a singular concept of incredible horror that has shaped large swathes of foreign policy for fifty years. But, if you really want to understand the American populace's war time response (or lack of) to the holocaust, it's important to look at the holocaust from a 1940s sensibility.

First, while there is very credible evidence to suggest that while many westerners knew about the holocaust, there is equally credible evidence to suggest that even the best informed had little understanding of the scale or method of the death camps until the liberations started. At the time, speaking in terms of overall military might, it would have seemed unthinkable to kill off a potential work force. Second, and perhaps more importantly, even if the scale of the death camps had truly been known, it happened in the midst of a war that killed about 70 million people. It was another brutal dimension in a global war.

Industrialists in the US advocated for (and implemented!) forced society-level eugenics as a way of creating a more "desirable" pool of employees for them to exploit. Germany just copied the US, then the robber barons had to distance themselves from the ideas of controlling humanity person-by-person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#... — "Every 7 1/2 minutes a high grade person is born in the US" almost sounds like modern tech/startup "some people are actually just better than others" rhetoric.

Eugenics, and social darwinism, are alive and well in the elite realms of science and technology. Modern tech/startup rhetoric is not immune to association by osmosis in this regard, in my opinion. Fact is, one can observe heinous totalitarianism anywhere authorities are given power, and that is a lot of what our tech world is about, after all ..

The word "Untermensch" was also in fact adopted from a German translation of Lothrop Stoddard's "The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man".

> Industrialists in the US advocated for (and implemented!) forced society-level eugenics

That's a pretty revisionist phrasing. Eugenics had a much broader base in society than anyone, regardless of politics, should be comfortable with.

From the wikipedia page you link to:

"Eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community. By 1928 there were 376 separate university courses in some of the United States' leading schools, enrolling more than 20,000 students, which included eugenics in the curriculum."

"By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation."

"Public acceptance in the U.S. was the reason eugenic legislation was passed. Almost 19 million people attended the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915."

But legislation and implementation was largely backed by the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Carnegies, and the other shadowy economic 0.001% people of their day.

(citations left as an exercise for the reader)

And this is something fascinating what everybody should know. Anti-semitism was so wide spread in Europe and US...

For example, story of Kristallnacht and expelling of polish jews to Poland...

Nazis expelled majority of Polish jews to Poland in 28 October 1938. However, Poland refused to accept them even though they were Polish citizens. So ~8000 people (families with young children, elders..) ended up stranded in no-mans land without food, shelter, ... (Among those stranded were parents of Herschel Grynszpan, Polish Jews who was living in Paris. He heard and saw suffering of his family and, on Monday, 7 November 1938, he murdered Ernst vom Rath in Paris. Then Nazis organized Kristallnacht...)

And seems story is happening now with refugees from Syria: ISIS is not really interested to have certain people (only "real" Muslims can stay) in their state - so they pretty much expelled bunch of people. But, for Europe, they are not good enough - as Hungarian prime minister says that refugees "are threatening Europe’s Christian culture" [1]

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisi...

In a similar vein, also of note is the Evian conference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference

Held in 1938, the question was to help Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Both the US & UK refused to increase quotas and other countries followed suit. Hitler had notably offered to let every Jewish person leave.

This kind of thing still happens. I'll bet if you dug into the history of those Hitler pieces, you'd find out the Nazis paid some PR firm to arrange those articles. That's how it happens now. I'm sure it was the same then.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the...

http://www.thenation.com/article/professors-paid-qaddafi-pro...

This is very common. Brutal and dictatorial regimes often buy PR and lobbying from K street, also put ads in magazines.

If you see "Uzbekistan: A misunderstood gem" (just an example) touting how great it is, and how torture we hear about is all fabricated lies, in full page add in Foreign Affairs, it is obvious what is going on. But they can of course be more subtle and are buy academics, like you showed in the links. Those professors seem to the outside world as "independent" thinkers/researchers. So if they then start publishing papers on "Benefits of business development in Central Asia" mentioning Uzbekistan as a great place to do business, it is a bit less obvious what is happening. Someone might get fooled.

This also happens with climate and other major areas that affect powerful interests.

Yeah it's bad.

Also, I can't believe I forgot to mention Walter Duranty. He was writing around the time of these Hitler articles. As far as I know, no one paid him to do what he did - he just did it for the sake of journalist activism or something. There's a lot of that too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

Well, I guess with a bit of anachronism and hindsight anything could be made to look sensational and exciting.

The whole point of the article is that hindsight should have already been there at 1939 -- 6 years after Hitler came to power, with Main Kampf already published, with the Kristallnacht and tons of other signs...

