Man of the Year . However , Man of the Year is for the most influential person of the year . It doesn ' t have to go to a person who is morally good . Time knew Hitler was an evil dictator . I mean , here ' s the cover to the 1938 Man of the Year . That ' s Adolf Hitler playing an organ that has dead people hanging from it . The caption says German leader Adolf Hitler playing a hymn of hate . The article itself , 9171 , 760539 , 00 . html made it pretty clear what Time thought of him . But the figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe with all the swagger of a conqueror . Not the mere fact that the Fhrer brought 10 , 500 , 000 more people 7 , 000 , 000 Austrians , 3 , 500 , 000 Sudetens under his absolute rule made him the Man of 1938 . Japan during the same time added tens of millions of Chinese to her empire . More significant was the fact Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic , freedomloving world faces today . A generation ago western civilization had apparently outgrown the major evils of barbarism except for war between nations . The Russian Communist Revolution promoted the evil of class war . Hitler topped it by another , race war . Fascism and Communism both resurrected religious war . These multiple forms of barbarism gave shape in 1938 to an issue over which men may again , perhaps soon , shed blood the issue of civilized liberty v . barbaric authoritarianism . It was noteworthy that few of these other men of the year would have been free to achieve their accomplishments in Nazi Germany . The genius of free wills has been so stifled by the oppression of dictatorship that Germany ' s output of poetry , prose , music , philosophy , art has been meagre indeed . What Adolf Hitler Co . did to Germany in less than six years was applauded wildly and ecstatically by most Germans . He lifted the nation from postWar defeatism . Under the swastika Germany was unified . His was no ordinary dictatorship , but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning . The socialist part of National Socialism might be scoffed at by hardfast Marxists , but the Nazi movement nevertheless had a mass basis . The 1 , 500 miles of magnificent highways built , schemes for cheap cars and simple workers ' benefits , grandiose plans for rebuilding German cities made Germans burst with pride . Germans might eat many substitute foods or wear ersatz clothes but they did eat . What Adolf Hitler Co . did to the German people in that time left civilized men and women aghast . Civil rights and liberties have disappeared . Opposition to the Nazi regime has become tantamount to suicide or worse . Free speech and free assembly are anachronisms . The reputations of the oncevaunted German centres of learning have vanished . Education has been reduced to a National Socialist catechism . Pace Quickened . Germany ' s 700 , 000 Jews have been tortured physically , robbed of homes and properties , denied a chance to earn a living , chased off the streets . Now they are being held for ransom , a gangster trick through the ages . But not only Jews have suffered . Out of Germany has come a steady , everswelling stream of refugees , Jews and Gentiles , liberals and conservatives , Catholics as well as Protestants , who could stand Naziism no longer . TIME ' S cover , showing Organist Adolf Hitler playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims dangle on a St . Catherine ' s wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on , was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper see p . 20 , a Catholic who found Germany intolerable . Meanwhile , Germany has become a nation of uniforms , goosestepping to Hitler ' s tune , where boys of ten are taught to throw hand grenades , where women are regarded as breeding machines . Most cruel joke of all , however , has been played by Hitler Co . on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany ' s bourgeois economic structure from radicalism . The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business .