In March 1941, months before the United States would officially enter the Second World War, Adolf Hitler took a massive hit from American forces. The strike was orchestrated by two Jewish-Americans, and was witnessed by well over a million people. The event in question was not a military operation, nor was it strictly-speaking real, but it nonetheless helped shape the American perception of Hitler, Germany, and the war in Europe.

This historic meeting between Adolf Hitler and the fist of American heroism took the form of the publication of the first issue of Captain America from Timely Comics. The cover of issue one featured a star-spangled Captain America in a room full of Nazis, punching Hitler in the face hard enough to knock him over. At no point in the actual story does Cap actually encounter Hitler, much less punch him in the face, but this didn't seem to be a problem to readers. This issue was wildly successful and sold over a million copies, securing Captain America's existence as an American wartime staple before the war had even officially started for Americans.

Captain America #1 started a trend that would carry on past the war – the blurring of the line between fiction and reality when it comes to the major players of World War Two. [...] Literally, Hitler and the Nazi party were the villains Captain America was fighting in each issue of the comics, but figuratively, and more interestingly, Nazis are remembered as being something analogous to comic book villains.

This phenomenon can be attributed, at least in part, to very successful indoctrination by way of propaganda, especially the propaganda directed at children, like comic books. By making the real-world major players of World War Two, especially America's enemies, into fictional characters in a medium as easily consumed as comics, Captain America helped to mythologize the war and its participants.

When I say “mythologize”, I don't simply mean that we remember the war as a narrative – people have a tendency to do that with most historical events. A narrative becomes a myth when public memory ascribes a morality to that narrative. American tradition remembers World War Two not as a multi-nation war fought between the Allies and the Axis, but rather as a moral conflict between Allied “good guys” and Axis “bad guys”.