Den britiske forfatter William Walter Crotch færdedes i Tyskland og Østrig mens Adolf Hitler endnu var på vej mod magten, og kort efter valget til den tyske rigsdag i 1933 skrev han en lang artikel om sine egne og andres indtryk af Hitler fra dengang. Han kalder ham “en slags militærudgave af Charles Chaplin” og slutter artiklen af med at skrive:

Though he insisted in season and out of season on the greatness of “pure Germanism”, I never met a German who was so entirely un-German. His speech, his thought, his outlook were far more Slav than Teutonic. He loved everything foreign while he denounced it. His race theories came from the Frenchman Gobineau and the English renegade Houston Chamberlain. His famous phrase “the Third Reich” was the invention of the Dutchman Moeller van den Bruck. The party salute was an Elizabethan stage convention—a subterfuge adopted by actors to imitate Romans. His regimental standards were a pale imitation of Roman eagles. His uniforms are anything but Germanic. They are a sort of cocktail of French, Austrian and English uniforms with most of the bad points to all three.

But I will say this, as the result of these long evenings spent with him: he was, and probably still is, passionately, almost ferociously, sincere in all he says and does, even when it appears hypocritical and insincere.