Besides that whole "defend the Nazi" thing?
You can read that in full context on wikipedia.
What Buchanan said about Hitler is that he is portrayed as a caricature of evil and cowardliness. Said, in context, that while Hitler was evil, you have to acknowledge that, in his early years, Hitler was courageous and not a coward in World War I.
That while Hitler was murderous and brutal and arguably crazy, it's just bad and innaccurate history to say he was a coward.
Separate from Buchanan's opinion, I read a far-from-pro-Hitler biography,
The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (Praeger Publishers, 1973) by Robert Payne, but even that biography acknowledges Hitler was courageous on the battlefield, and decorated multiple times for his courage on the battlefield (he was a messenger who brought messages from field command posts to officers on the front line, a job that few German soldiers lived very long doing, and Hitler did it fearlessly and was injured multiple time in his service).
A book I read called
Inside Hitler's Germany: Life Under the Third Reich (not Buchanan)said that Germans who lived through the 1930s under Nazi rule (up till 1939) look back on it as a time of prosperity, stability and national pride.
Hitler created millions of jobs, built the Autobahn highway system (which engineers brought home to the U.S. after the war, in envisioning the U.S. national interstate highway system), and created social programs such as Kraft Duch Freude, or "Strength Through Joy" that subsidized vacations for German workers with their families and sponsored other rallying community and nationalist events that were not focused on race, hatred or anti-semitism.
Obviously things in Germany went South after that, though.
The concentration camps (mostly for communists and other political oppossition at first) only held a few thousand prisoners until 1940, and initially were not nearly as brutal as what they evolved into in the 1940s. Euthanasia of the infirm and mentally ill did not begin until 1939. And it did not evolve into genocide until the Germans found themselves with millions of Jews and no nation that would take them in late 1941. The death camps did not begin until 1942.
In Buchanan's most recent book,
Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, argues that Hitler's sole focus, as is evident in
Mein Kampf, was invading Russia and colonizing it.
Hitler never wanted war with Britain, he never wanted war with France.
And that the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, while giving "right of self-determination" to many peoples of central and eastern Europe, had carved off giant chunks of germans in Germany and Austria-Hungary after 1919 and put them under rule of other cultures. And that Hitler in negotiations with Italy, with taking back the Rhineland, with absorbing Austria by will of a majority of its people, and with annexing Czechoslavokia (more brutally), was mostly a relatively bloodless reversal of the punishing terms of the Versailles treaty.
The roadblock for peaceful reversal of Versailles was when England gave a war guarantee to Poland (but England had no military forces to back up the threat, and was weak in 1939).
Hitler negotiated for months with Poland to simply allow railroads and highways across the Polish Corridor to unite separated East Prussia with the rest of Germany.
WITHOUT wanting to take back the land, requesting only the city of Danzig that was 90% German, and would have left 1 million Germans in the Polish corridor under Polish rule.
Hitler negotiated this for 6 months, and only the British war guarantee prevented Poland from negotiating and accepting this peaceful resolution. Hitler knew England couldn't defend Poland, and invaded for what he wanted, thinking England would never go to war.
When England declared war, France was obligated to as well. To outmaneuver England and France, Hitler was forced to invade Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and France, which he was forced to by England and France declaring war and having to outfight them.
Hitler only wanted to invade Russia, and if England and France had just stayed in the sidelines, they could have watched while Germany and Russia destroyed each other.
Buchanan makes the point that to save less than 10 million Polish citizens from Hitler, the net result was condemning 100 million eastern Europeans to brutal slavery under Stalin.
Among many other enlightening points.
I've yet to read controversial remarks such as these that were truly racist or crazy, as is alleged about Buchanan.
While I'm a great admirer of Israel, I see the logic of Buchanan's point that no foreign nation should have the level of influence over our Senate and Congress as Israel does, to the point that any senator or congressman who disputes or scrutinizes U.S. aid to Israel is driven from office. For this, Buchanan is falsely labelled an anti-semite.
For questioning bad history and caricature of Hitler, he is falsely labelled a Nazi.
I've yet to read accusations toward Buchanan of this type that hold up when Buchanan's words are read in context.
Buchanan fell out of favor of Republican neo-cons when he was critical of George W. Bush's abandoning of Reagan conservatism, well explained in his 2004 book
Where the Right Went Wrong. And since then, a number of the slanders toward him have come from the right, for not towing the party line.
