PR made Hitler likeable

PR made Hitler likeable

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 09:37 AM IST
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New Delhi : Some of the most iconic photos of Adolf Hitler show him at his most intense, eyes alight as he addresses an audience or salutes a crowd. Equally, if not more, haunting are images that ran in the years preceding World War II in home magazines and the New York Times that portrayed him as a country gentleman-a vegetarian who played catch with his dogs and took post-meal strolls outside his mountain estate.

These articles were often admiring-even after the horrors of the Nazi regime had begun to reveal themselves-says Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian at the University at Buffalo. In a new book, Hitler at Home, (Yale University Press) Stratigakos recounts how the Führer’s inner circle worked throughout the 1930s to reinvent his image from a solitary oddball with few family ties to a statesman of fine taste and morals.

“They were able to engineer a complete transformation of Hitler’s public persona,” says Stratigakos, interim chair of architecture. By the end of the 1930s, news stories around the world described him as a caring, gentle individual with great taste in home décor.” “It was dangerous because it made him likable,” Stratigakos says “After reading these stories, people would feel like they knew the ”true” Hitler, the private man behind the Führer mask, and that maybe this person was not as bad as all of the news coming out of Europe seemed to suggest.”

While many historians have dismissed Hitler’s personal life as irrelevant, his private persona was in fact painstakingly constructed to further his political ends.

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