Further reading: How American journalists reported the rise of Hitler

Regardless of which historical figures were invoked, the analogies served several didactic goals. The commentators sought to make Hitler comprehensible by comparing him to familiar examples; they aimed to reassure people psychologically that the events they were experiencing were merely new versions of older ones; and they showed how past precedents could provide guidelines for present-day action. As often as not, the analogies did more to conceal than reveal Hitler’s radicalism.

Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, journalists expressed a mix of caution and confidence by invoking the figure of Emperor Napoleon III. The Brooklyn Eagle declared that, because few people had originally taken Louis Napoleon Bonaparte seriously before he seized dictatorial power, it was important for people not to underestimate Hitler and remember that while he “took the oath to defend the constitution, [so] did Napoleon III.” By contrast, the Middletown Times told its readers that “the German nation is suffering from a temporary aberration. Hitler is merely a symptom, [just] as Napoleon III [was a] ... symptom ... of feverish French progress from the First Empire to the Third Republic. It is a physical and mental illness that has serious aspects but is not necessarily fatal.”

The analogies used to explain Hitler’s violent purge of the SA on the “Night of the Long Knives,” in June of 1934, also conveyed a mix of caution and confidence. Some observers underscored the threat by comparing the killings to the murder of French Huguenots by Catholics during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Others sought solace in the French Revolution by arguing that Hitler’s purge duplicated “the victory of the Rightist Girondists against the revolutionary and socialistic Jacobins.” As one paper optimistically opined: Germany’s “Napoleon may be yet to come.”

Analogies weren’t used just to explain events, but also to advance particular agendas. In 1939–41, for instance, American journalists compared Hitler to Philip of Macedon in order to encourage U.S. intervention in the war. They pointed out that when the city-states of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes failed to heed the Athenian orator Demosthenes’s admonition to unite against the Macedonian threat, they went down in defeat and lost their freedom.

By the time Americans were invoking Philip, however, many European observers felt that historical analogies no longer held water.

In 1939, following the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, the Times of London called Hitler the “Nebuchadnezzar of modern times,” only to note that “Hitler has far surpassed his exemplar; for Nebuchadnezzar carried away no more than ten thousand captives … Hitler has displaced a far larger multitude.” As reports of the Holocaust increased in number in 1944–45, Americans also began to feel that Hitler had eclipsed the atrocities of previous dictators. Writing about his visit to Buchenwald in The New York Times, Harold Denny declared that while “Tamerlane built his mountain of skulls ... Hitler’s horrors … dwarf all previous crimes.”