The author is Patrick Buchanan. He has learned political finesse over time, but read what he wrote in 1977.
http://www.realchange.org/hitler.htm
an excerpt from there:
“Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as caricature. Either he was a ranting, raving, carpet-chewing Chaplinesque buffoon — or the anti-Christ, Satan Incarnate, a devil without human attribute who had hypnotized the German people.
Such ignorance is folly. Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him.
But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.”