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How Hitler Overcame the Media in His Rise to Power
Posted
May 6, 2025
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May 6, 2025
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5.43%
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4:14Now PlayingIn the highly polarized media landscape of the Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler could expect little accommodation from the press. Across Germany and around the world, Hitler’s attempts to assume power initially made him a laughingstock.
“We have come to view Hitler’s path to the chancellorship, and ultimately to dictatorship, as inexorable, and Hitler himself as a demonic force of human nature who defied every law of political gravity,” Timothy W. Ryback writes. And yet, when the journalist Dorothy Thompson encountered Hitler in 1931, she described him as a man of “startling insignificance.”
How could Thompson and so many other experienced journalists and political observers have underestimated Hitler—and the historical moment—to such a degree?
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