The 6 most controversial Time Magazine People of the Year from Hitler to Stalin

The Time Magazine Person of the Year is upon us, with a short-list filled with characters who couldn’t be further from each other.

Of the nine names that made the shortlist include the Hollywood strikes, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, singer Taylor Swift, OpenAI mastermind Sam Altman, Donald Trump’s prosecutors, Barbie, Russian President Vladimir Putin, King Charles III, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell.

Each influential in their way, Time’s final choice will be announced on Wednesday 6, December.

Some of the names on this year’s list are highly controversial, like the inclusion of Xi and Putin.

And while Time hasn’t shied away from controversy in the past, its boldness has on several occasions come back to bite it. Here, Express.co.uk lists six of the contentious awardees in history.

In September 1938, Europe was on the brink of war. Adolf Hitler, the strongman leader of Nazi Germany, demanded that his country be given German-speaking parts of neighbouring Czechoslovakia.

After telling Western powers of his desire he would later invade the Sudetenland, with Czechoslovakia largely powerless to stop him.

The following month, under his watch, Nazi-led mobs engaged in a night of terror against Jews in Germany and Austria, destroying shops, arresting 30,000, and killing almost 40 people. Today, the tragic episode is known as the Night of Broken Glass, a key event in what would become a genocide against Jewish people.

Despite this, that year, Time Magazine decided that the person worthy of their annual award was a Mr Adolf Hitler.

In an announcement to mark his victory, the publication noted how Hitler had dominated the Munich Treaty, where Britain, France, and Italy gathered in Munich to redraw the map of Europe.

“But by all odds, the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler,” Time wrote.

“Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.”

The following year, in 1939, Hitler waged a war on Europe that would engulf the entire world for the next six years.

In 1939, keen to avoid the wrath of Nazi Germany, Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler.

While from the outside it was deemed to have saved Europe from war, in reality, it allowed the Soviets to invade Poland without any repercussion from Germany.

That year, as was the case in 1942, Time decided to name Stalin as its Person of the Year.

The Georgian was one of if not the Soviet Union’s most ruthless leaders. In 2011, after assessing 20 years of historical research contained in archives across Eastern Europe, historian Timothy Snyder argued that Stalin deliberately killed six million during his various positions of power from 1922 to 1952.

Describing its decision to name him person of the year, Time wrote in early 1943: “The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength.

“The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression ‘tough guy’ was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Russia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia through.”

When Stalin died in 1953, the unlikely figure of Nikita Khrushchev took his place.

Khrushchev introduced what would become known as his ‘Thaw’, a period of relative liberalisation which to a degree allowed foreign films, books, art, and music.

Soviet censorship rules changed, and previously banned writers and composers miraculously returned to the fray.

As such, in 1957, he was named Time’s Person of the Year.

Krushschev would prove a thorn in the US’ side, and that very year sent Washington into a frenzy after the Soviets successfully launched their Sputnik satellite and so began the space race.

A few years later, in 1962, he would oversee the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world the closest it had ever been to all-out nuclear war.

Richard Nixon is the most controversial US President of all time — perhaps even more controversial than Donald Trump.

He is most remembered for the Watergate scandal, which began in 1972, and saw members of Nixon’s re-election campaign break into, burgle, and wiretap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Before this, Time voted him their Person of the Year in both 1970 and 1971, citing his famous visit to communist China and effort to pull the US out of Vietnam as reasons why.

In what could be perceived as a veneer of foreshadowing, the magazine described Nixon as “disconcertingly unpredictable”. After a failed coverup of the scandal, Nixon resigned in 1974.

In 1979, Time named Ayatollah Khomeini as their Person of the Year.

That year was one of Iran’s most turbulent of the 20th century when the Islamic Revolution prevailed and a hostage crisis saw tens of US citizens trapped inside the country’s Tehran embassy.

Khomeini had lived in exile for years while the pro-western Shah was in power.

Public opinion turned against the Shah that year, forcing him to flee, something which many say was the nail in the coffin of Iran’s monarchy.

Khomeini soon returned to Iran and established theocratic rule, something which has been in place ever since.

Writing on the decision to name Khomeini Person of the Year in early 1980, Time said: “The lean figure of Khomeini towered malignly over the globe. As the leader of Iran’s revolution, he gave the 20th-century world a frightening lesson in the shattering power of irrationality, of the ease with which terrorism can be adopted as government policy.”

Eight years after he became President of Russia, Vladimir Putin earned the accolade of Time Person of the Year.

The former KGB agent came to power only years after his country opened up to capitalism, helping to preside over its transition.

Time’s then managing editor, Richard Stengel, at the time said: “He’s not a good guy, but he’s done extraordinary things.

“He’s a new tsar of Russia and he’s dangerous in the sense that he doesn’t care about civil liberties; he doesn’t care about free speech; he cares about stability. But stability is what Russia needed and that’s why Russians adore him.”