How media ‘fluff’ helped Hitler rise to power

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Some of the most iconic photos of Adolf Hitler show him at his most intense, eyes alight with frenetic energy as he addresses an audience or salutes a crowd.

Equally haunting, however, are another set of images that are oft-forgotten: In the years preceding World War II, news outlets from home magazines to the New York Times ran profiles of the Nazi leader that portrayed him as a country gentleman — a man who ate vegetarian, 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.

Her new book, “Hitler at Home,” will be published Sept. 29 by Yale University Press. It 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 in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning. “They accomplished this by focusing on his private life — by showing him playing with his dogs and with children, and at home in architectural spaces designed to evoke a feeling of warmth. 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 likeable,” Stratigakos said. “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.”

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

Stratigakos says that her early research for the book uncovered a media landscape that felt surreal: “These news stories filled your head with positive images of Hitler. I was shocked at the extent of it and how late they appeared.”

On Aug. 20, 1939, the New York Times Magazine published an article describing the day-to-day life at Hitler’s mountain chalet.

This was 12 days before Germany invaded Poland and started World War II, nine months after the violent anti-Jewish pogroms of Kristallnacht, and six years after the first Nazi concentration camp opened at Dachau.

The article commented that Hitler’s estate on the Obersalzberg, a mountain retreat near the Austrian border, was “furnished harmoniously, according to the best of German traditions.” Unstained wainscoting and handwoven rugs combined to “create an atmosphere of quiet cheerfulness” in the Führer’s study, the New York Times reported.

Hitler had a tomato garden and a fondness for chocolate, the story said. He was a man “who can eat a gooseberry pie or a well-done pudding with relish.” He liked to take an afternoon nap.

A 1938 profile in Homes and Gardens, a British magazine, was similarly descriptive. The piece, a three-page feature on the same estate, related that the home was “bright” and “airy,” with a jade green color scheme. It noted that Hitler “had a passion for cut flowers,” and considered his gardeners, chauffeur and air-pilot not as servants, but as “loyal friends.”

“All kinds of publications — from serious political journals to LIFE and even American Kennel Gazette, a dog magazine — were covering this story about the ‘real’ Hitler,” Stratigakos said. “In 1934, the German Press Association reported that images of Hitler at home playing with his dogs or with children were the most popular images purchased by the media in Germany and abroad.”

The media’s adulation of Hitler on the eve of war shows how lifestyle stories considered “harmless fluff” can serve as powerful propaganda, Stratigakos said.

She notes that the widespread media coverage of the Nazi leader’s home life was the result of a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign.

Architecture played a key role in that effort: The makeover of the Führer’s public persona coincided with major renovations of three residences he occupied — the old chancellery in Berlin, his Munich apartment and his mountain home.

“Hitler at Home” documents the creation of these homes, showing how Hitler was intimately involved with each project, working closely with his architects and Frau Gerdy Troost — an interior designer who was well known at the time but subsequently forgotten by historians.

The team used architecture as a tool for manipulation: They crafted spaces that, like movie sets, evoked the right emotions. Then, they invited reporters in for tours where they experienced Hitler in a setting that felt exclusive and emanated domesticity and warmth. Politicians were also invited, and in some cases, similarly duped.

Though the media changed its tune on Hitler after the fighting began, his private life remained a source of fascination and mystique even after the war.

The final chapters of the book trace the postwar looting of Hitler’s residences and the collectors who still avidly pursue these objects, how displays of such items in museums stir protest and how Germany has struggled to determine what to do with the places where Hitler once lived.

The story of Hitler’s homes is far from over, Stratigakos says.

Today, as in the past, we believe our domestic spaces reflect the inner person — the person someone “truly” is.

That powerful association is easily manipulated, Stratigakos says.

Her book is not just about Hitler, she says, but also “about the way that we can be lulled into changing our ideas of someone through a slick presentation of their private lives.”

“The 1930s marked the rise of celebrity culture, in the era of talking movies, radio and new lifestyle magazines,” Stratigakos said. “People developed a strong desire to know what the private person was like behind the public facade. Hitler’s propagandists took advantage of the new celebrity culture and even helped to shape it.”

“Journalists seek out these behind-the-scenes stories because people demand it,” she said. “This still holds true today, and I believe that we need to be much more critical of the industries that focus on home or lifestyle news. They really do have influence.”