The New York Times Whitewashes its Complicity in Whitewashing Hitler
Over at our main website today, we posted an article highlighting an almost unbelievable puff piece about Adolf Hitler published in The New York Times Magazine in 1939.
That Magazine piece is perhaps the most prominent of a number of pre-war stories that, falling prey to the plan hatched by Hitler’s propagandists, served to recast Hitler as a country gentleman with sophisticated tastes. Hitler’s mountain home is “furnished harmoniously, according to the best of German traditions” and the Führer “is very partial to English flannels and tweeds,” The Times explained. (And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.)
All this is discussed in an upcoming book by University of Buffalo historian Despina Stratigakos — and in a number of recent media stories about the book release. Virtually all of those stories mention the stunning New York Times whitewash. One notable example, though, ignores the Times role in refurbishing Hitler’s image. And since you’ve read the headline above, you know which one it is: The New York Times itself.
The newspaper reported late last month,
Before the Nazi invasion of Poland, British and American newspapers and magazines published flattering features about the interiors. The journalist and novelist William George Fitz-Gerald praised Hitler’s “cozy but modest” rooms, furnished with bouquets of flowers, cactuses in majolica pots and books on “history, painting, architecture and music.”
Ms. Stratigakos said that her study was meant “in large part to show how dangerous those stories were.”
And that’s the only reference to those unnamed “newspapers and magazines.” Quite a convenient omission by the New York Times
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