Once Upon a Time Hitler was not a Threat

William C. White discusses in his article, Adolf Hitler, The Man and His Program, the threat of Hitler before WWII. White inaccurately compares Hitler to the “racket” the Klu Klux Klan once made in America. In March 1932, when this article was written, the Klu Klux Klan was the most concrete comparison to Hitler and his followers. From the tone of this article, I sense that America allowed Germans to idolize Hitler and his ideals because the Germans were helpless from the depression. Hitler was their hope, and the consensus in America was that there was no harm in letting Hitler reassure the broken Germans. This idea was completely misguided, yet it was supported by the impressions of Hitler reporters published. The Germans, in the eyes of the Americans, were suffering from the inheritance of reparation payments for a war they did not fight in or cause. Hitler did not try to pacify the anger of the Germans, instead he “offer[ed] someone to blame for their misfortunes— the Jews.” Hitler gathered the people’s anger and hurled the combined fury into the most destructive accusation in history.
Hitler himself did not have a proper German citizenship until after he was released from prison, and not long before his nomination for the Presidency of the German Republic, yet he later condemned people that did not fit within his Aryan racial state.
The article argues that Hitler is only a threat if he manages to take power, which at the time was completely improbable because Hitler had vowed he would not take the reins of power through illegal means, and statistics provided evidence proving that Hitler could not win the majority in an election. Whoever calculated those numbers focused on mathematical laws and forgot to account for the capabilities of the human mind: people are unpredictable, especially in a state of perpetual desperation. Turning to Hitler was not a rational decision, but none of these people had asked to be subjected to the Treaty of Versailles either.