Could it really have been there? Remember how the US looked back in these days: The US had to invent its "moral high ground" and chose to be against racism all of a sudden mostly because it had to justify the costs of WWII.

I am an outsider but I could imagine, that this artificially introduced moral is part of the reason why racism and other problems are still big in the US: The people generally believe that they already have the moral high ground and after all won against the evil. It is much easier to handle 800k+ refugees like Germany will do this year, when your moral self-awareness is a bit more toned down to say the least and you still think you owe the world.

In the US, there is an organization called Big Brother / Big Sister. Basically, it enables an adult to make a difference in a child's life. Typically, the child does not have a father, and the Big Brother/Sister will spend a few hours a week with the child.

A friend of mine was a Big Sister to a girl. When the friend moved out of the city to the burbs (got mugged one too many times), they had the little sister (the girl) help them move.

The girl was shocked to find out that you could own a home. She thought that the gov't just provided that sort of thing. You see, she exists in this subculture that not only has lost the skills needed for success, but who are punished by the gov't programs that support them if they attempt to follow more successful life strategies.

If you are on assistance and get married, you lose it. If you get a job, your assistance is reduced. And so on.

Pearl Harbor was the only justification needed in the United States for the costs of World War II, and anti-Japanese racism was a massive part of the war propaganda at the time. Of course, too many discussions of the war run into another sort of racism--a Eurocentrism that forgets that the war also happened on the other side of the world, and for a much longer time at that.

Pearl Harbor is part of the reason for anti-nazi propaganda: America was mostly isolationistic or even pacifistic at that time (maybe not everything was bad back in the days?) and the people had to be convinced why they would want to fight in Europe while they were being attacked by Japan.

People often forget that it was Germany that declared war on the United States. Isolationism (and even pacifism) rarely survives when one is on the receiving end of an act of war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...

"The Germans were bad for sending the Jews to the gas chambers but the Americans were bad too for running articles about Hitler's homes" is pretty weak sauce.

In true slashdot tradition I did not read the article, but if that is the gist of it, weak sauce indeed...

This "bad too" in your comment, implying that the article intends to say "equally bad", is even more weak.

The entire western world was pretty racist before (and during) the war, the war (or its aftermath actually) changed that. The article (naively?) applies newer sensibilities to a previous era.

My favorite anecdote: who refused to shake Jesse Owens' hand after his achievements in the 1936 Berlin Olympics? No, it wasn't Hitler [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens#Berlin_Olympics

I had a set of atlases from 1937. It was amazingly complementary towards Germany's leadership, but did mention that people of certain religions and races should avoid traveling there. I'm still in awe of how people can compartmentalize things to the point of paradox.

Do you get the same sense when you see advertisements for Emirates or Qatar Airlines, or advertisements and guidebooks for tourism to places like Dubai and Qatar?

I honestly don't know. I don't really see a lot of advertisements for the gulf and its not a place I want to travel. Sure seems popular with the rich though.

Fair enough, but consider that, at least before the war, Germany was still thought of as, well, Germany--a decently well-developed country with lots of culture and history. In other words, a reasonable tourist destination. In 1937, passenger travel between the US and Germany was popular enough to justify a regular line for the Hindenberg, until it burst into flames.

Remember that our current perception of Nazi Germany is largely based on (a) human rights abuses that largely happened during the Second World War, (b) the fact that we were on opposing sides of that war, and (c) the fact that Nazis don't have any influential sympathizers left. This isn't to say that the Nazis weren't as bad as commonly thought, but they were certainly not unique in such.

Evil is not unique, but Hitler and his bunch earned their place in history with their mad genocide. They started before WWII and continued to its final days. Stalin, our ally, was not an innocent and killed millions. The 20th century is all of history wrapped in the shiny efficiency of better technology.

People will ignore quite a lot that conflicts with their desired perception. It is amazingly hard for the a being so built to pattern match to break from patterns. Russia was trading with Germany up until they were attacked.

