The Hitler Nobody Knows
Photo credit:
Heinrich Hoffman
Even back in 1930s Germany, Adolf Hitler was a pretty unlikable guy. After all, he was an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser, an ex-con who’d tried to overthrow the government, and his Brownshirts had a bad habit of beating up political rivals. So when Hitler lost the 1932 presidential election, his team figured it was a good time to remake Hitler’s image, especially since his opponent (war hero Paul von Hindenburg) hadn’t won an absolute majority, and a run-off election was on the horizon.
Their goal was to turn Hitler into a lovable guy—no easy task. Fortunately for Hitler’s PR team, Heinrich Hoffman had the perfect solution. Hoffman was Hitler’s official photographer, and in 1932, he released the craziest coffee table book of all time, a photo album entitled
The Hitler Nobody Knows. The book was full of quaint little pictures, starting off with photos of baby Hitler and his childhood home and leading up to his days as a World War I soldier and politician.
However, most of the photos purported to show an average day in the life of Adolf. Hoffman photographed Hitler traveling from political rally to political rally, meeting with the German people, and working tirelessly for the Motherland. Many pictures showed a tired Hitler resting between meetings or retiring to a simple dinner at the end of a hard day. Other photos showed Hitler surrounded by adoring children, feeding baby deer, or chilling with his beloved dogs. The accompanying text emphasized how Hitler epitomized “
STRENGTH and GOODNESS” and that he was a “NON-DRINKER, NON-SMOKER, and VEGETARIAN.”
The photos showed Hitler in average Joe clothes in an effort to portray him as an everyman. Since Hitler was a drop-out, the book made a really big deal about how Hitler allegedly read every single book in his personal library, all 6,000 titles. But while Hitler didn’t win the run-off election (von Hindenburg would later appoint him as chancellor), the book was enormously popular, selling 400,000 copies in 1942 and endearing Hitler to the public, both at home and abroad.
US magazines helped out quite a bit, too. Publications like
Vogue and the
New York Times Magazine ran flattering pieces on the fuhrer, giving readers a tour of Hitler’s home and portraying him as a kindly country squire. One famous journalist named William George Fitz-Gerald wrote multiple articles for multiple magazines describing Hitler as a “shy, retiring man” who sported an “old tweed coat” and visited local villages to make sure the children were eating properly. Shockingly, some of these articles popped up just days before the Nazis invaded Poland and
months after the world learned about Hitler’s animosity toward Jews.
Thanks to this massive PR push, Hitler fooled quite a few people into buying his benevolent leader gimmick, right up until the moment that the world went to war, and everyone found out the truth the hard way.