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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

It's also worth bearing in mind that the film was set in 1938, at the time of the Anschluß, and the bloodless German occupation of Salzburg in March that year was widely supported in the city. In fact, people turned-out to cheer... and did so again when Mr Hitler came to visit them the next month.

At that point most of the abhorrent things we now know to have been committed by the German regime hadn't actually happened, so I don't see how they could have been bolted onto the film. Or if they were, presumably one should also show the city being bombed by the USAAF in 1945?

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Strong disagree about what Austrians could have known about Nazi Germany in 1938. Germany of 1938 could be likened to pre-famine North Korea. Mass-murdering purges of opposition (or even politically inconvenient supporters) had already been normalized, and a large system of concentration camps had been created for political undesirables. Aktion Reinhard hadn't been put into effect yet, but no educated Austrian should've had any illusions about what was in store for their country.

At the time even the US loved Nazi Germany and Hitler.

No, that's an extreme and absurd generalization. Journalists were covering the rise of Nazism as a threat to the US as early as 1932, and Hitler had been perceived as a thug since at least the Beer Hall Putsch. What's true is that mainstream sentiment in the US was more sanguine about antiSemitism in 1937 than it is now, or, for that matter, than it would be after Kristallnacht in 1938.

>and Hitler had been perceived as a thug since at least the Beer Hall Putsch.

To leftist, progressive, and jewish journalists. The general public, and especially the upper classes, concerned with the thread of communism, were much more sympathetic. And much more antisemitic as you say. When Charlie Chaplin wanted to make the Great Dictator, for example, he received numerous threats and indignant messages from within the US.

>What's true is that mainstream sentiment in the US was more sanguine about antiSemitism in 1937 than it is now, or, for that matter, than it would be after Kristallnacht in 1938

Well, even later. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

So people often talk about TIME magazine awarding Hitler "Man of Year" in 1938 as evidence of "The US loved Nazi Germany then". But that magazine pieces was very negative. The cover showed a drawing of Hitler playing a church organ, surrounded by corpses. The subtitle was "From the unholy organist, a hymn of hate". It only gets more critical.

There was not just that though.

The America First Committee was a different animal than the German American Bund or the homegrown Fascists, and they were far more powerful. These were Americans from many different backgrounds who shared a desire to end the war with Germany and Japan, but not out of any pacifist streak. The most prominent member to us today would be Colonel Charles Lindbergh, an internationally known figure due to his solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Along with Lindbergh, other prominent members of the Committee included: World War I air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, industrialist Henry Ford, Thomas McCarter, the Director of Chase National Bank, Robert Wood, Chairman of Sears Roebuck, Douglas Stuart, a member of the Quaker Oats family and owner of the Fascist publication Scribner's Commentary, and even Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's socialite daughter and a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At its peak, the Committee boasted a following of 5 million members. (Higham 1985, 13) They had friends in high places, too; from Senator Wheeler, who supported the America First Committee by selling them a million franks (the free postage given to Congress and Senate members), and from Senator Lundeen, who was later killed in a mysterious plane crash with the FBI man following him. Lundeen had hired George Viereck as a speechwriter; Viereck was later convicted as a Nazi agent. (Hoke 1946, 105, 108)

George Viereck was also linked to the publishers of the Fascist Herald and Scribner's Commentary in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Scribner's published articles by Lindberghs and many other Fascist apologists, and when the FBI raided the Lake Geneva complex, Fascist Ralph Townsend disappeared into Canada, while several German agents were arrested. (Hoke 1946, 158) The future members of the Committee were not detered. In November 1939, Charles Lindbergh wrote the following for the Reader's Digest: "Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on a strength too great for foreign armies to challenge; on a Western wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German airforce, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence...we can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races." (Seldes 1943, 149)

The Reader's Digest, not surprisingly, was owned and published by the pro-Fascist and anti-labor DeWitt Wallace. (Seldes 1943, 175) Among the other right-wing, if not outright pro-Fascist publications were the Chicago Tribune, the Hearst newspapers, the newspapers of Frank Gannett, the Scripps-Howard (later UP) Syndicate, and the Washington Times-Herald. (Seldes 1943, 208) Throughout the 1930s, the Chicago Times offered rewards of $1000 to $5000 to prove that certain items in the Tribune were NOT lies. The rewards were never claimed. President Roosevelt himself denounced William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate and the Chicago Tribune for their support of Hitler. (Seldes 1943, 223-224)

Lindbergh was a rabid anti-Semite and an apologist for fascism, but also relayed intelligence from his tours of German factories back to the administration --- motivated, in advance of 1938, by his concern that we'd be drawn into a war with Germany, which was a popular concern at the time.

It's hard for you to make the case that the inevitability of war with the Nazis was in the zeitgeist and that America as a whole supported Hitler.

As you point out, all this stuff needs to be understood in the context of the Great Depression, concerns about Communism, and the general acceptability of anti-Semitism at the time.

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