Ye spoke to InfoWars host Alex Jones on Thursday and told him “I like Hitler” and that the dictator had “a lot of redeeming qualities” in an episode that also featured white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Those remarks were quickly condemned by public figures and Jewish groups, with the Republican Jewish Coalition calling the show a “horrific cesspool of dangerous, bigoted Jew hatred.”

But is there any historical basis to some of Ye’s less explosive claims?

The Claim

At one point in the show, Ye told Jones: “I love everyone and Jewish people are not going to tell me: You can love us and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography.”

“But this guy [Hitler] that invented highways and invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good,” he said.

Ye added: “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”

The Facts

Adolf Hitler was born in what is now Austria in 1889 and ruled Germany from 1933 until his suicide in a Berlin bunker in 1945. He was the leader of the fascist National Socialist Workers’ (Nazi) party and ruled under the German title “Führer” (leader) from 1934.

The Nazi regime was responsible for starting World War II, when its forces invaded Poland in 1939, and for carrying out the Holocaust, which saw approximately six million European Jews murdered.

Among its other victims were five million prisoners of war, members of the Romany community and homosexuals, as well as many others, according to the National World War II Museum.

Highways

The Merriam-Webster dictionary notes that the first use of the word “highway” in English meaning “a public way” predates the 12th century.

The form of road infrastructure now commonly referred to in the U.S. as a “highway” also predates Hitler’s time as leader of Germany.

The earliest U.S. example of a highway is the Long Island Motor Parkway, also known as the Vanderbilt Parkway, which began construction on June 6, 1908, according to the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

“It was the first long-distance, reinforced concrete highway, using bridges and overpasses to eliminate cross traffic and curves for safety and speed,” NYC Parks website says, and describes the parkway, which is now a bicycle path, as “America’s first limited-access road for cars.”

Ye may have been referring to the German autobahn system of highways, which saw heavy involvement from the Nazi government in the 1930s. However, neither Hitler nor the Nazi party invented the autobahn, though, records indicate, they did attempt to take some credit for it through propaganda.

German news outlet Deutsche Welle (DW) published a report about the Nazis’ involvement with the autobahn in 2012, calling the idea that the Nazis invented them “a historical fiction.”

Germany was initially unable to build highways due to financial constraints following World War I.

The first autobahn to be successfully financed and built was opened in 1932 between the German cities of Bonn and Cologne. It was the brainchild of Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), then mayor of Cologne, who would go on to become chancellor of West Germany.

DW noted that the Nazi regime supported autobahn construction in the ’30s and used the highways as part of their propaganda. Prisoners and Jewish forced laborers were also brought in to build the autobahns after the outbreak of World War II.

Microphones

The famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) patented the first microphone in 1876, according to the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Library—some 13 years before Hitler was born.

As early as 1856, Italian inventor Antonio Meucci had invented the dynamic microphone with an Inventors Digest article in 2017 writing that his “method of modulation was the best and most enduring basis for telephone technology.”

Though there has long been dispute about the timeline of inventions surrounding sound technology and how patents were obtained, the microphone far predates Hitler’s birth, let alone his adult life.

Hitler made great use of microphones, however, and was well-known for his speeches, which were frequently recorded and broadcast. He famously made use of the Neumann bottle microphone, designed in 1928 by Georg Neumann based on his own early ’20s prototypes, but Hitler played no part in the invention or development of the technology.

The Ruling

False.

Adolf Hitler did not invent highways or the microphone.

The historical evidence shows that both predate Hitler’s time as ruler of Germany and microphone technology had been developed before he was born.

Though the Nazi government supported the construction of the autobahn highway system in the 1930s, they did not originate the concept.

Newsweek has reached out to Ye for comment.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK