Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in selected American magazines, 1923-1939 / by Mehale Athanasi Zalampas.

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct the images of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich available to the American general magazine reader from the initial references to him in March, 1923, until his attack on Poland in September, 1939. It is not an analysis of the magazines themselves. It is limited to selected mass-circulation magazines chosen for a variety of reasons. Some were chosen due to the sheer volume of their circulation: Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, The Reader's Digest. Some were selected as they were the leading news magazines of their day: The Literary Digest, Time, and Newsweek. Others were included, despite their smaller circulation, because they were read by an affluent, highly educated group important in the shaping of public opinion: Harpers, and The Atlantic Monthly. Two were selected because they represented a clearly liberal bias: The Nation and The New Republic. Its conclusion is that Americans were well-served by the coverage of National Socialism provided by their magazines and, by the spring of 1933, had already developed a repugnance of Nazism that subsequent knowledge only intensified. Tragically, this knowledge did not result in a determination to aid the victims of Nazi terror or to forestall Nazi aggression.