On a personal level, I see celebrities going to places that have awful human rights record then come back to the US and tell us how bad we are. I have little use for hypocrisy in this life. Yes, Germany was popular before the war which just means their are plenty of ignorant (both ill-informed and willfully) and useful idiots in the world.

what has been shoved down the memory hole is that hitler was a stooge/front man for the upper class and the corporations...and that was why the media here loved him....they always love those at the top...

read the essay called 'I was Hitler's Boss'...it's online...published anonymously in the 1930s, this essay makes clear that the general idea of the nazis and the third reich was already in place before hitler was even hired by the reichswehr...the most well-known hitler biographer Kershaw identified the author of the essay as Karl Mayr, who was indeed hitler's boss..

read the essay...this is what it says:

the german upper class & corporations were afraid that the same thing that was happening in russia during the bolshevik revolution was going to happen in germany...and indeed there were dozens of burgeoning worker's populist parties springing up...and what did those parties want? To disempower the rich and powerful...so the rich and powerful began using the german army to spy on and subvert these populist uprisings...they hired hitler because he was a war hero (although recent books make it clear that hitler did not deserve his iron cross and was known as a brown noser among the troops during WW1).

They hired hitler and put him to work spying on these working class parties that were the enemies of the rich and powerful.

As mayr writes, when hitler was hired, he was basically a pauper, and was just a lost dog looking for a master...didn't care squat about jews or anything like that...but the reichswehr and the upper class were planning to make the jews a substitute scapegoat for the rich, as mayr explains...the jews were a big part of the educated class, and those were a big part of the bolshevik revolution....so the planners of the third reich has already set their cap for the jews when hitler was first hired....

hitler was indeed born with an undescended testicle, which made him an outcast, mayr explains....so when he was a boy he wandered the hills making speeches...that talent came to the fore during his spying on the populist parties...and so the reichswehr and their corporate backers had found their talented orator to lead a fake-populist version of the true-populist workers parties that the upper class/corporations feared.

Now you know why hitler was actually quite popular with the media...the media is and always has been supported by advertising purchases by corporations...

Not a bad rant, but too many ellipses, and went off the rails when you started talking about Hitler's nuts.

read the essay

Mhm. Fascism is very corporatist, and the elites loved it. Hitler could help them. He could crush their workers' revolts. He could ensure the communists would not gain power. He would provide them with ample slave labour.

Nope. No, no way. Uh-uh. Forget it.

It didn't happen in the news, so it didn't happen. There is no possibility that anything hidden ever takes place, therefore you are wrong and your story must be fake. /s

(I've actually seen how the "man behind the curtain" operates many times throughout my own experiences, so I know that all sorts of things take place that the general public would never believe unless it showed up on the front page or nightly news.)

So how do you explain Mussolini? Populist fascism was a continent-wide phenomenon, and regardless of who may have supported these people, no one was Hitler's "boss" once he took power.

There is no nuance in gas chambers.

I was obviously not talking about that part. And as I mentioned the reality of gas chambers was not widely known during the war.

I’m willing to accept the claim that there’s not a lot of nuance to WWII era Germany’s actions and motives, etc. ("Schindler’s List" notwithstanding.) But to claim theres no nuance to the people fighting against Germany, seems ahistorical.

The question was about levels of anti-semitism. The highest level is gas chambers.

The question was actually about the portrayal of US motives during WW2.

Do Europeans actually believe that the main problem with Blacks in the US is racism?

Yes, I think so. Would you care to elaborate why this would not be so?

(I'm having trouble parsing your question.)

I think that most problems faced by black people in the US are a result of racism. Sometimes that's overt direct racism. Sometimes it's institutional racism. Sometimes it's the end result of years of policies that had racist origins.

Looking at NBA, football and US sports in general, I don't believe that. These problems are usually more complex than "it's just racism". We have that kind of problems in Europe too.

Being a huge black success in NBA doesn't mean anything with regards to racism in society.

Racists still enjoy sports. For them blacks athletes are like circus acts or monkeys performing for them -- they even have their favorites.

Europeans have a cartoon understanding of the US, which is why they actually worry that they will be carjacked when they visit.

I think most Europeans know, that most places in the US are safe.

For me the difference is, that I live in the most dangerous city in Germany (statistic inflated due to giant airport) and would still walk through every street here at any time. I do not think that I would do the same in some parts of LA. So maybe my understanding of LA is a bit cartoonish - and granted you do not walk in LA anyway.

> I think most Europeans know, that most places in the US are safe.

But they really aren't. There are more murders per capita in a quiet little town like Long Beach (CA) than in Naples (Italy).

"Europeans have a cartoon understanding of the US"

Unfortunately that appears to work both ways.

I didn't visit US and I don't intend to do it soon(ever?), but I would have some "cartoonish" fears like: being detained/harassed/turned back in the airport for possible stupid/hostile remarks I made (who knows when, who knows on which forum) about US gov or foreign policy; Or being shot without witnesses or strangulated to death by some psychopath policeman because "resisted arrest" and so on..

