The influence of these books was widespread. W. H. Auden praised the collection during World War II as one of the founding works of Western culture.[3] The tales themselves have been put to many uses. Hitler praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners, and so strongly that the Allied forces warned against them;[4] for instance, Cinderella with the heroine as racially pure, the stepmother as an alien, and the prince with an unspoiled instinct being able to distinguish.[5] Writers who have written about the Holocaust have combined the tales with their memoirs, as Jane Yolen in her Briar Rose