Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 13/12/2022
Numerous users of social networks are trying to discredit Time magazine, which recently awarded the title of “Person of the Year” to the Ukrainian president, recalling that the same magazine also awarded that title to Adolf Hitler in 1938. However, the information that Time presented Hitler in a negative light with that cover was omitted.
The following post was published on Facebook on December 7:
TIME magazine declared Zelensky the person of the year. Don’t forget that the same magazine also declared Hitler the person of the year. All regime media have the same owner.
As of the date of writing this analysis, this post has been shared 150 times, and the same claims have been published on several other Facebook profiles and pages (1, 2, 3).
The image in the post was originally published on the NOVI Svjetski Poredak Facebook page in August 2016 and had been circulating on social networks ever since.
What are the facts?
In 1927, the American magazine Time started the tradition of awarding its front page to the “Person of the Year”. The first person to whom Time awarded this title on the cover was the pilot Charles Lindbergh, who flew alone across the Atlantic Ocean. As explained in the article of the History web portal, the personalities who have appeared on the cover of this magazine over the years can be surprising, given that the title “Person of the Year” is often perceived as something that is necessarily positive and praiseworthy. However, Time’s “Person of the Year” represents an individual considered to have had the greatest impact that year, positive or negative.
This year, Time magazine declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “Person of the Year”, explaining that he “moved the world in a way not seen for decades”.
It is true that Time magazine also declared Adolf Hitler “Person of the Year” in 1938. However, as explained in the USA Today article from August 2021, this information on social networks is often presented out of context in the way it was done in the aforementioned posts in our language. Claims from social networks were also dealt with by our partner fact-checking web portal Raskrinkavanje from Montenegro in an analysis published on December 12, 2022.
Namely, the title of “person of the year” is not necessarily awarded as praise, and the cover dedicated to Adolf Hitler did not present him in a positive light. A USA Today article explained that Time presented Hitler as “the greatest menacing force facing the democratic, freedom-loving world”, describing him as “a moody, surly, unremarkable, 49-year-old Austrian-born ascetic with a Charlie Chaplin moustache”.
It was also explained that the cover dedicated to him at the time did not positively portray him. He is depicted as a small, dark figure playing the organ covered with the dead bodies of his victims.
So, it is true that Hitler was on the cover of Time magazine as “Person of the Year”. However, contrary to insinuations from social networks, he was not portrayed positively and was not praised, unlike the Ukrainian president.
Sharing these claims out of context and associating Hitler with Zelensky is part of a wider propaganda narrative in which Zelensky and the Ukrainian leadership are Nazis, and the Western media promotes Nazism. The manipulatively presented fact that Time named Hitler “Person of the Year” in 1938 should serve as “evidence” for this narrative.
In addition to Hitler, other dictators and autocrats appeared on the cover of Time magazine in the past decades, such as Joseph Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Vladimir Putin, who was named “Person of the Year” in 2007 for “raising his country from chaos at the cost of democratic principles”.
Publications claiming that Time magazine declared Adolf Hitler “Person of the Year” in 1938 without featuring the critical information that it was condemnation, not praise, are evaluated as manipulation of facts.