One of my favorite professors in college (Alastair Bellany, brilliant man) once asserted during a lecture that there is some new, emerging scholarship which contends that the German people were not simply trained to ignore or explain away Hitler's non-aryan appearance. Instead, they were trained to discount the evidence of their own senses and believed Hitler was blonde in actual fact, despite viewing his image everywhere, constantly.

At the time, it seemed unbelievable, but over the past few years as I've watched the United States divide into two camps who live in essentially alternate realities it's increasingly seemed plausible to me that you could get people to disbelieve their own eyes this way. I can't seem to find any scholarship making this argument, but I also can't imagine Professor Bellany would make such a surprising statement without at least some evidentiary basis—he was and is one of the smartest people I ever met. He portrayed this as sort of a cutting edge, modern theory without mainstream acceptance, but I also had the sense that he was leaning toward believing it himself.

So what gives? Is there any truth to this?