One in five Americans think Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany, did some good things, a new survey has found.
In the poll, conducted on November 1 among 1,077 U.S. adults, 23 percent of respondents said Hitler was a “good person or an equally good and bad person” or “a bad person who did some good things,” data from YouGov showed.
A majority of respondents described Hitler as a “completely bad person,” though the answers were split slightly along party lines. Of the Democrats surveyed, 75 percent said Hitler was completely bad, while 60 percent of Republicans said the same.
U.S. opinion on the Nazi dictator remains more negative that it was at the height of World War II, when 25 percent of Americans said his ideas were correct.
The poll, which also investigated voting intentions, found that Americans would be less likely to vote for a candidate that had a more positive view of Hitler, with 24 percent of voters saying they would be willing to vote for someone who said Hitler did some good things.
Conversely, 54 percent of voters said they would not vote for a candidate who made those comments. This response also saw a split down party lines: 12 percent of Democrats, 20 percent of Independents and 41 percent of Republicans said they would be willing to vote for a candidate who said Hitler did some good things.
The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
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Hitler has become an unexpected issue in the 2024 election. In October, The Atlantic alleged that former President Donald Trump praised aspects of the dictator’s leadership, saying that while serving as president, Trump once said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
John Kelly, Trump’s White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, told the New York Times that Trump said more than once, “You know, Hitler did some good things, too.”
Trump’s campaign denied the accusation. In a statement sent to Newsweek, Trump campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer said: “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”
In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, had told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband kept My New Order, a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, in a cabinet by his bed and used to read it periodically.
Historian Laura Smith, a professor at Oxford University, said the poll indicated that no issue was “clear cut,” despite historical reputation.
Smith told Newsweek: “There have been no such widespread feelings following the aftermath of World War II and the widespread knowledge of Hitler’s atrocities. The only parallel would be prior to Pearl Harbor when strong isolationist sentiments and a lack of understanding of the consequences of the fascism that was taking over Europe were sentiments Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with.”
She added: “For the long term, I think this poll demonstrates that no issue remains clear cut. World War II is often cited as a rare example of a clearly justified war against a force of evil— Nazism.
“If that communal understanding erodes, it is hard to think of other issues that won’t equally become more divisive and subject to opinion, rather than facts. This could easily drive future candidates to play politics to their base in a Trumpism fashion, rather than lay out the facts like John McCain did in 2008 when he defended Barack Obama.”
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