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

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-american-medias-awkward-fawning-over-hitlers-taste-in-home-decor

by aaronbrethorst • 11 years ago

75 75 11 years ago

nsns2• 11 years ago

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

coldtea7• 11 years ago

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...

allendoerfer5• 11 years ago

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.

mineshaftgap5• 11 years ago

"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.

nsns2• 11 years ago

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

coldtea7• 11 years ago

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

DasIch• 11 years ago

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.

wslh• 11 years ago

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.

ekianjo2• 11 years ago

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).

minthd2• 11 years ago

> 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...

seiji2• 11 years ago

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.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

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 ..

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

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".

mseebach• 11 years ago

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."

tlogan• 11 years ago

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...

wdr1• 11 years ago

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.

mineshaftgap5• 11 years ago

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

jacobush2• 11 years ago

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

DanBC• 11 years ago

(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.

leaveyou5• 11 years ago

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.

coldtea7• 11 years ago

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.

fauigerzigerk• 11 years ago

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.

allendoerfer5• 11 years ago

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.

mineshaftgap5• 11 years ago

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

coldtea7• 11 years ago

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?

mineshaftgap5• 11 years ago

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.

dang2• 11 years ago

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

happyscrappy4• 11 years ago

There is no nuance in gas chambers.

ekianjo2• 11 years ago

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

nmcfarl• 11 years ago

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.

happyscrappy4• 11 years ago

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

anti-shill2• 11 years ago

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...

thrownaway2424• 11 years ago

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

anti-shill2• 11 years ago

read the essay

TazeTSchnitzel3• 11 years ago

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.

WorldWideWayne• 11 years ago

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.)

philwelch4• 11 years ago

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.

amoruso2• 11 years ago

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...

rdtsc• 11 years ago

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.

amoruso2• 11 years ago

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

protomyth3• 11 years ago

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.

philwelch4• 11 years ago

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?

protomyth3• 11 years ago

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.

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

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