8 ms·

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

75 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

nsns 11y ago
Well, I guess with a bit of anachronism and hindsight anything could be made to look sensational and exciting.
- coldtea 11y 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...
  - allendoerfer 11y 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.
    - tomohawk 11y ago
      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.
    - philwelch 11y ago
      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.
      - allendoerfer 11y ago
        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.
        mtviewdave 11y ago
        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_against_the_United_States_(1941) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...
  - mineshaftgap 11y 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.
    - jacobush 11y ago
      In true slashdot tradition I did not read the article, but if that is the gist of it, weak sauce indeed...
    - coldtea 11y ago
      This "bad too" in your comment, implying that the article intends to say "equally bad", is even more weak.
  - nsns 11y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens#Berlin_Olympics
coldtea 11y 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 http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
- DasIch 11y 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 11y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism ,not only at the time.
- ekianjo 11y 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).
  - minthd 11y 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-20/ref=nosim/ 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-20/ref=nosim/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805059849/metafilter...
mineshaftgap 11y ago
Do Europeans actually believe that the main problem with Blacks in the US is racism?
- jacobush 11y ago
  Yes, I think so. Would you care to elaborate why this would not be so?
- DanBC 11y 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.
- leaveyou 11y 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.
  - coldtea 11y 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.
    - mineshaftgap 11y ago
      Europeans have a cartoon understanding of the US, which is why they actually worry that they will be carjacked when they visit.
      - allendoerfer 11y ago
        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.
happyscrappy 11y ago
There is no nuance in gas chambers.
- ekianjo 11y 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 11y 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.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    The question was about levels of anti-semitism. The highest level is gas chambers.
    - rza 11y ago
      The question was actually about the portrayal of US motives during WW2.
anti-shill 11y 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 11y ago
  Not a bad rant, but too many ellipses, and went off the rails when you started talking about Hitler's nuts.
amoruso 11y 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-only-remaining-online-copy-of-vogues-asma-al-assad-profile/250753/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the... http://www.thenation.com/article/professors-paid-qaddafi-providing-positive-public-relations/ http://www.thenation.com/article/professors-paid-qaddafi-pro...
- rdtsc 11y 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.
  - amoruso 11y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty
protomyth 11y 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.
- philwelch 11y 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?
  - protomyth 11y 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.
    - philwelch 11y ago
      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.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        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.

nsns 11y ago

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

coldtea 11y 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...
- allendoerfer 11y 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.
  - tomohawk 11y ago
    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.
  - philwelch 11y ago
    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.
    - allendoerfer 11y ago
      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.
      - mtviewdave 11y ago
        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_against_the_United_States_(1941) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...
- mineshaftgap 11y 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.
  - jacobush 11y ago
    In true slashdot tradition I did not read the article, but if that is the gist of it, weak sauce indeed...
  - coldtea 11y ago
    This "bad too" in your comment, implying that the article intends to say "equally bad", is even more weak.
- nsns 11y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens#Berlin_Olympics

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

DasIch 11y 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 11y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism ,not only at the time.
ekianjo 11y 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).
- minthd 11y 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-20/ref=nosim/ 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-20/ref=nosim/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805059849/metafilter...

mineshaftgap 11y ago

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

jacobush 11y ago
Yes, I think so. Would you care to elaborate why this would not be so?
DanBC 11y 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.
leaveyou 11y 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.
- coldtea 11y 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.
  - mineshaftgap 11y ago
    Europeans have a cartoon understanding of the US, which is why they actually worry that they will be carjacked when they visit.
    - allendoerfer 11y ago
      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.

happyscrappy 11y ago

There is no nuance in gas chambers.

ekianjo 11y 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 11y 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.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  The question was about levels of anti-semitism. The highest level is gas chambers.
  - rza 11y ago
    The question was actually about the portrayal of US motives during WW2.

anti-shill 11y 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 11y ago
Not a bad rant, but too many ellipses, and went off the rails when you started talking about Hitler's nuts.

amoruso 11y 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-only-remaining-online-copy-of-vogues-asma-al-assad-profile/250753/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the... http://www.thenation.com/article/professors-paid-qaddafi-providing-positive-public-relations/ http://www.thenation.com/article/professors-paid-qaddafi-pro...

rdtsc 11y 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.
- amoruso 11y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

protomyth 11y 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.

philwelch 11y 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?
- protomyth 11y 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.
  - philwelch 11y ago
    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.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      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.