Graham Broad

The editors prefaced the excerpts with the remark, "Germany is now waging a psychological war against this country." It was not an "op-ed" written by Hitler for the NYT. It was an assemblage of 15 year old quotations from Hitler produced by the Times as a warning.

To say that "the NYT let Hitler publish an op-ed" is entirely false. Hitler did not send an "op-ed" to the NYT that they agreed to publish. It's the equivalent of saying that I'm spreading Nazi antisemitism when I lecture about the Holocaust.

But this sort of thing is commonplace on Twitter (and not just on the political right, I am afraid to say). Read the comments – virtually no one has bothered to fact check the assertion or to contextualize the piece.

This is where a history education can be a powerful tool against ideologues of all political stripes today, because students of history know better than most that the past is complicated, and not to be deployed as a blunt instrument in scoring cheap political points today.

Finally: 2000 retweets from an account with 50000 followers. It is probable that, in that single Tweet, this person reached more people with a false claim than I will in a lifetime of classroom teaching and academic publishing.