Kitty

If I recall, he was preaching hate and vitriol and definitely had clear, violent intentions. I think what's important to remember is that hate and racism are enjoyable. One of the reasons it's so hard to get someone to stop being a fascist is because they know they're hateful and violent and they're having fun. National pride, sure. They were nationalists. But they also killed or imprisoned people who didn't like it (communists, Jews, the disabled, homosexuals, Roma and so on), so he's really only popular to the people that remained.

I agree that people aren't suspicious about the right things though. Sure people correctly identify the fascism is Trumpism for example, but they sure don't have suspicions about capitalism.

The way it was once explained to me is that Hitler did in fact publish a book that listed all the violent things he intended to do in power, but the moderates said "he obviously doesn't literally mean it, that's just rhetoric."

I get that it seems like Hitler could not possibly be as evil as he's painted, but I gotta say, when you listen to his speeches, you absolutely do not gotta hand it to him, he was pretty open about some bullshit. The trick, of course, is not to assume that everybody endorsed all of that, but rather that some people were thinking "he can't do ALL that, and his opponents are ALSO terrible, so I'll hold my nose and vote for (nevermind he was couped in he didn't get elected, abandon post abandon post)

One thing I’ve noticed in some discussion of that time period is that, in America, opinion was kind of mixed on Nazi Germany in the early days. Some people were against it, but there were also plenty of people who agreed with it and supported it. It seems kind of like the main thing that turned sentiment against them was actually going to war against them.

In that sense, it’s kind of no wonder we never learned anything. We didn’t fight the Nazis because they were bad, we did it because they were Our Enemy, and though we kind of retroactively narrativized that we fought them because they were evil, we never really dealt with that fundamental distinction.

The Wave is a really good based-on-a-true-story movie about exactly that. There's also a novelization of it which apparently goes into more detail about the real-life situation.

It's available online, incidentally.

Hitler was extremely clear about his intentions to commit genocide and enslavement in order to gain Lebensraum, and Nazi domestic propaganda was deliberately designed to tap into deep-seated prejudices against people like the Jews of Germany that Hitler deemed racial enemies, and blamed for Germany's troubles.

He offered a very seductive message to cishet ethnic Germans, which was help him purge the racial/moral/spiritual 'corruption' from Germany, and 'rescue' the ethnic Germans under the tyranny of 'subhumans', and they can retire to a farm in eastern Europe, where they never have to lift a finger because the fields will be worked by their Slavic slaves until the need for them was automated away and they could be finally eradicated too.

This is what Hitler was promising in those speeches that made him popular, but even then, there was still a significant proportion of the German population that was against him, or had only been cowed into complicity by violence and intimidation.

The problem, then and now, is that people refuse to believe that evil can be so barefaced.

It's pretty interesting to look at contemporary newspaper reports for this kind of thing, although obviously if you can't read German you aren't getting the full story. I don't know about for American newspapers, but the National Library of Australia's Trove is a great source for Australian papers. (As far as I recall from history class, Mussolini is much more of an example of what you're talking about than the Nazis, which seems to be borne out by the newspapers.)

Here's one about the Nazis, from 1930: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/67742802
And here's a practically propagandist piece, in the Melbourne newspaper of record (!), about Mussolini from 1924: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/203641347