He was an ardent nonsmoker, vegetarian and health enthusiast. He loved animals even to the extent that he arranged for the care and adoption of people's pets who were shipped off to detention camps, as they called them in the early days of the war and prewar years.
Western journalists, for the most part, gushed over these qualities and sold them to a worldwide audience. It wasn't until Crustal Night, just a few weeks after the Munich Agreement was inked, that a few of them begin to rethink their positions.