How did we let Adolf Hitler rise to power? Through denial.
Today, we see Adolf Hitler as a ruthless authoritarian. A murderer, who combined charisma and manipulation so effectively that he held the world in fear. But in the 1930s, we didn't see him that way.
For one, we didn't fear Adolf Hitler. And how could we? If you watched one of his speeches, you saw a short man with a silly haircut and a sillier mustache, who jabbed the air with his finger and flailed as if overcome by some fit. This show was so distracting that American journalists at the time would “burst out laughing [...] and refused to take him seriously” [1].
In fact, his style of delivery was so strange we even coined a word for it: Hitlerian.
We didn't think Adolf Hitler wanted to start a war. In 1935 he renamed the Reich Ministry of Defense to the Reich Ministry of War, and still we convinced ourselves he didn't have dark intentions. Instead of confronting him, we bet on appeasement [2]. And when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, and then demanded the Sudetenland, we thought he only wanted to restore German pride — yes, surely he would stop there. So, we did nothing.
We didn’t think Adolf Hitler would try to control what people learned. But if you walked through Berlin’s Opernplatz, you'd have seen Nazi officials burning books carrying un-German ideas. Still, American papers brushed it off. They called it “silly,” and “ineffective,” [3] — yes, silly them! And soon after, when Hitler redirected research funding away from Jewish Science and forced politically unreliable professors out of their positions, well, we did nothing.
We didn't think Adolf Hitler would end up controlling the media. But from the start, he made the press his enemy. Throughout his rise to power, he called journalists liars, irresponsible, and accused them of weakening Germany. When the Reichtag [4] burned, Hitler seized the crisis to blame it on left-wing radicals, and within weeks had tightened censorship and bent opposing media organisations to his will. It all happened so fast, so we did nothing.
We didn’t think Adolf Hitler would actually try to exterminate the Jewish people. Even though he spelled it all out in Mein Kampf [5]. And in his speeches when he promised to root Germany out of "aliens", we didn't pay attention because, remember, his speaking-style was so distracting we couldn't take him seriously.
So when he sent them to the camps, we did nothing.
If only we had realized what was going on, we might have stood up to Adolf Hitler and prevented the atrocities that followed. We should have been on the right side of history.
[2] Appeasement was the policy Britain and France followed in the 1930s toward Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Instead of confronting his aggressive moves right away, leaders—especially British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—chose to give in to some of his demands in hopes of avoiding another devastating war like World War I.
[4] Germany's Parliament.
[5] "My Fight". Hitler's manifesto.