What was being said about Hitler by the German media and public when his name was just getting known? How about the other Europeans countries? England, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium. The media in that time ... before anybody knew what Hitler was about but his name was getting known. How did people write about him? And more importantly ... when Hitler became a controversial person (I guess years before 1939) ... who was Hitler compared with?
The obvious answer is Napoleon. Here's a Punch cartoon from 1932:
I recommend you check out the book Hitlerland. It's about what people (mostly Americans) had to say about Hitler in the 1920s and early 1930s, before he had much power. Reading it, you can get a more thorough and nuanced account of what people thought, but to be brief, as he gained followers, he was compared with Mussolini, his fellow fascist and Hitler's idol in the 1920s. Some thought he might ascend to the the status of Mussolini (who ruled Italy at that time). Others said they thought he wouldn't be a second Mussolini, that he'd never amount to much. Any comparisons to Napoleon didn't come until later, because in his earlier days, Hitler was more a charismatic leader and not a military figure like Napoleon. The first American reporter who met Hitler, in 1922, during the very earliest days of Hitler's rise to power, headlined his story "Hitler Styled Mussolini of Teuton Crisis". And he referred to Hitler as "the German Mussolini".
Former president Herbert Hoover met with Hitler in 1938, after Hitler annexed Austria. Hoover was led to believe that Hitler was really a puppet, being controlled by a small group of men in the Nazi party. But after Hoover met with Hitler, he came to see that he was really the leader, and also that he was crazy.
John F. Kennedy, as a teenaged college student, visited Europe in 1937 and took a tour through Germany. He observed in his diary: "Hitler seems so popular here, as Mussolini was in Italy, although propaganda seems to be his strongest weapon." (all the quotes above are taken from Hitlerland).
Today, we think about Hitler in terms of the Holocaust and the large number of people he killed. But back then, virtually no one cared about Hitler's anti-semitic rages, except Jews, who were worried by it. It just seemed to many like it was a peculiarity of his, and maybe he didn't really mean it, because he made so much sense to them in other areas, that maybe he was just saying those things to rally the crowd. It's difficult to talk about Hitler without seeing him through the lens of the Holocaust. But in the 1920s and early 30s, the issues of concern were the recovery from the war, and the battle between fascism and communism and capitalism in Europe. The Nazis were staunchly anti-communist, so discussion might emphasize those political and economic aspects.
