What impression did the "West" get of Hitler, when he first became a powerful figure in germany?

Question

No I am not a n**i. I stumbled upon some war propaganda.

Answer 1

I've looked up what Western leaders thought of him.  

Churchill never met him.  In the one case they may have met, when in same hotel, in fact they refused to meet... because Churchill wrote H a question beforehand that H walked away from rather to answer, which would have revealed H's anti-semitism.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/01...

FDR never met him either.

Possibly the  one Western leader (except for Chamberlain, who he signed the Munich appeasement with) who would have met him face to face - and gave a personal opinion - was Canada's PM, WIlliam Lyon Mackenzie King; who thought of him as a 'peasant' - a harmless, rude low-life.  (Maybe today we'd say 'redneck?')

Answer 2

It depends what you mean by the "West." America and England looked at him quite differently.  The bulk of American brass still gun shy from the first world war looked at him as a menace zealot with a ragtag band of jackbooted thugs raising holy h**l in Europe.  However, in the initial years the mass consensus in America was that he was Europe's problem, and we were in no rush to stick our noses into it.  Also with a large population of German immigrants in the US, there were some that had n**i sympathies especially in the early 1930s, believing Germany had gotten a "bum rap" from the Treaty of Versailles.  The British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain viewed him as a threat, but one that could be managed.  Chamberlain chose to not confront Hitler as he rebuilt his armies and mobilized along the Rheine river in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.  Chamberlain went as far as to adopt a policy he called "appeasement" in which he allowed HItler to keep his "annexed" territory of the Sudatenland in modern day Czech republic believing if he was not opposed he would stop there.  Brittain was as eager as the US not to rush into the next world war.  We know how it ended from there and the rest as they say is History!!

Answer 3

Depends on what you mean by The West as to its countries.  Because Eugenics was widely respected back then, and with the widespread dissatisfaction with Democracy during the hardest years of the Depression, it's likely that many ordinary citizens had neutral to positive perspectives on Hitler.  We (the US) couldn't really fault him for violating a treaty that we (and England's top economist) didn't agree with, and who cared about the sovereignty of some European countries with regime-issues of their own?  

All but the staunchest cold-warriors of the west probably saw him as a convenient foil for Soviet Russia - just as the West viewed Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, an evil guy conveniently placed to duke it out w/the new Islamic Iran.

Answer 4

If you stumbled on some propaganda, you should love my reference site, below.

We were in awe, and admired him. Some of the richest men in the world (in America) actually met with him and sold him things to get his war machine started. In the USA at the time, the was to much division, social, racial, political, economic. Hitler brought the country out of its depression of world war one and brought the whole country together and in very little time, no country today could accomplish what Hitler did. In America, German Fascism dazzled many American leaders of capitalist industry, Hitler was admired for this. Of coarse no one knew till after the war how this great turn around happened so fast. So in the eyes of Americans such as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy(JFK’s father), Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon(head of Alcoa, banker, and Secretary of Treasury), DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil (now Exxon), Henry Ford, ITT, Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA), Prescott Bush, National City Bank, and General Electric and Henry Ford. GM and Ford built nearly 90% of the armored 3-ton half-trucks and 70% of the n**i medium and heavy-duty trucks used in WWII. Greame K. Howard, Vice President of General Motors, wrote and published “American and a New World Order” and argued that America should cooperate with the n***s.

They admired him and his incredible efficiency and how he was able to unify a country after the very costly world war 1. In 1938 Henry Ford received the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle as a birthday present from Adolph Hitler. Williams Randolph Hearst was a real fan of the n**i party. Remember those magazine pictures of Hitler’s retreat in Germany. Did you ever wonder how Better Homes and Gardens magazine got those pictures for the 1938 article? Hearst and Hitler were friends! Thomas J. Watson, the head executive of IBM, leased data sorting computers using IBM's Hollerith punch card technology in 1933 to the n***s enabling them to identify, find, and collect the victims of the Holocaust. Those numbers tattooed on the Jewish prisoners were of the Hollerith numbering system. Adolph Hitler awarded Watson a medal for his contribution!

We basically without knowing all the facts looked at a country that was reduced in all ways to nothing. The Hitler comes along and makes incredible reforms, building project, the autobahn, re-doing the banking system, creating jobs, and advancing Germanys economy in a little over 5 years. Plus he was admired for eliminating the divides in society that we still have today and creating a strong nationalist union of all Germans. As I said he was admired for all these things and helped by some of the most popular business men in the USA. No one really knew what went on in Germany till after the war.