Many of us see the USA through your "Hollywood window", media reports and statistics. Imagine how easy it is to be worried about your personal safety.

The reason I do not plan to visit is because of that image about gun-totin', mentally unstable nation out of touch with reality with bizarre and secret laws which are in the worst case enforced by trigger-happy people with less than 5 months of training. Terrifying. But you aren't actually safe from them in a different continent either: attending to a wedding in Mid East can be lethal...

I don't know the psychology of racists but in Europe I see very often a pattern, when person A feels discriminated by person B, A would rather blame racism or xenophobia if he can, than admit he is discriminated because he has different social class, different culture|religion|sexuality, lower level of education or intelligence, unpleasant behavior or physical appearance, etc.. So when an individual gets along well with several people of a different race but he's accused of racism by others, I tend to believe the source of conflict is not racism but some other "unspecified" reasons.

> because he has different social class

That's just classism, which is as bad as racism or xenophobia.

> different culture|religion|sexuality

Also inexcusable

> lower level of education

Which typically happens as a result of racism

> unpleasant behavior or physical appearance

Caused by poverty, which was caused by racism

Yes, I very much agree that poverty and the lack of education should be forbidden (racism and xenophobia already is). We only have to work out how to efficiently impose universal education, respect, equality, fraternity while still preserving the liberty.

Sounds like freedom of association is not one of your strong points.

racism prevents associations too.. I for example would associate with Obama's daughter but I bet she's a freaking racist

>That's just classism, which is as bad as racism or xenophobia

Depends on the kind of classism (and the direction) -- because upper classes DO have power, money, etc, and it's not some basic human right or morality to believe that they should.

Else, we can describe anything with an "ism" and say it's bad. "You hate murderers? That's antimurderism".

I believe what most Europeans would think is that the main problem for Blacks in the US is poverty, and that poverty is related to racism, some of it historical.

I personally think, Europe and the US have a problem with their underclass. This fuels racism, because claims like "more blacks are criminals than whites" are indeed true, but not because they are black, but because they are in the lower class. With stagnating economies it is much harder to rise out of it and with technological advancements it becomes harder and harder for them to stay employed.

I would call it racism, because the term expanded to be about more than just color of skin. I do not think about it in a redneck-raises-confederate-flag-and-points-shotgun-at-black-sense either but more in the way key points of society like education are structured.

There are plenty of other groups in the lower class with much better outcomes, but any discussion of cultural issues is strictly verboten.

Just carefully back up you claims and nobody on HN will harm you. Being offended by mainstream media and believing you alone know the truth while all other follow the government like sheep is usually the narrative of actual racists.

"and nobody on HN will harm you"

I think you are letting your hate get the better of you, which is not an attractive quality for a German.

I've asked you many times to stop making inflammatory statements on HN. This one is beyond the pale.

If you do this again I'm going to ban your account.

How is "back up you claims and nobody on HN will harm you" not an implied threat?

None of those groups you are thinking of, including black immigrants from Africa, experienced Jim Crow and the extension of those policies in the Drug War and school-to-prison pipeline. Or are these not the white racist "cultural issues" you are looking for? Treat people the same and you get the same results.

None of those groups were brought to the US as slaves, either.

Do Americans actually believe it's not?

Do people understand systemic injustice, and what coming from being a nation of slaves merely 150 years ago, and having legal injustice until merely 40 years ago and implicit injustice until today can do to a people?

A mere 70 years ago Jews were being chased through Europe and killed like dogs. My only point was that there are bigger problems than racism. The roots may be from Jim Crow and such but the lack of progress is disheartening and seemingly intractable.

>A mere 70 years ago Jews were being chased through Europe and killed like dogs.

However all of them were white, educated (a lot of them highly educated), and managed to migrate to places where they fit with white society and were not persecuted for being jews anymore. Blacks didn't have that.

>The roots may be from Jim Crow and such but the lack of progress is disheartening and seemingly intractable.

Well, lack of progress is relative. From just-freed slaves, peniless and uneducated, now there is a decent black middle class.

But if your grantparents were dead poor (think Jim Crow blacks in the South in the 20's and 40's), then you don't get to jump that far in a 3 generations.

Especially if your father had to face discrimination (in schooling, hiring, loans etc) up until the seventies or even more.

Latinos have the same problems.

Jews, Italians, Irish not so much -- they started from much better position than slaves, and they are white so could fit in to business etc better. Besides they didn't originate from places like Alabama, Mississippi, like most of blacks who migrated North did etc -- they came to NY, Chicago etc.

We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177465 and marked it off-topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com