Hitler was always criticized. There’s a NYT report calling him out as an antisemite in the 1920’s and Casablanca looked down on Nazis almost a decade before the first signs were showing of the holocaust to come.
There’s a NYT report calling him out as an antisemite in the 1920’s
Sure, but this was at a time where you could get antisemitic magazines delivered to your door, and some people had dozens. There really wasn’t as much stigma on it as now (And I’d argue it could use a little more stigma still). There were lots of places around the world where you could discuss the latest details of antisemitism with your hairdresser, and it wouldn’t even be that weird.
I’m not saying there was stigma on it, I’m only saying it wasn’t some alien idea that, just maybe, the Hitler guy might be shady.
The Dearborn Independent from Henry Ford was one of the most wildly distributed papers of its time due to the Ford dealer network and how Ford was lauded as a the hero that brought the car to rural folk giving them freedom.
It’s unfortunate that his antisemitic views were often the main things one would find in his paper that many would have just accepted as fact. Ford a brilliant man in many ways but this was one of the few ways in which he wasn’t.